Steven Gaydos Executive VP of Content “Do you guys ever think about dying?” asks the titular toy at the center of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s inventive and ambitious screenplay for the mega-hit comedy “Barbie.” In their yarn, the virus of death awareness is planted in Barbie World by a daydreaming Mattel employee named Gloria, who randomly sketches Thoughts of Impending Death Barbie at work one day, thus triggering the tale of the famed doll’s journey from plastic prop to self-empowered woman. I wasn’t daydreaming, but I was casually musing out loud on X, formerly known as Twitter, after my first viewing of “Barbie” about how the film seemed heavily influenced by a book I first read 50 years ago: Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Denial of Death.” For the uninitiated, Becker’s central thesis is summarized in “Death” as “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” I quickly got a private message from documentary filmmaker Laura Dunn.