Barbarella

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Version française

For Dick
Special thanks to Matthew and his Facebook friends for bringing back the memories

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Kids should never disobey their parents even though in the end it becomes unavoidable if only for the sake of emancipation. It is part of growing up and finding our own identity.

We start life as little beings completely dependent on our parents or caretakers. They provide a warm and safe shelter, they feed us, they keep us dry through seasons and despite the whims of our digestive and urinary systems.

And they teach us basic skills. When and what to eat and drink; when, where and how to move around while controlling those pesky sphincters; how to get dressed for warm and cold weather.

Eventually we grow up, until we’re old enough to eventually wear out from too much living.

In the process of growing up as kids we conveniently forget that somebody taught us the basics and we only remember the practice time we spent on our own or with our peers perfecting our life skills. We ignore that we become the sum of the knowledge, the wisdom, the habits, good and bad, of our parents and their ancestors.

They say parents only die when their children die and even then, not really: they just become part of a more or less anonymous data bank from which their grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on thoughtlessly draw information.

But I digress, let’s go back to emancipation.

At some point when we grow up, we develop desires and needs our parents forgot they once had. One of the needs my older brother and I discovered in our early teens took a very specific form that we knew our mother would not agree with: Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy.

In the 60’s and early 70’s, we were raised on French comic books and magazines, at a time where the genre was swiftly acquiring its status as a valid form of literature. We were aware of Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella original serial comics and had seen some of the strips. When Roger Vadim turned the comics into a movie in 1968, casting a very pretty pretty Jane Fonda, his third wife, as the galactic heroine, my brother and I knew we had to see it.

Jean-Claude Forest (1930-1998) was a French illustrator and writer who created the Barbarella character in the early 1960s. Published originally as serials in V-Magazine in 1962, Barbarella became a runaway best-seller translated in dozens of languages.

Unfortunately, the movie had not been a commercial success and did not linger in cinemas. This was many years before VCRs, DVDs or BitTorrent and it would take a long time before whomever picked movies to play on Canadian TV could see enough artistic value in such a film to broadcast it.

Yet, the movie had everything to appeal to 14 and 15 year-old boys: a Catchman who hunted children; flesh-eating dolls; Leathermen guards shooting laser rays; a bushy-eyebrow villain named Durand Durand who invented the Excessive Machine, a kind of organ designed to kill through orgasm; a blind angel who lived in a nest and re-discovered how to fly after being introduced to carnal pleasure by Barbarella; and a lesbian one-eyed unicorn tyrant (played by Anita Pallenberg, then Keith Richards’ companion).

And of course, there was Barbarella, wearing tight-fitting revealing clothing that kept being torn off so that she could change more often.

The sets and props were typical 60s pop-art. Andy Warhol’s influence was everywhere. Barbarella’s spaceship was made of plywood, rubber and plastic, materials that didn’t burn out plunging through the atmosphere in 1968. The floor, ceiling and walls of the cockpit were covered with shaggy carpeting since back then allergies did not exist and mildew did not cause respiratory problems.

Times certainly have changed.

You can picture our excitement when my brother found out in an underground newspaper that a small theatre would be showing the movie one time only on a Friday at 11 PM.

But there was a problem: this was past our curfew and our mother would never allow us to go out at night to the shady part of town where the cinema showing the erotic movie was located.

We decided to sneak out of the house when my mother was sleeping.

So there we were, lying in bed with our clothes on, listening to my mother’s breathing in her room, impatiently waiting for her to fall asleep, fearing her reaction if she caught us leaving the house or worse if she got up in the middle of the night to find we were not in bed.

When you’re 14, disobedience is quite exciting.

Finally my brother whispered “let’s go!”. Carrying our shoes in our hands, we tiptoed our way to the door, careful not to cause the floor to creak and hoping that the door lock would give way quietly, that the door would open silently.

Outside we sat on the steps of the porch to put our shoes on and walked away without a word. My brother and I had become Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on our way to spend an evening with the Queen of the Galaxy before she became an anti-war activist, a feminist, a fitness video guru and a born-again Christian.

Before the advent of VCRs in the 1980s, a movie could be headlined at the same theatre for months. When video cassettes appeared on the market, there was an outcry from the industry saying that it would be the death of movie theatres. Thirty years later, video cassettes are gone after being replaced by DVDs which are in the process of being supplanted by films in the Cloud. Movie theatres are still around.

Once on the bus, my brother and I discussed nervously how we could explain our absence to our mother if she ever found out. So it was with a sense of impending doom that we entered the near-empty movie theatre.

Then the lights went out, the curtains parted, the opening credits started floating around, Barbarella removed her spacesuit at 24 frames per second in zero gravity... and I forgot that I even had a mother.

When the movie was over, my brother and I realized it was too late for buses to run and we ended up walking the five miles home in the cool spring night.

If my mother ever noticed our little escapade, she never mentioned anything. Maybe because after all she knew about the importance of emancipation.

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