Brigitte Bardot with a pink bath towel in 1959
Photo by Sam Levin
I.
The French film actress, singer, and animals rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died, aged 91, and, like many people around the world, I mourn her passing.
For Bardot remains one those names beginning with the initial 'B' that mean a great deal to me and who act as a kind of guiding spirit to Torpedo the Ark [1].
II.
As is often the case these days when somebody famous - and, in Bardot's case, truly iconic - dies, everyone seems compelled to pay tribute on social media; thus French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, writes that BB embodied a life of freedom.
By which I guess he refers to the fact that Mme. Bardot followed her inclinations and didn't give a damn about what others thought of her; nor was she afraid to express her views on all kinds of issues, including political questions.
For me, however, the most insightful and philosophically-interesting words written on Bardot - as a figure within the pornographic imagination rather than as a woman in real life - remain those written by Simon de Beauvoir in 1959, when the former was billed as the world's most outrageously sensual film star and the latter recognised as France's leading female intellect.
De Beauvoir helps us understand why Bardot was regarded by some as a monument of immorality - a New Eve for the post-War world:
"Seen from behind, her slender, muscular, dancer's body is almost androgynous. Femininity triumphs in her delightful bosom. The long voluptuous tresses of Melisande flow down to her shoulders, but her hair-do is that of a negligent waif. The line of her lips forms a childish pout, and at the same time those lips are very kissable. She goes about barefooted, she turns her nose up at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious and a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance." [2]
III.
De Beauvoir closes her little study of Bardot by expressing her hope that the bourgeois order will not find a way to silence her, or compel her to speak lying twaddle: "I hope that she will not resign herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity. I hope she will mature, but not change."
I think she'd be pleased to know that Bardot didn't compromise; that she remained one of the most liberated spirits in all France and a real force for change; a woman who, in her own words, gave her youth and beauty to men, but her wisdom and experience to animals.
Notes
[1] The others being Baudelaire, Bataille, Barthes, and Baudrillard; see my A-Z of Torpedophilia (24 October 2013): click here.
[2] Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (Four Square Books / The New English Library, 1962).
[3] Ibid.
To read the original post in which I discuss Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of Bardot (published 16 May 2018) click here for part one and here for part two.
Three musical bonuses:
(i) To play Serge Gainsbourg's 'Initials B.B.' - a single from the album of the same title (Philips Records, 1968) - which is his tribute to one of the women he loved (and with whom he famously had an affair), click here.
The song sample the first movement of Antonin Dvorak's Ninth Symphony and lyrically quotes from Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' in its opening lines. The song also mentions the novel L'Amour monstre (1954) by Louis Pauwels, which was recommended to Gainsbourg by Bardot.
(ii) To play the Gainsbourg/Bardot version of Je t'aime ... moi non plus (1967), click here.
Although the version with Jane Birkin (1969) is better known, the song was originally written and recorded in late 1967 for Bardot and intended to be the most beautiful of all love songs. However, when Bardot's (third) husband, Gunter Sachs, found out about the recording he kicked up such a stink that the single was not released until nearly twenty years later (1986).
(iii) To play some perfect bubble gum pop sung by Bardot, click here for La Madrague (1963) and here for Moi je joue (1964). Both tracks are composed by Gérard Bourgeois, with lyrics by Jean-Max Rivière.
