The film version of Barbarella gets a semi-bad rap as an over-the-top sex farce with an almost-camp sensibility and a genuinely bad rap as a film either completely disengaged from its own gender politics or completely sexist:
While women strove to clothe their gender with dignity, Barbarella endeavored to strip them of it…Barbarella’s sexual appeal proves to be her most powerful weapon, but she does not control it as much as it controls her. Each episodic dilemma moves to the next by Barbarella’s sexual encounters with alien strangers, at first a pittance she pays them for saving her life. Notably, circumstances leading up to this event strip Barbarella of most of her clothes. The only exception is when she has sex with Duran Duran’s machine, in which her multiple orgasms ruin the device and foil his scheme to kill her. Opening with an erotic scene of Barbarella undressing herself, the film begins with the statement, woman equals sex [Ed.: italics added], for by that point the audience does not know who she is, and spends the remainder of the time underscoring their assertion. [Source here.]
This is a particularly egregious example of feminist critique, but the fact that anybody can seriously advance the notion that a simple striptease is sufficient to denote “woman equals sex” indicates that we may be to the point where we’re so deft with the feminist critique of objectified female bodies that we overlook the ways in which those bodies function not just as oppressive representations of women but as ambivalent representations of cultural dynamics about women. (Not to mention for not-inherently-problematic aesthetic pleasure.)
One of the most striking lines from the film in this context is “The Mathmos has created this bubble to protect itself from your innocence.” The line is spoken by the Great Tyrant, after she and Barbarella are dunked into the ever-hungry Mathmos expecting to die, only to find themselves protected by a spontaneously generated enclosure that looks a little like the Jetsons’ car (I failed to find a decent picture online.) Delivered in the film’s final minutes, after Barbarella has eagerly rewarded three rescuers with sex and survived the Orgasmotron, the line encapsulates the film’s characteristically 1960s’ stance on the inherent goodness of sexual pleasure. Like much popular culture from the era, Barbarella works to recast the traditional, Puritanical distinction between innocence and corruption, making “purity of body” almost entirely inoperative and advancing the idea that the “good-hearted” (male and female) enjoy sex too.
This is not “woman equals sex.” This is “sex is really, really, fun but mostly irrelevant.”
As an artifact of sexual liberation, Barbarella is certainly subject to the more-limited feminist critique that the sexually liberated woman is a male wish fulfillment, but in the world of the film, Earth culture has evolved to a future state where the Hippie premises are simply business as usual and the power dynamics that inform them in the present have evaporated. Sex is casual; pleasure is paramount; goodness is manifest; and power is besides the point. The other stereotypical Hippie assumption, that mind-altering drugs are benign and progressive, has a surprisingly ambivalent status: on Earth, a drug that allows for the “rapport” of minds has replaced physical intercourse. Although the film doesn’t strongly disparage the use of the drug, it definitely depicts physical sex as both more “primitive” and better.
Thematically, Barbarella’s fantasmic sexual receptiveness is a function of that “primitive goodness” – the merging of physical sensuality with a nurturing and anti-violent sensibility – a concept not entirely unrelated to the later feminist concept of “woman’s wisdom.” The fantasy extends significantly beyond access to the desirable female body, and the film’s politics – sexual and otherwise – are consequently more complex. The critique of Barbarella as brute objectifiation is one of those reductive arguments deriving from an adherence-to rather than an awareness-of the contemporaneous feminist dictum that the personal is political, and it misses the extent to which there’s a lot of politics in this film that has nothing to do with Barbarella’s breasts.
Countercultural exoticism, in both its erotic and philosophical modes, often reflected the influence of the “Hippie trail” – the search for enlightenment in the uncorrupted cultures of the East, viewed as more primitive, authentic, or “in touch” with nature. This affection for primitive eroticism drives the film’s motifs, although the space-exotic aesthetic owes more to the curvy “woggles” of Morris Lapidus than to primitive art or the ethnic tapestries of the subcontinent so characteristic of more earthbound 60s mythologies. Barbarella’s primitivism takes a particularly Western formulation: She is Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall: a helpmeet and sexual partner to man, but “innocent” and “pure,” uncorrupted of spirit, naïve about the ways in which her sexuality is both powerful and political.
Released in 1968, the year of the Battle of Saigon and the My Lai massacre, the movie is also ambivalent about violence: the opening sequence, in which the President of Earth sends Barbarella to locate and stop Durand Durand from an as-yet-unknown nefarious plan, establishes that “the Universe has been pacified for centuries.” When the (completely nude) Barbarella receives weapons to help her in the mission she campily complains about being “armed like a naked savage.”
Societies with a propensity to war are described as “in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility.” Without even a hint of contradiction, primitive violence is every bit as bad as primitive eroticism is good. Make love, not war.
Aesthetically, the film is a shaky and rollicking hybrid of this hippie utopia with space age bachelor fantasy: Barbarella is beautiful, strong, available for sex at the drop of an innuendo, handy with gadgets, and pacificist, but a perfect shot, able to destroy aircraft from an entirely unbelievable distance with merely a handgun. The world she inhabits is fashionable, uninhibited, and full of stylized villians who are easily defeated.
But perhaps the most illuminating element of the hybrid lies in the residue of domesticity. Barbarella does not keep house; she does not cook; she is not waiting around for the men she sleeps with to take care of her or provide for her. She is a “five-star, double-rated astronavigatrix” with her own spaceship who gets direct calls from the President of Earth. She is also immensely kind, consistently nurturing, and completely not manipulative in any way. This is surely male fantasy, but it is not the oppressive “barefoot and pregnant” male fantasy of first wave feminism or even the “hang around the Mansion and look gorgeous” fantasy of Hugh Hefner. If Barbarella dressed in a smart polyester pantsuit and unzipped it less frequently she would be as unobjectionable as Mary Tyler Moore.
Watch this spot for a link to part 2.
“This is surely male fantasy, but it is not the oppressive “barefoot and pregnant” male fantasy of first wave feminism…”
I think you mean second wave? Folks like Friedan and Dworkin an so forth, right? (I’ve never actually been clear on when first wave feminism is, though, so maybe it’s me who’s confused.)
More substantively….I think you’re not giving those second wave folks enough credit. They were very aware of the place of women within hippie fantasy, and managed to critique it fairly devastatingly (in my view at least.)
I guess what’s oppressive is open to debate…but I think, for example, male expectations that the ideal woman not be manipulative in any way creates fairly stringent expectations which can get leveraged in various unpleasant ways. I also think you’re maybe a little too quick to dismiss the woman=sex (and love, I think) which seems like an equation which is definitely functioning in the film.
I think it makes sense to point out that the exploitation is being done in the name of a hippie/pacifist vision which may have some things going for it (I sort of hate hippies in a lot of ways, but they had some things going for them.) But you seem to be saying that exploitation and sex aren’t in fact important to the film, and I just can’t get myself to see that as a very convincing argument.
“She is a “five-star, double-rated astronavigatrix” with her own spaceship who gets direct calls from the President of Earth.”
The problem with this is that I think it’s definitely satirical. I’d grant that there may be ambivalence there, but I think that definitely one part of what it’s doing is making fun of women with careers. Tying her competence so intrinsically to her sexuality has problems as well, I’d think.
As a comparison — Wonder Woman is also sexploitation fodder in some sense…but her competence is never satirized. (There are other differences too, but that’s a pretty important one.)
I could be misreading — it’s a long time since I’ve seen the film. Which I enjoyed, and I’d agree that excessive handwringing is probably unwarranted overall. But I don’t think that those second wavers were completely off their rockers either.
Noah — yes, I meant second wave. I’ll correct it and put a note. Sorry ’bout that.
I think you’re reading satire where I see farce. I think of Barbarella as the heroine of a farce, not a farcical heroine. And her heroic attribute is that Hippie ideal of “goodness.” I don’t think that’s satire; I think that’s completely sincere.
In pointing that out, I don’t mean to advance it as some absolute ideological ideal or as a broad corrective of some sort to the 2nd wavers and their observations about culture and society; I just don’t think the operative sexual ethos in this film is particularly exploitative. I think it’s worth putting the 2nd wave critique in some historical context as well: at the time the film came out it may or may not have contributed to a broader context of exploitation which would justify a greater amount of angst over it than is appropriate 40 years later. You can argue that the sex farce is inherently objectionable, but I think that’s unnecessarily limiting.
I suppose that’s a long way of saying yes, it’s the hangwringing over this film in particular that I’m objecting to…not the handwringing over sexual exploitation in general.
One more thing: Barbarella is pretty bad on queer sexuality, actually; it’s extremely heteronormative. But as far as heteronormative sex fantasies go, it seems pretty benign…when I make a list of sex fantasies that I want to object to, men enjoying the idea of beautiful, sexually profligate women with kind hearts isn’t the first one that comes to mind…
Oh, man, would Andrea Dworkin disagree with you…but I can’t imagine that would bother you excessively….
I’m reading Intercourse, which is great. She’s so metal; she’s the Deicide of feminist criticism….
Argh, I wish I could participate in this conversation, but it’s been too long since I’ve seen the movie.
But now I have the Barbarella theme song stuck in my head. Thank you soooo much, Caro.
You’re better off than me, Richard. I got Duran Duran’s “Electric Barbarella” stuck in my head sometime about halfway through writing this and it’s still there. A day later. Over and over. Incessantly.
The Germans have this word for a song stuck in your head: earworm. That’s what it is. An evil wicked insidious earworm.
Amazon has the movie available for purchase/download for $8.49. The comic, which I shall talk about shortly, is currently selling for $31.49 and up.
Noah, words tomorrow on Dworkin. Now Zzzzzzz.
My one caveat relates to the use of the word “hippie”. It’s a movie by a French film-maker adapted from a French comic strip.
The director, Roger Vadim, is closer to the sexual and societal inclinations of a Hugh Hefner.
BTW, the bastard married Bardot, Deneuve and Fonda…grrr.
Hi Alex — Have you read the comic? It’s also much closer to Hefner than Hippie, at least in English translation. That’s sort of what I was getting at with the space age bachelor hybrid. I’d assume the changes made from the comic to the film were intentionally incorporating Hippie themes.
More on that in Part 2!
Hi, Caro–
I think what I was trying to say is that France went through its own period of sexual/cultural liberation in the ’50s and’60s. This was the age of the New Wave in cinema (as recent tributes to the 50th anniversary of Godard’s ‘A Bout de Souffle’ attest), of wonderfully liberated chanson from Jacques Brel and Françoise Hardy, of the rise of liberating designers such as Yves Saint-Laurent.
Obviously, this French movement intersected with the American Beat, Folk and Hippie movements, but I don’t think ‘Barbarella’owes much, if anything, to ‘hippyism'(which was surprisingly puritanical in its permissiveness.)
I compare Vadim to Hefner in that both specialised in a sort of horny sleaze redeemed by humor and what Sinatra called ‘rink-a-dink’. I mean, Vadim committed “…And God created Woman”, with Bardot. Pure Hubba Hubba with a veneer of sophistication!
(Vadim, rather endearingly, admits in his memoirs that Jane Fonda, with her feminism and sexual aggressiveness, made him impotent.)
Hi Alex — thanks for the clarification. But this isn’t entirely a French film: Terry Southern’s got top billing for the screenplay. He also wrote Easy Rider.
Southern lived in Europe off and on for years throughout the ’50s and was certainly sensitive to the French character of the source material, but he’d been a satellite hanger-on to the Beats in New York in the early ’50s, and he was living in Los Angeles as of 1964. He hung out with the Beatles and Dennis Hopper and had his picture on the cover of St Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It’s certainly true that the artistic community in the 1960s held itself somewhat apart from the grassroots subculture, just like artists do today. So the Hippie influences are certainly very distilled, but one would expect that regardless from a writer as cosmopolitan as Southern, who surely had a great deal of distance on the subculture and was as aware of its failures as its bright lights.
But it sounds like you’re saying he was unaware of it, and I think that’s extremely unlikely considering his biography and his friends. Even without his personal connections to the Beats, anybody living and working in the LA entertainment business at this time would have been very aware of and familiar with Hippie-inflected popular culture.
Also, I’m not sure why he would have been involved at all if there were no desire to include pop cultural elements that would appeal to young American movie-goers. There’s no reason why he wouldn’t have wanted to include those elements in places where they weren’t inconsistent with the story or the ethos of the film (and I think he integrated them very successfully).
Not to say that Barbarella isn’t French — it’s definitely a French farce — in fact, I think that probably has something to do with how unsuccessful it was at the time. Americans struggle with farce — the oft-commented-upon mismatch of sensibilities between Alain Resnais and Jules Feiffer in I Want to Go Home is a particularly illustrative example. But it’s definitely got elements from both cultures, French and American. That said, I think it’s generally a mistake to see the ’60s counterculture as having rigid national boundaries, period…it was more a single “Western” movement with national flavors.
Sounds about right to me.