Our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomyhas been rebranded as Anatomy of a Nude Scene, but nothing else has changed. We're still going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, Jane Fonda goes nude in zero gravity to give us one of the most skintillating opening scenes in film history in Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy!
Sci-fi cinema got awfully campy in the 1960s, withfilms like The Time Machine, The Phantom Planet, Invasion of the Triffids, andcountlessother films that trafficked in the sillier side of outer space. Then, in 1968, three major science fiction moviesall came along, pulling the genre in wildly different directions. In April, two films representing the future of the genre came along. First, April's Planet of the Apes turned the science fiction world on its head over the next few years, becoming a franchise and representing the peak of science fiction as social commentary.Also in April 1968 was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a forward thinking film that would eventually turn science fiction into a thinking man's genre once we reached the 1970s.
Then in October came Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, a campy film more in line with the science fiction cinema that predated it. Several years before her anti-Vietnam activism would earn her a whole generation of detractors, star Jane Fonda became an overnight sex symbol when Barbarella hit theaters. Fonda had spent much of the 60s in her father Henry's shadow, floundering in ditsy romantic leading roles and not really fitting the typical "movie star" mold that was finally beginning to crumble. While the following year's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? would bring her the critical acclaim that had eluded her up until this point, it was Barbarella that really helped to establish Jane as a movie star in her own right.
Like a fair amount of science fiction films at the time, Barbarella was a mostly European production, with financial ties to both Italy and France. French director Roger Vadim made a big splash with his 1958 debut ...And God Created Woman—a film he would remake 30 years later—andFonda lobbied for him to get the directing job on this film. This isn't totally surprising as the two were married from 1965-1973 and had collaborated on several films at that point. Writer Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, The Magic Christian) was brought in to help make thescript funnier and though he and Vadim are the only credited screenwriters, well over a dozen different writers worked on the script during its development.
Barbarella wastes no time establishing itself as something different from your normal science fiction film. With censorship laws having fully loosened in Europe—further loosening would also come to America in 1968 with the dissolution of the Hays Code—Vadim capitalized on the opportunity to have his leading lady float around and strip completely nude in zero gravity to open the film...
While all of the nudity in the film is confined to the first ten minutes, Barbarella is a film drenched in sex. Fonda's heroine comes from Earth, where sex is achieved by taking a pill, but when she meets space hunk David Hemmings (Blow-Up, Deep Red) he talks her into having sex the old-fashioned way. She also helps blind angel Pygar (John Phillip Law) regain the ability to fly by having sex with him, and she even breaks an "excessive pleasure machine" by withstanding the multiple orgasms it causes.
As if you couldn't already tell, Barbarella is one of the most bonkers sci-fi films of the 1960s, but it's also very much steeped in that 1960s vision of the future as well as the free-love movement that was sweeping the world. This is likely why every attempt to reboot the franchise has failed—including one as recently as 2007 directed by Robert Rodriguez and starring Rose McGowan—because the film is too much a product of the time in which it was made to succeed in the present. Camp science fiction, with very few exceptions, died with the release of Flash Gordon in 1980 and has yet to have any sort of meaningful, big budget revival.
At least the original Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy holds up more than 50 years later, thanks in no small part to Jane Fonda's amazing zero-g nudity, and we don't have to sit around waiting for Hollywood to figure out how to remake the film. It'll be another 50 years before they get their act together at this point, so let's just enjoy what we've got while we've got it!
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