With a reboot of the 1968 sci-fi classic Barbarella in development, we pay
homage to the original interstellar sex romp with the gorgeous *Chelsea
Salmon* for *Playboy Magazine May 2011*. Barbarella's charm lies in its
goofy, sexy and affectionate spirit. Its heroine starts out in a world that
has banished violence and sexual inhibition—hence the striptease, which is
prelude to a conversation with the president. In this utopian regime, where
"neurotic irresponsibility" is a thing of the past, erotic
"reciprocity" is achieved by taking a pill and touching hands with a
partner. It is only when Barbarella travels to the distant planet of Tau
Ceti, in search of a renegade inventor named Durand-Durand and his Positronic
Ray, that she is initiated into more strenuous forms of intimacy. Her first
encounter is with a bounty hunter whose pectoral toupee is a wonder of
neoprimitive manscaping, and her most meaningful relationship is with a
depressive, flightless angel named Pygar, who regains the use of his wings
after making love with her. "She's the only comedienne I can think of who
is sexiest when she is funniest," Pauline Kael wrote about Jane Fonda. This
mixture of playfulness and lust lifts Barbarella out of the realm of
exploitation into something much stranger and more fun. In the context of
Fonda's career, Barbarella is an oddity. And it is also an anomaly in the
annals of cinematic science fiction, which has, for the most part, followed
in the earnest, allegorical, sexless footsteps of 2001. But Barbarella
herself endures—as an early action heroine, as a space-age sex symbol and
above all as a reminder that the role of humanity in the cosmos is not to
take ourselves too seriously. See more of Chelsea Salmon at Playboy