Don't Forget About Imagination

I have been told all my life that I could be and make anything, and that it's up to me to make my own meaning in the world. But as a creative person whose greatest successes has been making things for big corporations, the idea that my creativity only matters when it’s making someone else a lot of money started to creep up on me. I can’t pinpoint when or how it happened but the thought unsettled me: have I traded my soul for the machine? And if I have, is this all my creativity was made for?

There’s one scene in Barbie that made me realize what was missing, and it wasn’t that I wasn’t creative enough or good enough to be or do more. It’s so simple that maybe packaged any other way, I wouldn’t have paid much attention.

So let’s talk about Barbie again nearly a year after its release and for the second time here (the first post-watch). Because it’s the Oscars and I’m thinking about movies that impacted me deeply.

Near the end of the film, after the external conflict has been resolved and Barbie Land has been returned to the Barbies, we see that Stereotypical Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, has changed. There’s something on her mind.

So Ruth, Barbie’s creator played by Rhea Perlman, takes Barbie by the hand for a 1 on 1 between object and creator.

Let’s recap.

Barbie: I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. I’ve always been stereotypical Barbie and I don’t really think I’m good at anything else.

Ruth: You saved Barbie Land from patriarchy. (Barbie: That was very much a group effort.) And you helped that mother and daughter connect. (Barbie: They really helped each other.) Maybe you’re self-effacing Barbie? (Barbie shrugs and says: Maybe I’m not Barbie anymore.)

Pause as they stop walking and turn towards each other.

Ruth: You understand that humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever. Humans not so much. You know that, right? (Barbie: I do.) Being a human can be pretty uncomfortable. (Barbie: I know.) Humans make up things like patriarchy and Barbie just to deal with how uncomfortable it is. (Barbie: I understand that.) And then you die. (Barbie: Yeah. Yeah.)

Barbie: I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I want to do the imagining.

I want to do the imagining.

That sets off the true resolution of Barbie’s adventure. (Don’t call it a chick flick, it’s an adventure film.)

This scene had an immediate impact on me and that’s saying a lot because the entire movie was a back to back spectacle with so many layers of meaning disguised as a “feminist 101” film wrapped up in a super-fun time.

Over the last few months, it’s grown on me even more.

I saw connections to stories I already knew: Pinocchio, and then A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the 2001 Steven Spielberg movie in which a robot boy goes on a quest to become human. The Little Mermaid, in which the mermaid willingly sacrifices her life as she knows it to also become human.

Then there were the less obvious, more grotesque connections.

In Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, we see another product of human invention yet while Barbie is a perfect plastic doll, Frankenstein’s creature is an ugly monster. The latter is a cautionary tale of the consequences of playing god and in the end both creature and creator die. (See also: Best Picture contender Poor Things, a loose retelling of Frankenstein in which the creature is more doll than monster.)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, one of my favourite classics, is about a man corrupted by his vanity, who decides to trade his soul to stay young forever. Barbie, on the other hand, decides to give up beauty and youth precisely so that she can live and then die.

There’s the more obvious connection and meditation on our predisposition for inventing ideas (religion, dolls, patriarchy) to, as Ruth said, deal with the world.

I thought about how a doll that wants to be human, ironically, is an allegory for being human—female, male, doll or monster. How sometimes I feel like a doll myself: the preening, the contortionism, the endless pursuit of perfection. And honestly, sometimes a monster, too.

I thought about Virginia Woolf and her famous essay, A Room Of One’s Own. How for almost any generation other than ours, an entire half of the population has been excluded from the imagining because what woman at the time had, as Virginia articulated, both the money and a room of her own to write fiction? (Virginia Woolf’s preoccupation was writing fiction, but imagination itself is not reserved to writers or artists.)

But that all came after.

In the moment, in the theatre, I was just thinking about myself. I married and divorced young which meant an entire shakeup of my life and identity when I was still grasping for both those things, have always been told by other people who did not know me who and what I should be, and who just like Barbie have always felt like I'm not particularly good enough to be anything.

I felt all of this come to the surface in the dark, the hollers and laughs from just a few moments ago now washed away in a still theatre full of beaming smiles and glossy eyes, people just one tear away from an ugly cry.

Then it was over so quickly and Barbie World’s beat dropped. The end. And breathe. I left the theatre with emotional vertigo, a swirl of glitter and whiplash.

It settled over the next few months, a funny feeling in the pit of me: I’ve never related so much to anyone more than I have a doll. I was both unnerved and amused.

In 2017 when I was still working in tech, I attended my first ever design conference and learned all about creativity and how people do it for work. I’d never been in a room with so many creative people in my life. It felt exhilarating, like I was among a group of people creating things. It felt like a privilege, like I had joined the creative class.

The picture of creativity I’ve seen since then has felt like a letdown but it wasn’t because we got any less skilled or less creative. In fact, since 2017 the creator economy has exploded and there are more tools than ever available to help creative people make things.

We’ve even dubbed the people who make content for social media platforms “creators” because well, now we’re all creators and creatives and people making stuff, right? Look at us! All ascended to god-like status.

All of this and we don’t talk about imagination.

Imagination is just so…fluffy, which is precisely why it could only be delivered in a vehicle of mass consumption like Barbie.

We hear less and less about imagination as we become fully formed adults. Yes, we can be creative (“everyone is creative!”)—in fact, we’ve mechanized creativity for attention, conversion, and profit—but do we ever really imagine anymore?

Okay, okay. But we need to make money. Imagination, like tricks, are for kids. We’re not all dolls who live in Barbie Land where money probably doesn’t exist and surely inflation doesn’t either. Barbie doesn’t have kids. Barbie doesn’t have to think about death and taxes. If there were Barbie 2, we might see the consequences of her actions and maybe they ended it where they should have so the audience can imagine a (safe-for-work) happy ending.

We don’t even know if real world Barbie intends to be a novelist or designer or filmmaker or artist, typical vocations associated with ✨ imagination ✨, if that’s what she meant when she said she wanted to be a part of the people who make meaning.

Barbie’s been all of that. She’s been assigned those roles. She hasn’t decided for herself—not the day-to-day decisions of what to wear or how to do her hair—but larger questions like: what is real?

What is a real poem, a real writer, a real problem?

Being creative is being able to generate more novel solutions to a problem. Imagining is going back and zooming out to ask: is this even a problem? No, not the data showing conversions go up 5% kind of problem, the incremental-better problem. Is it a real problem? Is it how you want to spend your days and therefore life? Is there something else out there?

Tech companies try to sell the noble idea that we are all in this together, this great new wave where we are part of disrupting everything wrong with the world. Tech is now one of the biggest black holes of creative talent.

(For perspective and laughs, if you work in tech where many creative souls go to get rich and die trying, or at least burn out: MY COMMENTS ARE IN THE GOOGLE DOC LINKED IN THE DROPBOX I SENT IN THE SLACK.)

We don’t go deeper to question our reality, the invented ideals and roles and structures that surround us. We treat our minds as mostly made up, our worlds as places we are a part of, not places we actively build. We make things and brands and masks but we forget that we can still make ourselves. We forget how much of everything is made up. We forget to make meaning not just a living. We are (now) creators but we act more like dolls.

Is it an oversimplification to say all we have to do is imagine? No and yes. Barbie showed us that to want to do the imagining is a leap, scary and uncomfortable. And she wants to do it in the real world, not in the perfect pink Dream House made just for her. It’s our associations of imagination with childhood and fun and fantasy and soft and fluffy things that make it feel like something we should leave behind to do “real work”—which conveniently works out for the systems who want us to do and create but not build unless we are building for them. (Note to all: It just doesn’t work for the rich and famous to sing imagine to those of us stuck in the “real world” in the middle of a pandemic.)

We have to remember: imagination precedes creativity.

You can choose the house and the clothes and the car and the hair and even the job. But have you chosen what you believe?

You are not here just to make the ideas and systems that perpetuate other people’s invented and upheld beliefs and agendas. You’re not here just to try harder to be more perfect, more shiny, more standout, more every-pixel/hair/manner-in-the-right-place and faster faster faster.

At the end of Barbie the prodigal doll becomes human, as if it’s a choice. It was. But she felt like she needed to ask for permission. Almost as if to hint to us because we think otherwise: that we have a choice. And we don’t need to ask for permission.

So creatives, creators, humans: if Barbie isn't going to settle, don't settle for creativity. Do the imagining, too.

As so wisely prophesied by Aqua in 1997’s Barbie Girl: Imagination! Life is your creation!