by Ryan Britt
And I suspect that day is right now, because you might know “right now” by its other name. The future.
The Birds, the Bees, and Barbarella
Walking in on your parents having sex is one thing, but walking in on a couple of dinosaurs is something else. It’s not necessarily worse, just a little unexpected, particularly if you are not a dinosaur. When we’re kids, figuring out the whole deal with sex is not a mystery we’re all trying to solve; it’s just something that never occurs to us. It’s like asking, “How come Superman gets away with just putting on the glasses?” You don’t ask questions apropos of nothing until later, when you’re confronted with them, almost by accident. And my accidental “birds and bees” talk was precipitated by seeing some dinos get it on.
Shocking no one, this sex act wasn’t in real time, nor was it shaky-cam footage of real dinosaurs. I’m sad to say I don’t have any good intel on secretly living prehistoric creatures, though I do know people with Bigfoot fetishes. This dino-sex-act came from a magazine, an old issue of the science/science fiction magazine Omni, dated October 1988, which would have made me seven years old. Along with Playboy and Penthouse, my father also subscribed to Omni, which I loved because it always had my favorite stuff in it: spaceships, aliens, and dinosaurs. But in this issue, the dinosaurs were doing something I’d never seen dinosaurs do before: they were getting on top of each other in what looked like a sort of weird, horizontal piggyback ride. All my favorites, too: apatosauruses (brontosauruses), tyrannosauruses, triceratops. Were they smiling? This was before we all knew about raptors, so all dinosaurs to a kid in the ’80s were really huge. Wouldn’t that hurt to have one on top of you? Even if you were another dinosaur?
The illustrations were done by an artist named Ron Embleton and the article itself was written by Sandy Fritz and was titled “Tyrannosaurus Sex: A Love Tail.” My child brain processed the basics of the illustrations—one dinosaur on top of another dinosaur—and I could read the words, but none of it was making any sense. It was like learning Santa Claus isn’t a real person or Godzilla isn’t actually a documentary. I needed it explained to me. And my father was happy to oblige.
“Dinosaurs were just like people,” he said. “When they really loved another dinosaur, they would diddle them, and make more dinosaurs.” My dad wasn’t embarrassed about talking about sex one bit, and looking back, it seems like he was dying for an excuse to faux-innocently broach the topic and use the word “diddle.”
“So, dinosaurs had to love each other to make other dinosaurs?” I said.
“Well . . .” my dad said.
“So did they all die because they stopped loving each other?” My dad considered this for a second, gently stroking his period-appropriate Tom Selleck mustache.
“Maybe the love part wasn’t the important thing,” he said, “but what they did because of it.”
In my childhood and adolescence, science-y stuff and science fiction in particular always seemed to be a weird portal into knowledge about sexuality and adulthood, my wardrobe leading into a naked and deranged Narnia. My parents were strange sociopolitical hybrids from another dimension, totally godless Republicans (we never went to church) who maintained strict bedtimes and rigorous chore schedules, but let my sister and me absorb all sorts of racy media, just as long as it wasn’t too violent. My father didn’t exactly leave the Playboys and Penthouses lying around all the time, but it was known to happen. He was a photographer, so I think he and my mother tried to cultivate a half-assed “The Human Body Is Beautiful” philosophy, which they implemented as well as their We-Used-To-Be-Hippies-But-Now-We-Love-Reagan sensibilities allowed. This is to say that my mom was still a mom and my dad was still a dad, meaning when my dad would try to get away with some bullshit, my mom would call him on it. Which is where Barbarella comes in.
Barbarella. 1968. Jane Fonda, who plays the titular character, is in space boots, and little else, brandishing a ray-gun and looking like a sci-fi soft-core porn supernova. If you’re unfamiliar, I’m not sure you necessarily need to see it, but it is, kind of, a science fiction classic. This isn’t to say that it’s good—like at all—it’s just that when it comes to “important” science fiction and fantasy, the larger pop canon of science fiction and fantasy tends to include all sorts of great stuff alongside some total shit that is really memorable, and also, well, good in a different way. Lost in Space, for example, is objectively terrible, and yet, it had that great robot and a family who lived on a flying saucer, so it becomes “important.” Lost in Space next to an episode of the classic Star Trek is exactly like the fact that box wine is sold in the same store as some delicious Barolo. I just know when I’m slumming it. And sometimes, you might just want to grab the box wine because it’s easier.
This, I think, more than anything, is what has historically turned off a lot of people from sci-fi and fantasy: the inability to see the value in the crappier examples while simultaneously being unable to distinguish it from the supposed “good stuff.” As I mentioned, those Playboys were sometimes lying around my house growing up, but because of my dad’s photographer status so was a black-and-white instructional manual called Nude Photography: The French Way. When I hit puberty, I actually preferred the ladies in Nude Photography: The French Way to those in an issue of Playboy. Can this distinction really be the difference between “good” sci-fi/fantasy and “trash”? Kind of. And what’s worse is that it’s made even more confusing when you consider that truly trailblazing genre authors like Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin were (and still are!) published in Playboy. The mix of lowbrow “trash” with high-concept “brilliance” is the undeniable heritage of science fiction and fantasy, and it’s totally connected with a young person’s notions of growing up. Which—duh—is connected to sex.
The idea that those of us who end up loving science fiction and/or fantasy are obsessed with the low-hanging fruit when we’re young is tricky, because all kids are obsessed with low-hanging fruit. They’re kids! And if you’re still into that stuff—robots, aliens, and dinos—as an adult it can come across as a bit like you haven’t really grown up. As a grown-up, I’m lucky to have a lot of friends who are totally into the whole cosplay scene: they dress up as characters from their favorite fiction. One couple I know tends to do couples costumes, and my favorite one was when they dressed as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, partly because this couple is a couple of girls. Other times, they’ll dress up as something more highbrow: maybe characters from the book versions of Dune. The kind of geek you are depends on the day, and your mood. Box wine or Barolo.
So where the hell does Barbarella fit in? At a glance, Barbarella is an on-purpose crappy movie with the pornographic trappings of embarrassingly old-school testosterone-fueled science fiction. And yet, somehow, for me anyway, it’s accidentally a progressive work of sci-fi genius. Barbarella—the film—is like an idiot savant, maybe not aware it’s good (and often bad in many places) and maybe not even actually good, but infinitely redeemable. A Rosetta stone for explaining how we think about pop fiction. Barbarella—the person—is essentially a female James Bond, somebody who is fucking people to get what she wants and definitely not with the intention of making little Barbarellas. From her first moments in a zero-gravity striptease, nine-year-old me started to connect the dots between sex as a sometimes reproductive act and sex as recreation. The dinosaurs-doing-it-for-fun comment my dad had made a few years earlier started to make a little more sense. Just because you get your birds-and-bees (and brontosauruses) talk doesn’t mean you instantly understand sex, the universe, and everything, overnight. In 1990, I was a tiny bit worldlier than when I’d stumbled on “Tyrannosaurus Sex,” but still at not quite ten years old, I still hadn’t figured out my body, or science fiction. To be fair, at thirty-three, there’s a very real chance that I still haven’t done either.
Barbarella had a profound effect on me. There’s something fairly guiltless about enjoying this movie, because i
t’s so obviously about sex. And yet, in being exposed to it so young, I was getting the good stuff about the movie without any of the horny and misogynistic baggage. Sure, I was starting to feel certain stirrings by watching this movie, but little kids have so much weird sexual energy, that was inevitable. The profound thing about Barbarella was that I was tricked into renting it by my father.
When we went to the video store with one parent or the other, either my sister or I was allowed to pick out “our own” movie, while whichever parent was with us got something else. For a solid five years, this probably meant I lurked in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror section of a non-franchised hole-in-the-wall called the Movie SuperStore. Mostly I stuck with certified classic monster movies—Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf-Man—which my parents supported because these films were usually bloodless. You could call this policy “boobs not blood,” but prior to Barbarella, it was mostly just blood. The day this happened, though—sometime in December 1990, I think—I had my little paws on something that was probably Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster or some similar fare, which I had certainly already seen. (Side note: isn’t it funny how little kids cling desperately to the familiar? Next to the very elderly, they’ve got to be the most set in their ways of any age group.) But my dad was like, no Godzilla, what about Barbarella?
“You’ll like this!” he said. “It’s got all your favorite stuff in it.”
“Dinosaurs?” I said.
“No, but spaceships and ray-guns and, look, this guy can fly!” I had to admit, Barbarella’s ray-gun did look awesome, and everything else about the movie seemed appealing. When we got home my mother rolled her eyes really hard when she saw what I had selected as “my movie.”
“Ryan picked this out, huh?” she snorted. “All on his own?”
“What?!” my dad said. “He’s gonna love it.”
“I bet he’s not the only one,” my mom said.
In that moment, Barbarella became my first guilty pleasure. I did like it a lot, though I never really let on to my mom that I did. And in my heart, I knew I really didn’t understand it, but that it was changing me. When Jane Fonda has an orgasm so strong that she breaks the “Excessive Machine,” I had no idea what was going on. Did I understand the lesbian tendencies between her and the Black Queen of Sogo? Nope. Was the joke of the name Dildano lost on me? Yep. And was I, like many of you, thoroughly confused about the search for someone named Duran Duran?* Yes, the band got its name from this movie; the movie was not searching for the band, even though, philosophically, it kind of was.
Somehow, because Barbarella was a girl, and seemed to sort of be in charge of the movie, and won through less-than-conventional means, I think it made me start to think differently about what to expect from these kinds of stories. And maybe other stuff, too. Ironically, because I was sort of still figuring out some of the sex-stuff in the movie, I could draw my own conclusions from it that my father, the supposed Barbarella fan, was totally incapable of. I don’t think this was the result he had hoped for. I think his goal was to turn me into a sort of man’s man, kind of like him. This didn’t really work, because what I took away from the movie ended up having little to do with what my father loved about it. He created a monster, totally by accident.
In watching Barbarella as an adult, and science fiction critic, I’ve realized that my thinking about sci-fi/fantasy started right here. For little kid me, this wasn’t a movie that I’d wanted. It didn’t reinforce anything that I really had enjoyed about these types of stories at that time—male main character, outer space morals, people who were clothed—which is exactly why it changed me. By throwing sex in the viewer’s face and having a woman seemingly not be the victim of it, the movie tried to convey (a little naive) ’60s progressivism, which was actually lost on someone like my father, who was of that generation. In 1990, as a sort of armchair Larry Flynt conservative, my father just saw the movie as an excuse to watch soft-core porn at dinnertime. For my father, Barbarella was wish fulfillment, getting away with something, reinforcing his own interpretation of what the movie was about. But for me, it was a sea change, something that was in the category of stuff I liked, but totally different. Because it was so imperfect and so odd and full of stuff I didn’t understand, it was more of a challenge, and it required me to pay better attention, and think about life in ways I never had before. A woman could run the show, a blind man could fly, and maybe the astronaut you’re trying to rescue will turn out to be an asshole. I know feminists are divided on this movie, but count me among the feminists who think the good outweighs the bad for this particularly confusing mess of pop culture. And that’s because Barbarella is exactly like a short story by Margaret Atwood appearing in an issue of Playboy, a mixed message that requires the individual to parse out the good from the bad, the low-hanging fruit from the potential for intellectual and emotional growth.
Soon after this epic viewing, my father (who passed away in 2012) offered me his definition of what science fiction supposedly “really was.” He’d repeat this notion well into my adulthood.
“You’ve got to have three things,” he said, “spaceships, robots, and babes. Otherwise, it’s not science fiction I want to watch.” It goes without saying that my dad liked Robert Palmer music videos.
Luckily, I didn’t really listen. I had those blameless, non-eroticized dinosaurs as my first introduction to sex way before he told me this particular brand of dad-malarkey. And by the time he did say it, I’d already started to make up my mind differently about Barbarella anyway. Liking that movie taught me what I’ve found profound about science fiction and fantasy: just because someone else defines “it” for you, doesn’t mean you can’t redefine it for yourself.
My father had a limited, totally backward, and incorrect view of science fiction, but he still managed to introduce me to great stuff, even if by accident. Loving the good with the bad is part of what it means to love sci-fi and fantasy, and just like realizing dinosaurs could love to diddle, I was starting to figure out there was a whole lot more to robots, sex, and life itself than what my dad or even Jane Fonda and her ray-gun could teach me.
I Know It’s Only Science Fiction, but I Like It
Science fiction became rock and roll for me when I was seventeen, in the summer of 1999. Just before heading into my senior year of high school, I was pulling shifts at a big-box bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona, where I’d close the place four nights a week with my manager and personal hero at the time, Captain Space Pirate.
Outrageously handsome, thirtyish, with a dark mop of hair and a beard, and always dressed all in black, Captain Space Pirate was basketball-player tall, but hunched over in the way he’d probably done since burying his nose in books in grade school. This gave his handsomeness an Ichabod Crane resemblance. I didn’t know about Space Pirate Captain Harlock—the anime character—at the time, but that visage plus a beard isn’t far off. He drove a motorcycle to work and wore a black leather jacket, which, when taken off, revealed his black button-up and black skinny tie. He was a superhero mash-up of the Hamburg leather-wearing Beatles you see in those really old photos and the clean-cut Beatles on Ed Sullivan. And because he was the only person back then who knew more about Star Trek and Star Wars than I did, Captain Space Pirate was about as rock and roll as it got.
This might not be exactly proof that he was cool, but my mom totally had a crush on him. Though I usually drove myself to work in my 1987 Gold Dodge Ram 50 pickup truck—complete with an X-Wing fighter window decal, unironically affixed above a sticker for the band Oasis—one day I was forced to carpool with my mom so she could take my truck on some other errand after dropping me off. On that day, she went out of her way to go into the bookstore and give my boss, Captain Space Pirate, a hug. “It’s the smile,” she’d say when talking about him later. “He smiles like Indiana Jones.”
Captain Space Pirate told me he’d long ago dated one of the actresses from Buffy the V
ampire Slayer before she was famous, but wouldn’t tell me which one. He told me he’d seen eleven different cuts of Blade Runner the year it was released. He told me that the novel version of Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, by George Lucas, was really written by a guy named Alan Dean Foster, even though Lucas’s screenplay came first. Captain Space Pirate’s girlfriend was only a little bit older than I was and I thought their age gap was terribly odd, but I internalized it all as part of what made my manager great. At that point, his girlfriend knew more about vampires than anyone I’d known.