Film Dunce: Barbarella

Film Dunce is a weekly series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a movie that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never seen. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.

Many of the films featured by our Film Dunce series have been important, defining works of art. Some have been intellectually engaging art films (Last Year at Marienbad) or enormously influential genre fare (Night of the Living Dead), works that leaves a deep mark in our cultural psyche. Barbarella (1968) is not one of these films. So why does it merit inclusion as a Film Dunce? Despite all its many flaws and absurdities, Barbarella has somehow managed to become a pop-culture touchstone, something that nerds and normals alike can throw out as a reference and have more than a cult audience nod their heads in agreement that yes, indeed there was once a movie called Barbarella and Jane Fonda was in it. So why is this movie, which, to be charitable, is only one small step above the usual late night Cinemax fare, famous at all?

First of all, the plot of Barbarella is negligible, but does exist as a framework for Fonda’s skimpy wardrobe changes (which are amusingly frequent). It’s actually as formulaic as could be expected from any science fiction story of the time, which is surprising considering the movie’s reputation as a “new” (at least in 1968) kind of sci-fi, in which a woman was the hero and master of her own destiny. Or at least, so I was given to understand. Basically, Barbarella exists as a spaceship captain in a thoroughly tamed future Earth republic, which has become so tranquil that the standard greeting is simply “love” and war is unthinkable as a concept, let alone a reality. She’s conscripted to find (sound familiar?) Dr. Durand Durand (Milo O’Shea) the inventor of a doomsday device who has gone missing on a mysterious planet full of oddities and a dark psychic secret. If this plotline sounds hoary, it’s because it was already old in 1956 with the release of The Forbidden Planet. Along the way, Barbarella encounters sexy aliens, learns about old-fashioned sex (that’s using your genitals, rather than taking pills) and is tortured in the world’s largest vibrator/pipe organ.

When sitting down to watch Barbarella for the first time, my initial reaction was surprisingly simple: my 11-year old self would have loved this. Not so much for the actual sci-fi on display, but for the sheer level of T&A which he was sadly deprived of. And that’s not prurience on my part (nor on my hypothetical sweaty tween self); the movie actually open with Barbarella stripping out of a spacesuit in zero gravity and the only actual toplessness of the film. But my next reaction was one of sheer ennui, my now-jaded tastes being underwhelmed by the silliness of the nudity and the pretentiousness of having a Georges Seurat in the background. We get it, it’s not just that it’s a naked woman, it’s also a naked woman with taste. My younger self wouldn’t have cared, honestly, but my current self just wasn’t buying it.

If this all sounds dismissive, well, it’s a dismissible movie. So what makes it so memorable that it has remained after many of the other nudity-obsessed exploitation flicks of the period have disappeared like so many puffs of smoke? Part of this must come down to Fonda’s striking presence – her undeniable star power and family connections have a fascination all their own. As directed by then-husband Roger Vadim, Fonda is every inch the nubile yet naïve heroine, eternally doe-eyed and astonished by her surroundings. But this is also one of the most dated elements of the film and one that strikes against its supposed premise. Barbarella is not a dynamic protagonist, making her own way despite the obstacles in her path – contrary to the presumed feminist-angle, she is constantly being bailed out, helped and used as a sex object (albeit largely willingly) by the men in her life. If anything, she’s a successor to the Golden Age Wonder Woman; eternally appearing strong and capable, but always finding herself erotically bound and in need of rescue in any given situation.

Much of this must be due to the time period. After all, this was 1968, the so-called “Summer of Love,” when people had sex casually and recreational drugs were de rigueur amongst young people, unlike the current staid, frigid youth culture. To see a woman of any kind as a protagonist must have been somewhat thrilling, even if her part mostly involved changing her fanciful outfits (and I’m sure part of the lasting impact of the film was the hip silliness of her costumes) and frequently rewarding male rescuers with sex. And while the latter attitude also may have seemed to be sexually liberated and aware at the time, it now comes off as uncomfortably exploitative, particularly in a near-rape sequence to which Barbarella confronts her attackers with a resigned “Oh.” As a first viewing, that was nearly as disturbing as any overtly sexist behavior I’d seen in less “liberated” fare; everyone, including herself, sees Barbarella as a sexual object to be traded. Certainly not what I’d been led to expect for the crazy and important time that was the ’60s. If anything, it was a window to how slowly and well, self-indulgently the social politics of the time changed.

So what does make Barbarella so memorable? If anything, it’s the simple gleeful trashy confusion of the film. It’s never sure whether it’s a comedy or not; many of the sequences are played for laughs, most successfully with a clumsy revolutionary leader (David Hemmings), but many others land so flat that it makes one question whether the actors were in on the joke. It’s never fully committed to being a sex-romp, though it does get away with as many naked silhouettes and post-coital (or in the case of the notorious Excessive Machine, mid-orgasmic) Fonda shots as possible. It’s not even all that committed to science fiction, mixing a (sexy, of course) angel in there along with a sludgy personification of evil and various woolly phantasms. Watching it as a film dunce, the single question that kept coming up in my mind was whether anyone making the film was ever clear on what they were committing to. If anything, it seemed like a movie made by people who convinced themselves they made a revolutionary film but had only made a pandering one, a film that was so supposedly liberated and counterculture that it couldn’t see how exploitative and formulaic it was. Barbarella’s clearest descendents are the movies that are so bad they’re good, the trash you love and revere for its faults, not its virtues. It’s the kind of movie that’s lasted the test of time because of how silly it is, not for its influence or quality. It’s the kind of movie that’s hard to take serious nowadays, but then again, I doubt anybody ever did.

by Nathan Kamal