Fire up the orgasmatron: why we can't let Barbarella go

“Oh! It’s … it’s sort of nice, isn’t it?” Barbarella (Jane Fonda) exclaims as the evil scientist Durand-Durand (Milo O’Shea) begins to play upon his nefarious piano-like Excessive Machine. The scene, like the B-sci-fi goof Barbarella as a whole, is famous for its winking sexuality; you see Fonda’s clothing being spit out of the machine, and then she moans and sweats and writhes in the sensuous clutches of Durand’s pleasure trap.

But for all of the film’s double and single entendres, the truth is (as Barbarella well knows) that sex is easy to find everywhere. What really makes Barbarella special isn’t sex. Rather, as the main character says in surprise, what makes Barbarella special is that it’s “nice”.

Based on a comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest, Barbarella is set to become a comic again in 2017 from Dynamite Entertainment. After that, the Hollywood Reporter says, the rights-holders have plans for a full multimedia wave of Barbarella nostalgia projects.

The best-known version of Barbarella, though, will always be the 1968 movie. The plot, such as it is, casts Fonda as a space adventurer from a idyllic future Earth in which war has been so thoroughly banished that people barely know what it is – Barbarella fetchingly furrows her brow at the very thought. Yet somehow Durand-Durand has constructed a superweapon, a Positronic Ray, and absconded with it to the Tau Ceti region. It’s up to Barbarella, decked out in a series of revealing and sparkly mod outfits, to find Durand-Durand and bring him back to peace, love and all around grooviness. “Something must be done!” Barbarella declares as she stands nude before her viewscreen connecting her to the president of Earth. “Yes,” he replies with heartfelt meaningfulness. “And you are the girl who must do it.”

Barbarella doesn’t pick up on the president’s interest, as she doesn’t pick up on much of anything. She’s unfailingly trusting and eager to please, and she keeps getting betrayed and attacked for her troubles. The first thing she does upon landing in the Tau Ceti region is to try to make friends with two young girls – they knock her out with a snowball and then sic evil vampire dolls on her. She is rescued by a virile, fur-clad, hairy-chested dude who forthrightly tells her he wants to make love – but Barbarella is too naive even for that. In the future on Earth, they bond by taking “exultation transference pellets”. Learning to do it the old-fashioned way doesn’t sully her, though; if anything, it makes her more completely stainless. She hums and sings unselfconsciously after intercourse, noting, with satisfied puzzlement, that the ancients were right: sex really is distracting.

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Of course, this is all parody. Barbarella is too pure and virtuous to be true, like that other campily incorruptible 60s do-gooder, the Adam West Batman. After a fling in the nest with Barbarella, angels regain the will to fly. When our heroine falls into the Mathmos, a lake of pure evil, it creates a bubble around her to protect itself from her innocence. “You are so good you made the Mathmos vomit!” the evil tyrant shouts. “That’s nice,” Barbarella replies. Fonda gets just a hint of archness into the delivery, letting the viewer know that she’s aware of how ridiculous it is to cheerfully approve of her own miraculous saintliness.

Barbarella is Mr Rogers as Jesus Christ as Marilyn Monroe; the sex bomb who will bring about world peace while reassuring you that you’ll never go down the drain. The fun of the film is giggling at this premise. Viewers of the film in 1968 knew that the hippies nattering on about peace and love and pleasure weren’t going to save them. Vietnam ground on no matter how fetchingly Barbarella tossed her hair and lost all her clothes. The secret invisible key to the tyrant’s Chamber of Dreams is a literally transparent fiction. It’s made up; it isn’t there. The sexy utopia is a myth. Barbarella encourages you to feel smart for laughing at the very idea.

But laughing at the fantasy is one way, half-surreptitiously, to enjoy the fantasy. No sex goddess is going to swoop in wearing vinyl and make all the nuclear weapons – er, positronic rays – disappear. The lion won’t lie down with the lamb, the angel won’t virtuously rescue the bisexual tyrant queen, and the nations of the world aren’t going to choose sex over war. We snort at the very idea. But, oh, if they did! It would be sort of nice, wouldn’t it?

The real naked truth of Barbarella isn’t sexploitation. It’s niceploitation; the cynical exploitation of utopian goodness and, conversely, the starry-eyed utopian exploitation of cynicism. Like Barbarella’s outfits, the film is carefully and delicately constructed, mocking its own dreams of pleasure and peace the better to indulge in them to sensual excess.

This is why the various Barbarella reboot attempts seem unlikely to capture the original’s charm. The comic series’ editor at Dynamite, Matt Edelson, says that he thinks Barbarella’s message was about “freedom of self-expression”, which willfully misses the point. Barbarella isn’t a daring ideological personal avant garde deployment of x-rated content, a la DH Lawrence or R Crumb. On the contrary, Barbarella is endearing because its coy flashes of nude Jane Fonda barely conceal the shocking, not-shocking truth that people lust for peace and love. When Barbarella overwhelms the Excessive Machine, it is in part because of her capacity for sex and pleasure. But it’s also because of the excess ecstasy of, as she exclaims, “My goodness!”