Barbarella Made A Science Fiction Fan Out Of Me

When I was a kid of about ten or eleven my parents would occasionally take my brother and me to movies that would now be rated R. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that our family had run out of prospective babysitters, but another part of it had to do with the fact that my parents were always honest with us when we had questions about adult movie stuff like sex, violence and white-collar corporate crime.

They didn’t let us kids cuss, but they didn’t freak out if we saw a movie with a few bad words.

In 1968 more than a few young science fiction movie fans learned a thing or two about heavenly bodies by watching Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy starring Jane Fonda.

Because of my parents’ rather lenient attitude toward movies, we got to see films such as Midnight Cowboy, The Boys in the Band, and Easy Rider years before our classmates did. I remember seeing one particular film that made me the envy of nearly every guy in my fifth grade class at Iroquois Point Elementary School. It was a risqué little science fiction romp called Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy starring Jane Fonda. The movie was made in 1968. That was before Jane was distracted by the Vietnam War, workout videos, or being Ted Turner’s trophy wife at Atlanta Brave baseball games. No, in 1968, she was the all-American pinup girl and Barbarella was the perfect vehicle for displaying her somewhat dubious acting talents.

I don’t really remember the plot of Barbarella but I do remember that she escaped every perilous situation she encountered…even if the majority of her clothes didn’t. For fans of science fiction who prefer their leading ladies scantily clad, it had a perfect combination of adventure, inventiveness and comic book flair.

As I’ve come to learn over the years, not every parent is as tolerant of the First Amendment as mine were. Case in point, a mother in Georgia named Laura Mallory is working tirelessly to have J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series removed from the Gwinnett County Public School System. Her objection stems from a purely religious standpoint, believing as she does that the Harry Potter books would lead her children “to be indoctrinated into a religion whose practices are evil.”

Last week Mallory filed an appeal to the Gwinnett County School Board to have the Harry Potter books banned from the school system’s media centers. That’s despite the fact that she has admitted to The Gwinnett Daily Post that she hasn’t actually read any of the books because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.” Her formal written complaint to the school board claimed that she knows the books are full of “demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells and teaching children all of this.”

Mallory’s complaint to the school board also suggests replacements for the schools’ libraries if they take up her cause and ban Harry Potter. Her replacement list includes C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series and Tim LeHay’s Left Behind series.

So apparently Mallory has no problem with witches, spells and violence if they are promoting her own pro-Christian agenda. The Narnia books are considered by many to be a beautiful Christian allegory with Aslan the Lion acting as a thinly veiled Christ figure whose resurrection helps save the world. And the Left Behind series goes to extreme lengths to show what will happen to non-believers on earth after The Rapture has scooped up all their good Christian neighbors. Think of it as a modern Dante’s Inferno, only grislier and more graphic.

It’s time that people like Mallory accepted the fact that if they keep kids from reading books with witches, ghosts and magic in them, the list of banned books will include Cinderella, MacBeth, The Wizard of Oz, and the Holy Bible.

If you think that censorship takes place in this country only in an attempt to protect minors from grownup words and images, well, guess again.

A new movie titled Death of a President was released by Newmarket Films and won the International Critics’ Prize at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. The movie takes place in 2007 and shows what might happen to our government and country if George W. Bush were to be assassinated.

Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie theater chain in the U.S., and AMC, the second largest chain, have refused to the show the controversial film. When Cinemark (Century Theatres) joined the ban, it effectively prohibited Death of a President from being shown on 16,300 American movie screens.

Additionally, both CNN and National Public Radio announced that they would refuse to run paid advertisements for the movie, even though CNN has reported on the film as a news story.

“To refuse to accept ads for a movie is tantamount to saying it shouldn’t be seen,” said Chris Ball, an executive at NewMarket. “This runs counter to everything we are supposed to believe in as a free society.”

Ironically, Newmarket is the same company that released the controversial movie The Passion of the Christ two years ago. The film depicted the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ and ultimately grossed over a half billion dollars worldwide.

Death of a President opened last Friday on less than 120 screens nationwide. Although few of us here in the High Country will be able to view until it is released on DVD, it seems as if much of the hysteria about the subversiveness of the film is much ado about nothing.

In his review of the film for Entertainment Weekly, Owen Glieberman wrote, “Even if you think of yourself as a proud Bush basher, you may be surprised at how the prospect of political homicide makes you recoil, makes you want to see the president protected.”

In giving the film an overall B+ rating, Glieberman stated that the most interesting aspects of the movie were how the public and government reacted to the crime in this, the era of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act.

Of course, if it is up to Regal Entertainment, we’ll never see the movie at all. A company representative has stated that Regal will never ever allow its customers to see Death of a President, even if it becomes a hit in other theaters. Although Regal Entertainment is a private corporation and not a public library, being the only game in town it has the power to censor what we see on movie screens here in the High Country.