This Is the Most Important Character in ‘Barbie’

The Big Picture

• The addition of Ruth Handler’s character in Barbie is unexpected but incredibly important, serving as Barbie’s guiding light and helping her discover her true desires.
• Ruth, as the creator of Barbie, offers Barbie a choice between staying a doll in Barbieland or becoming a human, emphasizing the power of choice and the acceptance of mortality.
• Ruth’s character showcases that women can achieve anything men can, as she became the president of Mattel and allowed Barbie to fulfill her potential and represent limitless possibilities.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie unsurprisingly took the box office (and the whole world) by storm this summer. The movie was anticipated to be a success due to the sheer amount of buzz surrounding it, and it delivered. Starring Margot Robbie as the titular Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, the two rule the screen in their own ways, perfectly embodying the iconic dolls. But while they may have been the film’s most iconic characters, they actually weren’t the most important. That title belongs to Rhea Perlman who plays Ruth, an elderly woman with a strange kitchen at Mattel headquarters. She offers Barbie some tea and gives her advice before eventually helping her sneak out and escape the higher-ups at Mattel, who are chasing her to send her back to Barbieland. At this point, it’s unclear who Ruth is or what importance her character has. Is she simply there to help Barbie? Is she just there to provide wisdom? All is revealed in the final act when she once again appears during the peak of Barbie’s existential crisis and reveals that she is Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie. Yes, the character is in fact a real person, and her addition to the film plays a bigger and more important role than you may realize. But to fully grasp why she is the most important character in the film, we have to go all the way back to when she invented the doll, and how exactly she did so.

How Did Ruth Handler Create Barbie?

The creation of Barbie actually begins with furniture, believe it or not. Ruth Handler’s husband Elliot Handler had a hobby of furniture making, and attempted to make their furniture out of some new plastics, Lucite and Plexiglass. Seeing how well the pieces turned out, Ruth suggested they begin a furniture business, and acted as the sales force, landing them contracts with large companies. The pair went into business with Harold “Matt” Matson, and combined his last name with Elliot’s first name to create the business’ name: Mattel. During World War II, sales for furniture started to fall, so Mattel opted to create toy furniture instead — the success of which led to Ruth and Elliot transitioning Mattel into a fully-fledged toy manufacturer.

The idea for the Barbie doll came when Ruth saw her daughter and her friends playing with paper dolls. Per Esquire, in Handler’s memoir Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, she wrote of this moment, “I discovered something very important. They were using these dolls to project their dreams of their own futures as adult women. Wouldn’t it be great if we could take that play pattern and three-dimensionalize it?” However, when she pitched the idea to her partners, they shut it down, saying it was impractical. Fast-forward a few years and while on a family vacation to Switzerland, Handler found a doll that was reminiscent of the one she wanted to make. In her memoir, she said, “Here were the breasts, the small waist, the long, tapered legs I had enthusiastically described for the designers all those years ago.” The doll in question was a German doll named Bild Lilli which was based on an adult comic strip targeted at men. But Ruth purchased the doll and brought it back with her to America where she presented it to her team, and thus the first Barbie prototype was made.

The doll was given the name Barbie after Ruth and Elliot’s daughter Barbara, and a few years later, Mattel designed a male doll named Ken, after Ruth and Elliot’s son Kenneth. The release of the Barbie doll sent Mattel to new heights, with 300,000 dolls being sold in its first year. The success not only saw Mattel become a leading toy manufacturer but also saw Ruth Handler move from executive vice president of the company to president. Now that is some serious Barbie energy.

Why Was Ruth’s Character So Important in ‘Barbie’?

The addition of Ruth Handler as a character in Barbie was unexpected yet elevated the film in a lot of ways, and by the time the credits rolled, I was left with the thought that she was the most important character in the film. Not Barbie herself, not Gloria (America Ferrera), but Ruth — a character who had maybe 10 minutes of screen time total. Of course, the creator of Barbie would be an important character, but it’s more than just that surface-level nod to the doll’s history. Her addition was incredibly poignant as she was the one who ends up being Barbie’s guiding light, and the one who helps her discover what she truly wants. She’s the one who tells Barbie (and the audience) that she can be whoever and whatever she wants to be.

The entire plot of Barbie revolves around the fact that Barbie is having an existential crisis. She’s been having thoughts of death, her showers are suddenly cold, and most shocking of all, her feet are flat! At the height of Barbie’s existential crisis at the end of the film, Ruth reappears, revealing herself as the one who invented Barbie. She guides her creation to a void of sorts and offers her a choice: she can either stay a doll, happy and carefree in Barbieland, or she can become a human. She already knows what Barbie’s choice will be and reminds her that if she becomes a human, she will eventually die. Despite her earlier crisis and constant thoughts of dying, Barbie accepts this fate, taking Ruth’s words into account. The doll’s maker tells her, “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever,” and after getting a taste of what the real world is like, Barbie opts to accept her fate and become human so that she can make lasting changes. The very last scene of the film sees Barbie in the real world as she approaches a receptionist and tells her that her name is Barbara Handler, a charming nod to Ruth’s daughter who is the doll’s namesake.

Aside from just providing Barbie with wisdom and ultimately helping her through her internal battle, Ruth’s character is living proof that women can be whatever men can, as proven by the fact that she became president of Mattel. Without her, Barbie wouldn’t exist, so for her to be the driving force that lets Barbie enter the real world and become a human is especially poignant. She’s the one who allows Barbie the chance to become whoever and whatever she chooses to be — just like Ruth had always intended for the doll to represent.

Barbie is now available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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