This month the first live-action film based on the Barbie doll will be released. From what we know about it already, Barbieland is a perfect place for perfect beings but Barbie starts to question it and becomes imperfect. So she goes to the real world to search for happiness. The film plays on the concept of Barbie's world being a dream or fantasy world, not necessarily in the sense of it being a fictional world, but in the sense that it is a world we'd dream about living in. This of course is part of the appeal of the Barbie range of toys – through playing with the toys, children escape into an imaginary world where life is perfect and dreams can come true: Barbie lives in a dream house with her dream vehicles in a dream world.
Having dreams and aspirations are part of a child's development, helping them to shape their future life choices. But because children can imagine a perfect world they are often more able to see the imperfections in our world, and want to do something about it. As adults we often resign ourselves to an imperfect world (“that's just the way life is”) and lose the will to try to make things better. Sometimes however people's dreams and lives are crushed by circumstances.
In a very different picture to Barbieland, at her lowest point the character of Fantine in the musical Les Miserables sings “I had a dream my life would be / So different from this hell I'm living / So different now from what it seemed / Now life has killed the dream / I dreamed.” As she discovered, and as we all discover, the perfect world and the perfect life cannot exist, because all of us make mistakes which hurt and damage ourselves and others. The Christian world view names this as sin: our rejection of God and his ways in order to make ourselves the god of our lives – and tragically we are naturally inclined to put our own needs above others. The Genesis creation story tells us that the consequence of this sin is death: human sin spoiled the perfect world God created thus allowing death into it.
The trailer for the Barbie movie shows one of the moments where Barbie spoils the perfect Barbieland by asking “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Even in Barbie's world the thought of death spoils the dream. We don't know from the trailers how Barbie's situation will be resolved: whether she will have to choose between the imperfect real world and the perfect fake world; or whether she brings the imperfection of the real world into the perfection of the fake world and this somehow improves the perfect world. Or will none of these questions be answered, making way for a sequel!!
What we do know is the Christian good news: that Jesus came from his perfect realm into our imperfect world, so that he could take our sins onto himself on the cross, that through his death we might be forgiven, and through his resurrection death might no longer reign thus opening the way to a perfect everlasting life. Our dream world becomes reality through Jesus.
