Disillusionment Barbie

thoughts on a plastic woman, and an all-too-real one

Last Saturday, I took my daughters to the Barbie movie. I knew I’d love it, but I didn’t expect to cry quite so many times… and I really didn’t expect to think so much about it either:

Then on Wednesday—of much greater consequence—we lost the irreplaceable Sinead O’Connor.

I’ve had her music on repeat ever since. It’s been a bittersweet, exquisite kind of ache, recalling every lyric, gulping down that poetry and pain once again, remembering what her music meant to me as a teen and a young woman:

It’s been quite a week for the GenX sisterhood.

There have been insightful think pieces about the film, and beautiful tributes and reflections about Sinead. I really can’t improve upon them. But I did stumble on a mental tripwire connecting these two seemingly unconnectable events.

First, the film. Without revealing anything that’s not in the trailer: Barbie lives with the other Barbies in Barbieland, where they are the doctors and the mechanics and the president—they run absolutely everything, and every night is full of joy and fun. Simply stated, the world is set up to allow for their comfort and their flourishing. Barbie assumes that because little girls have played with her for decades, that she has inspired them, and the world, to reflect the empowerment she knows in Barbieland. Through a series of events, Barbie comes to the real world and runs headlong into… well, this [gestures at everything]. 

She’s catcalled. She’s mansplained. She’s underestimated. She’s objectified. 

And she’s heartbroken. 

If you’ve seen the movie, you know Margot Robbie nails this moment. The despair, the shattering of innocence. How director Greta Gerwig manages to make this winking and campy film also unabashedly earnest and heartfelt is… well, it’s a revelation. 

Do you remember that moment in your own life? That awakening to reality? When you realized that you couldn’t be anything you put your mind to, because the world you were aging into simply wasn’t set up that way? That there were headwinds against you, be they gender or race or class or something else or all of the above? 

And of course, there’s never just one moment, but a series of grim revelations. For me there was my parents’ divorce, and the news clipping my mom carried around as a bitter talisman, a study showing that following a divorce, the man’s standard of living typically rose as the woman’s declined. There was 1992’s so-called Year of the Woman, when we were all giddy with the milestone of five whole-ass women elected to the U.S. Senate. (The math’s not hard: that’s 5%.) There was the semester in college when my grades tanked under the stress of a stalking ex-boyfriend, who seemed to have precise genetic knowledge of how much harassment he could dish out to inflict maximum distress on me with no consequence for him. Those are just the ones that come to mind first on a random Thursday evening.

When Sinead tore up her mother’s photo of the pope on SNL, I won’t lie: I found it jarring and disorienting. Weren’t there more considered ways to get the point across? Sure, maybe. But she was an artist, not an alderman. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see it as the most punk rock thing anyone has ever done. Also, she was right. She was 100% right.

What I remember most is the aftermath. Anyone who’s parsed Sinead’s lyrics knows: here is someone who knew trauma, decades before that word was on everyone’s lips. More than a woman, she was an exposed nerve, feeling the world’s griefs acutely and responding in song and in action. But we didn’t know how to do this yet: how to wonder what might have led someone to go so thoroughly thermonuclear on national television at the height of her stardom. Too many of us still don’t have that empathic curiosity, but we’re further along, thanks to people like her. 

In any event, the next week’s SNL host said it was a good thing he wasn’t there when it happened; he would have grabbed her and smacked her. The audience laughed and cheered and you can still watch that goodfella threaten violence against a 5 foot 4 inch 25-year-old woman on SNL’s official website. That was in 1992. The Year of the Woman.

Unlike our plastic doll friend with the blonde hair and impossible measurements, there seems to have been no moment of awakening for Sinead, no scales falling from her piercing green eyes—the poor young girl, and then the woman abused by her own mother, wracked with bipolar disorder, carried the injustices of the world in her own body all along.

I hate that Sinead is dead. As a mother of a seventeen year old myself, I hate that she had to live a single second without her dear son. Yet I’m grateful for the ways she fought for others and for herself. She lived in power, and now I hope she rests in peace.  

I finally finished Gabor and Daniel Mate’s book The Myth of Normal and have been gobbling up videos and articles of the two of them. In one of them, Gabor was asked about the subtitle of the book, especially “healing in a toxic culture.” He responded:

The essential first step is what I call being disillusioned. Now, people usually think of disillusionment as discouraging and somewhat negative. No. Would we rather be illusioned or disillusioned? Would we rather see the world through rose-colored glasses, not seeing what’s in front of us, or would we rather deal with reality the way it is?

Artists like Sinead O’Connor tear up our illusions on national television. We rarely thank them for it.

But disillusionment is honest, creative, healing space.

Thanks for being in it with me.

~

What I’m Up To

• You can listen to last Sunday’s sermon here, in which I talk about another “disillusioning” woman.

• This week’s Celtic Curriculum for supporting subscribers is here, in which we reflect on welcoming in and letting go.

• The images above were published via Substack’s Notes social network. Join me there if you’d like!

Steady on.