The summer of 2023 sure feels like it was 4,000 years ago, not less than two. If you need hard evidence of this, go check your closet. There is a significant chance you will uncover, like an artifact at a dig site, the hot-pink pantsuit or suit jacket you wore to a Barbie screening that July.
If not a toy franchise, what was the reigning cultural entity in 2,023 B.C.E.? The Neo-Sumerian Empire, of course: the high period of Mesopotamian civilization under the dynasty of Ur, which most likely bequeathed us the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The University of Iowa is home to the only classroom on Earth, presumably, where Barbie and Gilgamesh collide.
This past semester, the Marketing Department of the Tippie College of Business offered a course called “Hey Barbie, I Like Your Style – AND Substance: The Archetypal Genius of a Blockbuster.” The course’s instructor, Professor Anna Barker of the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures, is a fixture of the arts in Iowa City.
From her talks at the Iowa City Book Festival to her talk-backs for the Cedar Rapids Opera to her record-setting exhibitions with University of Iowa Libraries, Dr. Barker has educated the CRANDIC for decades. Zipping from one venue to the next, she emits supersonic bursts of learning and joie de vivre from her petite and caffeinated frame, always on the lookout for unexpected connections between far-flung subjects.
Barker’s classroom is no different — hence the curricular meeting of Ken (Barbie’s unnervingly hairless bae) and Enkidu (the fur-covered wildman of Sumeria, for whom Gilgamesh is gaga).
“A blockbuster like Barbie achieves what it does by tapping into thousands of years of cultural and artistic history,” Dr. Barker told me in an interview. “What makes [the film’s director] Greta Gerwig a genius is her ability to plug into deep, archetypal narratives from throughout that history, and make them relevant to the 21st century.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica describes archetypes as “a primordial image, character, or pattern of circumstances that recurs throughout literature and thought consistently enough to be considered a universal concept or situation.” The idea of the archetype was first developed by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung — a student of Freud’s, and the Aristotle to his Plato — and was applied to literature through the scholarship of Northrop Frye.
The canonical works of world literature that concerned Frye are also the purview of Dr. Barker’s class: students read excerpts from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Book of Ruth from the Hebrew Bible, Goethe’s Faust and Sorrows of Young Werther and more.
The course syllabus proposes profound connections between Gerwig’s “eye-candy epic” (as Dr. Barker puts it) and these diverse works.
Beneath the glossy plastic surface, the film offers nuanced assessment of several weighty existential concepts such as beauty, aging, immortality, quest, cultural alienation, femininity, masculinity, becoming ‘real.’ The metaphysical arc of the film takes the viewers, along with Barbie, on a journey of discovery of the meaning of life and the relationship with a creator.
At a time when people’s private and public lives are plagued by a sense of unreality, a late night spent reading deeply in a pool of lamplight can guide us — paradoxically — back to real life.
As a course in the Marketing Department, students also considered the way the film’s archetypal power brought it to the center of public consciousness for an entire season. It’s one of the biggest marketing successes in recent memory, but also a film about marketing: its ubiquitous product placement, from Chanel to Hummer, flamboyantly depicts the capacity of advertising to shape our desires.
Paula Miranda, a student in the class, originally signed on because of her love of the Mattel-produced film. “It’s a movie that makes you think and feel so many things, and I also thought that the way they marketed the movie was genius because it was all everyone was talking about that summer it came out.”
At the end of the semester, after learning the history of the Barbie franchise and the film’s engagement with cultural archetypes, Miranda admired another text as well: the Epic of Gilgamesh.
“[Gilgamesh] talks about a journey and the failure of humans to be immortal,” Miranda said. For her, the epic depicts how “humans are always attracted to the ideal and we spend our time and money trying to get close to it, and then despise it since we simply cannot. And a product like Barbie takes advantage of this because it allows you to feel closer, since it is tangible, and an idea that lives forever.”
In his book denouncing the pernicious influence of demons on daily life, Cotton Mather — the most sought-after Puritan intellectual of colonial America — describes witchcraft as “the Skill of Applying the Plastic Spirit of the World, unto some unlawful purposes.” With the phrase “Plastic Spirit,” Mather means to describe the world’s mutability: the way how things that seem one way can so suddenly become another.
In a similar sense, you might consider “Plastic Spirit” a good name for the imagination: for the mind of a reader or viewer as they wrap their minds around a work of art. In the Barbie movie and in Dr. Barker’s class — both of which draw on millennia of art — the plastic spirit of the mind meets, well, actual plastic: the household, synthetic kind. The University of Iowa’s “neuroplasticity” is better off as a result.
