Who is Ruth, and why is she ‘Barbie’s most important character?
From its collaborations, discontinued dolls, and Barbiecore fashions, the Barbie movie proves a crash course on all things Barbie. Yet the dazzling promotional tour managed to hide one lesson: the curious inclusion of the doll’s IRL mom, Ruth Handler.
We get to meet all the important people in Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) life throughout the film, including the other Barbies, as well as Gloria (America Ferrera) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), but there’s someone who stands out — and it’s definitely not Ken (Ryan Gosling). It’s her inventor, Ruth (Rhea Perlman), who is the secret key to Barbie accepting herself and choosing a new path to be on, insecurities, shame, and all.
Who is Ruth in the Barbie movie?
Barbie first meets Ruth while she’s trying to escape from Mattel’s headquarters. She accidentally stumbles upon Ruth’s office on the building’s 17th floor, where she finds Ruth making tea in a kitchen that doesn’t quite look real. Barbie doesn’t really know anything about Ruth at this point, except that she’s a kind old woman who deeply cares about her and believes in her more than anyone else. Ruth helps Barbie escape Mattel, but it isn’t the last we see of her.
Towards the end of the film, Ruth shows up in Barbieland, where it’s explained by Mattel’s CEO (Will Ferrell) that she’s actually the ghost of Ruth Handler, Barbie’s original creator in the Real World. Although Barbieland’s been reclaimed and the other Barbies and Kens have found their purpose, our Barbie’s still unsure of who she wants to be after everything she’s been through and seen in the human world.
As Barbie’s creator, Ruth knows her purpose more than anyone. The two walk away into a white space that’s basically the Barbie equivalent of heaven, and Ruth asks Barbie if she’s really ready to take on everything that comes with humanity, including mortality. They hold hands as Ruth passes on all the memories and feelings Barbie would have as a human — a tear-jerking scene where Gerwig manages to encapsulate the emotional scope of girlhood through a short montage. (Is it even a Greta Gerwig film without tragic girlhood?) And by the end, Barbie realizes that she’s ready to feel all the feelings, and she decides to become a human…or whatever the Barbie equivalent of a human is.
In the film, Ruth comes to Barbie when she most needs her, whether it’s Barbie running for her life or having an existential crisis. As her creator, Ruth is Barbie’s ultimate mentor, but Ruth never oversteps her role, acknowledging Barbie’s autonomy in deciding who she wants to be — which is exactly what the real Ruth Handler wanted for her doll.
Who is Ruth Handler?
Ruth Handler is the American inventor who created Barbie in 1959, and co-founded Mattel with her husband Elliot Handler. As mentioned in the film, Barbie was named after Handler’s daughter Barbara, who also served as inspiration for Barbie in another way.
It’s been reported that Handler found inspiration for Barbie in two instances. The first was while watching her daughter and her friends play make-believe with paper dolls, where they’d imagine their dolls as college students, cheerleaders, or adults with different careers. The second was during a family trip to Europe, where Handler stumbled upon a German Bild Lilli doll, which captured Handler’s attention due to its adult body; most dolls at the time were modeled after toddlers or babies.
In 1959, Handler debuted Barbie at the annual Toy Fair in New York, where she revolutionized the American industry by introducing the first doll with an adult body. We see the impact of this dramatized in a sequence inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a bunch of girls playing with baby dolls throw them out as soon as Barbie lands on Earth. Instead of play-acting as a mom taking care of a baby or a toddler doll, young girls could instead play with a Barbie who could be anything.
In her autobiography, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, Handler wrote, “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman had choices.” And in the Barbie movie, Ruth helps Barbie make her biggest one — becoming a real, human woman.
