After I heard that French actor and animal activist Brigitte Bardot had died at 91 on Sunday, my first thought was of blasting her music “Les Cheveux dans le vent” continuous with my mother once I was a child, and she or he was introducing me to the Gallic yé-yé pop and its varied offshoots that had soundtracked her personal childhood. My second thought, although, was considerably much less nostalgic and nice. I recalled Bardot’s late-in-life shift to supporting right-wing political candidates, her method of coldly dismissing actresses who got here ahead about their experiences of sexual harassment in the course of the #MeToo motion, and the way she was fined a number of instances by the French authorities for “inciting racial hatred” along with her blatantly bigoted feedback about Muslims.
It’s maybe solely pure that so many eulogies to Bardot concentrate on her constructive qualities, from her influential model to her devotion to animals. However on this second of steadily rising Islamophobia, it’s onerous to sq. these celebrations with the opinions of a girl who railed towards immigration and publicly acknowledged her opposition to the so-called “Islamisation of France” in her 2003 guide A Cry within the Silence. Few would dispute Bardot’s half in embodying and advancing the sexual revolution, however was that position—or another side of her legacy—highly effective sufficient to outweigh her historical past of hate speech?
Demise usually has a type of flattening impact on legacy. It’s onerous to speak a few movie star like Bardot—somebody who introduced leisure and pleasure to hundreds of thousands, but additionally sowed hatred and bigotry—with the requisite quantity of nuance. But it surely’s our collective duty to not let her legendary magnificence and expertise obscure the ugliness of her Islamophobia, sexism, and far-right apologia. No much less an authority on complicated private legacy than F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his posthumously revealed 1945 essay assortment The Crack-Up that “the take a look at of a first-rate intelligence is the power to carry two opposing concepts in thoughts on the identical time, and nonetheless retain the power to operate”—and Bardot’s demise presents a uncommon cultural alternative to place that take a look at into motion.
As a substitute of limiting our mourning to wanting nostalgically again at outdated photographs of a beehived, bikini-clad Bardot and taking part in “Bonnie and Clyde” on a loop, let’s ask ourselves the onerous questions on how Bardot’s embodiment of prototypically “good” white womanhood relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism (issues that persist in France to at the present time). In spite of everything, if we rush to sanitize our onetime icons in demise, what message are we sending to those that are nonetheless dwelling?
