#2 Barbarella, Karma & Me

I recently watched Barbarella for the first time, a 1968 movie famously starring Jane Fonda. I’d always understood it to be a kind of cheesy sci-fi flick. Nevertheless, it mysteriously gets attached to her name 8 times out of 10, & it left some indelible imprint on pop culture that persists into now through spin off comics & cosplay at sci-fi conventions.

But maybe I need to backtrack to something that seems unconnected: Allen Ginsberg’s death.

Thanks to liver cancer, Allen had been given a few months to live in 1997. I had a job back then teaching English at a benighted college in Cholla Namdo in South Korea.

Allen had tried to reach me to let me know through one of my old Naropa Institute friends, who didn’t manage to do it, and I found out two weeks after it happened that he died. Bill & Derek, two Canadian English teachers I shared an office (& some Asian adventures) with, let me know. I don’t remember how we landed on the fact that Allen had died, but it became my first discussion of “six degrees of separation” between everyone on planet Earth. They were obviously amused to find themselves in that skein of connection with Allen via me.

I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. I remain touched that he thought of me. He was thorough that way, and an indefatigable networker.

Anyway, Barbarella entered my consciousness much earlier than that, when I was an English student at the University of Vermont in the 70’s, in the form of Raymond Federman, a French avant-garde novelist. We had read Take it or Leave It in class, a wildly exploratory book of endlessly changing graphic arrangements of words on the page & experiments with story-telling. I tend to forget about this book, though it’s been on my shelf for decades, but it certainly left its mark on me. I think that’s where I started to play with the visual presentation of words on a page, & it led quite naturally to reading Philip Whalen when I got to Naropa.

Federman came to read from his most recent avant-novel-in-progress, which featured Jane Fonda as Barbarella in the love interest role. Readers of his ms., he said, had criticized it for making her look dumb, and he had tried to correct that.

Dumb. Hmm.

If we go way back, my first Jane Fonda movie, Barefoot in the Park (1967), starred her opposite Robert Redford, a critical & comedic success. It was, coincidentally, the first drive in movie I ever saw, watching from the back seat between my parents. Neil Simon wrote the original Broadway play, for Chrissakes. But when Jane’s name comes up, it’s never Barefoot in the Park, it’s always Barbarella.

Well…why? She won a couple of Oscars, & still you don’t hear about Klute or On Golden Pond nearly as often. At least that’s my impression.

Barbarella’s director, her husband Roger Vadim (a Frenchman!) tried to get Raquel Welch into the role–as well as some other sex symbol actresses of the day–before he cast Jane. And what’s the movie about? Well, when I finally got to satisfy my many decades of built up curiosity, it’s exactly what I expected: the young, lithe Jane Fonda dressed in skimpy outfits & go-go boots campily galivants across outer space, plus a little dose of then current psychedelia. And to think, 2001: A Space Odyssey got released the same year.

But then there’s something obvious & unavoidable here that I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to admit to anymore due to some violation of political & digital moral correctness: she’s sexy—very sexy.

Unfortunately, I can’t illuminate it much more than that. For all the women dressed up in skin tight outfits set up to be ogled on the big screen, there’s something about her in this film that most of them don’t have. She has a kind of Marilyn Monroe appeal, perhaps. But she’s not really a charmingly dumb blonde. Her character comes across more as naïve, not unintelligent. She’s, in fact, lauded by the story for her goodness & sincerity, which somehow saves the universe from the force of evil (Anita Pallenberg)….But why am I talking about the plot?

Known as a comedic actress at that point, she had the timing & nuance to do Barefoot. Maybe we can credit her acting achievement, finding the power in this (you’d think) negligible role. She exudes something riveting, & maybe that’s not so easily articulated. It’s mysterious, potent, & stronger than a lot of other things.

Bizarrely enough, I come more directly into the fabric of the total story here in a, what?–random, accidental, glancing, or karmic way? It was of course Allen Ginsberg who, with Anne Waldman, founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. During one of the summer programs in the early 90s, I met Vanessa Vadim, who was attending that year. A lovely young lady, she wanted to learn sitting practice, & I met with her a couple of times to give her meditation instruction. Born that same year as Barbarella, 1968, she’s Jane & Roger’s daughter, though the marriage did not last.

I suppose we’re always trying to make sense of the apparent randomness composing our lives. What makes an impression on us & what doesn’t. Who we might be connected to & how. The possible interconnections of the 8 billion people on this planet, random or otherwise, pale to nothing if you think in terms of karma & rebirth. We’re interconnected in unfathomable ways, from a Buddhist point of view. Buddhism goes so far as to insist that we’ve all been (& not just the human beings) mothers to each other at some point in the limitless fabric of space & time. We came out from between each other’s legs! It’s a vast echo chamber or an unfathomable weave of threads of cause & effect.

One very tiny thread in it all turned out to be Hollywood finally getting me to watch one of its old & quite a bit less than 5 star flicks, but it leaves me marked with a mystery I can’t quite explain.