{"id":2948,"date":"2023-09-01T09:21:36","date_gmt":"2023-09-01T13:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2948"},"modified":"2023-09-01T09:22:14","modified_gmt":"2023-09-01T13:22:14","slug":"plastic-love-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2023\/09\/01\/plastic-love-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Plastic Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to this reflection as a podcast,<\/em> click here<\/a>
 
It\u2019s been a big year in Hollywood for toys and games. 
 
The summer blockbuster Barbie<\/em> has now raked in more than $1.3 billion in global receipts, and is expected to overtake the $1.36 billion haul of The Super Mario Brothers Movie<\/em>. 
 
Director Greta Gerwig\u2019s fantasy about Mattel\u2019s most famous toy visiting \u201cthe real world\u201d is a visual blast.  It also delivers messages about gender stereotypes, female empowerment, and the search for personal identity \u2013 a lot to put on the slender shoulders of a plastic doll. 
 
Barbie\u2019s cinematic quest to discover the meaning of her own existence includes an encounter with the spirit of Ruth Handler, who with her husband Elliot invented a new kind of fashion doll in 1959 and named it for their daughter Barbara.  A male doll named Ken arrived two years later. 
 
For 43 years, Barbie and Ken were the perfect polyurethane couple. 
 
Sure, four decades is an alarmingly long time to go steady.  But everybody assumed that Ken would ultimately get his act together and pop the question.
 
Then suddenly, in 2004, in a move that even The National Enquirer<\/em> didn\u2019t see coming, Barbie dumped Ken.
 
In a press release, the folks at the Mattel corporation who craft her fictional biography (her real name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, and she hails from Willows, Wisconsin) reassured the public that Ken and Barbie would spend \u201cquality time apart\u201d and \u201cremain friends.\u201d  That\u2019s a nice way of saying that the fantasy was over. 
 
Barbie, in the meantime, took up with an Australian boogie boarder named Blaine.  He\u2019s front and center in the picture above, as heartbroken Ken walks away.  Even I must admit that Blaine looks pretty hot.
 
Ken wasn\u2019t the only one who was crushed by this development.  Barbie\u2019s sales, which have always been extraordinary \u2013 it is estimated that three Barbie dolls are sold every second<\/em> somewhere in the world \u2013 suddenly took a nosedive. 
 
In the Barbie<\/em> movie, Mattel\u2019s CEO is played to goofy perfection by Will Ferrell.  When Barbie suddenly appears in the real world, he panics.  \u201cNo one rests until this doll is back in a box!\u201d  In the really <\/em>real world of 2006, Mattel\u2019s executives panicked.  The experiment was over.  It was time for Ken to win back his girlfriend. 
 
According to reliable toy marketing sources \u2013 and I am not making this up \u2013 Ken began to work out.  His body became lean and buff.  He pioneered some new fashions.  He even became \u201cspiritual\u201d \u2013 that\u2019s the term Mattel used \u2013 all in an effort to rekindle the love that he and Barbie used to share. 
 
Ken appeared on billboards across the country: \u201cBarbie, I want you back,\u201d and, \u201cYou\u2019re the only doll for me.\u201d 
 
On Valentine\u2019s Day 2011 it became official.  Barbie and Ken once again became an item.  Mattel then purchased billboards in which Ken proclaimed, \u201cBarbie, we may be plastic, but our love is real.\u201d 
 
Of course, even someone with the IQ of a Barbie or Ken doll knows that real love is more than skin deep.  It has little to do with whatever money, chemistry, or self-improvement initiatives we bring to the table. 
 
But the idea persists in Western culture that you\u2019ve got be lucky to find love.  And if you\u2019re not lucky \u2013 if you weren\u2019t born with Barbie\u2019s looks or Blaine\u2019s amazing hair \u2013 then you\u2019d better make your own luck by buying the Malibu Ken wardrobe or captivating others with a remarkable personality.  Otherwise you may have to go through life alone.
 
And that would be a tragedy.  All of us are desperate to experience true love.  We know we cannot live without it. 
 
Yet our own experiences of love are inevitably conditional.  We tend to love others only as long as they love us back.  There is a mercenary quality to our relationships.  We love others in the hope and expectation of being loved in return.
 
It\u2019s pretty clear what we need: More than anything else, we need someone who doesn\u2019t need <\/em>us. 
               
There is only one such person in the universe.  It is God. 
 
God loves us for our own sake, not his.  The apostle John puts it this way: \u201cThis is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us\u201d (I John 4:10).
 
From before the beginning of time, God knew us and loved us into existence. 
 
Which means that the fantasy we have always yearned for, incredibly, just happens to be Reality. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here It\u2019s been a big year in Hollywood for toys and games.  The summer blockbuster Barbie has now raked in more than $1.3 billion in global receipts, and is expected to overtake the $1.36 billion haul of The Super Mario Brothers Movie.  Director Greta Gerwig\u2019s fantasy about Mattel\u2019s most famous toy visiting \u201cthe real world\u201d… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2949,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-2948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2948"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2951,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2948\/revisions\/2951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}