Like spaceships? Like the idea of floating around in space? What about girls? Do you like girls? What about girls in space? Sexy girls in space? Naked girls in space? Hmm? Hmm?
The 1968 film Barbarella, directed by Roger Vadim, seems to be screaming these questions during its first scene – a strip tease in which Jane Fonda, playing Barbarella herself, awkwardly removes pieces of a clunky, futuristic space suit. Throughout its 98-minute run, the film can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a thrilling action adventure or a porn flick.
Jane Fonda as Barbarella in the kind of clothes that any normal space adventurer would wear.
Barbarella is a sexy young space traveler from Earth who has been sent on a mission by none other than the “President of Earth.” She must save the universe’s peacefulness, and thus Earth, by defeating the evil scientist Durand-Durand. And yet, for a hero who is entrusted with saving the universe, she seems to have trouble doing anything more than getting into scrapes that result in her becoming scantily clad and sexily positioned on the floor or tied to a pole. (Each time this happens, she promptly gets rescued by a man who solicits sex as repayment for saving her. You know, just like any normal girl.)
The film redeems itself a fair amount by refusing to take itself seriously. By acknowledging its own silliness, the film allows us to laugh along with it instead of just fidgeting uncomfortably and giggling at inappropriate moments. The pure silliness of Barbarella getting attacked by dolls and birds, and the extreme, hair-exploding reactions to the hand-orgy that she has with the revolutionary Dildano (that oh-so-average and un-suggestive name that everybody was giving to their kids in the sixties) are some of the most ridiculous things that you have probably ever seen. And Vadim seems to recognize that. Characters comically stumble and bumble into others’ intimate moments. And Barbarella is more wide-eyed and farcically innocent about sex than any adult woman could possibly be, all while engaging in at least four different sexual acts throughout the film.
Still, as much as the film is able to laugh at itself, a person almost feels guilty for enjoying the film, especially given its star’s history. Fonda struggled with bulimia at the time, and being shown as a sex object seemed to only increase her anxieties. Add onto that, she was married to Vadim during the shooting of the film, and they were going through one hell of a rough patch. The star has since admitted in interviews that she went along with threesomes that her husband suggested, despite her discomfort, in order to make Vadim happy. “It hurt me. It reinforced me feeling I wasn’t good enough,” she told CNN’s Rebecca Leung in 2009. “One of the reasons that I went along with it was because I felt that if I said no, that he would leave, and I couldn’t imagine myself without him.”
The sexily torn and otherwise strange, fetishistic costumes that Fonda wore as Barbarella seemed, to her, to be another way of enlivening a dying marriage. She described herself as, “infected with the disease to please. Not with women – I’m fine with women, but with men. ‘Whatever you want, honey, I’ll become.’”
These days, when she looks back at the film, Fonda is much more generous towards it. In a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan, she told him that, “I think it’s a charming camp movie, not very sexy. But at the time young men had their first experiences looking at the film and I’m glad of that. I think it’s kind of cool that I aroused a lot of young men at that certain time.”
For some of us, the film, despite its self-deprecating humor and camp, and despite Fonda’s more recent acceptance of it, is still somewhat difficult to digest.
Perhaps it would be a little easier to go along with the film if Barbarella was a more empowering character who could take care of herself. Instead of being rescued by a man every time she gets in trouble, it might be nice to see her gun down the man-eating dolls who attack her. Or break herself out of the glass cage in which she’s trapped with vicious birds who seem to hate the idea of a fully-clothed woman, rather than being flown down a secret escape chute by Dildano.
Maybe if the film had not fed its star’s insecurities and self-destructive behaviors at the time, it would be easier to accept Barbarella as a simple piece of fun. As it stands, Barbarella is the Barbie doll of film culture – a sexy-looking toy that you feel guilty for playing with as soon as you start paying attention to the implications it has for women.
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