What Would Space Exploration Look Like If It Starred More Women?

Space exploration in film is overwhelmingly male, metallic and hard-edged. Could we get further with more women on board?

The eponymous Barbarella, played by Jane Fonda, trapped in the Excessive Machine, which kills its victims by pleasure. Photo: Carlo Bavagnoli/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

By Margaret Wertheim

This year marks the 50th anniversary of two legendary space epics, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella. Both hit cinema screens in 1968, with Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the cosmic-industrial sublime in April and Roger Vadim’s psychedelic sex-fuelled dreamscape in October. 2001 is often hailed as one of the greatest films of all time, deemed ‘culturally significant’ by the US Library of Congress. Barbarella, meanwhile, is often relegated to the realm of kitsch, its admixture of space-kittenish, Fellini-esque aesthetics and general aura of winking fun regarded as too light and absurd to be taken seriously. I want to argue for a different assessment by proposing that, behind its ironic façade, Barbarella presents a more radical vision of space.

During the past year, the half-centenary of 2001 has unleashed an outpouring of adulation. In a special celebration at the Cannes Film Festival this May, Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar (2014), presented a new 70 mm print struck from the ‘original camera negative’ — a sort of cinematic laying on of hands. ‘It…