Someone on last.fm changed the album photo for Simply Saucer’s superb Cyborgs Revisited compilation from the good ol’ fashioned monochrome photo I’m used to to the original cover, the same photo soaked in searing psychedelic YMCK acid. It’s common for black and white photos to be everywhere on last.fm, and I do enjoy the combined old school-and-concise ethos of that mission, but I also appreciate the WHOA TRIPPEN OUT WOOOOOOAH effect of this shakeup.

I’ve been feeling the psych quite a bit these past days, to be truthful. Barbarella has been on my brain something fierce. As I get back to navigatrixing the trials and tribulations of Planet College, I guess I feel myself a tiny bit of its titular heroine, albeit less dumb (let’s be frank, she was pretty dumb) and more post-Babs Jane Fonda mugshot. At least, that’s what I’m trying to convey for myself. This is the semester I start going all in with the May 4 commemoration, after all, so I’ve got to get into that FTA ‘tude somehow. (Jane was scheduled to speak at the fiftieth back in 2020, but we all know how that went. NEAT.)

There’s a Barbarella remake in the works, apparently, which I only learned of fairly recently even though it was announced months ago. They’ve been trying for one since I think the nineties with actresses such as Drew Barrymore, and each try has ended in a quiet whimper of an abortion. This makes sense considering that Barbarella is a movie that could have only been made in 1968. How to you expect a modern audience to react to certain parts of that movie? Fittingly, there’s a plot summary for an early 2000s attempt (which of course I can’t find again for the life of me), and it sounds absolutely nothing like the original. Interesting if put in the right hands, but not faithful to the source material. Maybe it’s closer to the source material’s source material, which I am not yet familiar with. (Thanks to Mahvel’s subliminal effects on pop culture at large, I always forget that Barbarella is a comic book movie.)

That terminated remake seemed to take a more overtly political bent than the original, with lots of societal inequality and having your innocent past shattered before your eyes and the like. The original is also political, but in a super subtle way that is, obviously, drenched in copious amounts of sex. It is so sexy, in fact, that all anyone talks about regarding it is whether or not it is sexist. There’s surely a lens other than the feminist one that people can take about this movie* (while still recognizing Jane Fonda’s eternally radiating wonderfulness), and it doesn’t have to be an extremely serious one. Our world is more absurd, technologically advanced, and, frankly, stupid than ever, just like a Barbarella adventure. And what do we do? We refuse the laugh. It’s insane. And if you don’t recognize the insanity you can’t sustainably live.

2023! Less knee-jerk puritanical reactions, more embracing and exploring the trappings of liberation and all its hidden ugly corners, the pure intertwining with the reprehensible in perfect yin-yang union. If that remake actually happens, it is going to be awful.

* And I consider myself a feminist!