French Lessons

I recently finished reading the 1966 American edition of “Barbarella” by French artist Jean-Claude Forest and discovered that I’ve grown to appreciate the occasional innocence or naivete among my protagonists.

Most people these days may only be familiar with the character Barbarella from the Swingin’ ‘60s sci-fi flick. That’s how I first heard of her, anyway. When I was in college, I saw the film right in the middle of a stretch of bad movies — the other dogs I remember casting my eyes on in that dark month were “Andy Warhol’s Dracula” and “Caligula.”

I went to see “Barbarella” for the same reason most young males went to see it — cause Jane Fonda gets nekkid.

To the brotherhood of young men, let me say this: It’s all a lie. While Jane does lose her clothes occasionally and often gets up to bizarre, pseudo-sexual hijinks, it’s all pretty tame, even for the Swingin’ ‘60s. The most prurient of scenes — and perhaps the most amusing — involves the evil scientist Duran Duran attempting to break our heroine’s spirit with his sex organ, i.e., a musical instrument that he puts her in and plays like a piano. Her high sexual energy busts that machine good.

Anyway, the movie was inspired by Forest’s rather clever comic strip, which is part parable and part parody of the science fiction tropes of the Buck Rogers variety. Barbarella, a beautiful Earth girl, wanders the galaxy, happens upon the odd civilization under the threat of some despot, seduces said despot and escapes, usually in torn clothes. An earnest revolutionary, she inspires the masses to throw down their shackles, as she’s menaced by flying sharks, killer toys and a one-eyed queen disguised as a slumming prostitute. Her saviors tend to be as unusual as the worlds she visits, like a blind angel or a horny robot.

Barbarella’s greatest quality is her innocent belief that she can make things better. That, combined with her beauty and open sexuality — I said it was the ‘60s — make her surprisingly heroic. She has no cynicism, which is refreshing when you consider how much angst permeates current popular science fiction, or worse, that knowing, oh, I’ve seen this all before attitude, that self-mocking that invalidates the story.

Nope, with her it’s “Is there a problem? Let’s fix it. You mean I have to sleep with the evil scientist to save the world? OK, let’s get started.”

Like I said, it’s refreshing.

The art is a treat too. Forest's work is loose and sketchy in places, but he has an imaginative, playful eye. One nice touch is that each chapter of the book is done in a different color.

As near as I can tell, the 1966 book is the only edition available in English, though Forest wrote at least two other books in French, one of which finds Barbarella as a young mother. I saw somewhere that Heavy Metal reprinted some of the Babarella stories, but I'm not sure which. I'll have to track those down.