Soft to the Core

Enjoying Emmanuelle in 2026

History is no longer written by nearsighted academics but rather by enthusiastic and passionate partakers of a particular cultural intersection. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the re-issuing (and re-contextualizing) of so-called trash culture within the product perimeters of fine, highbrow culture. There is usually a return to the source material itself: re-mastered, pedagogically packaged and offered not with aloof didacticism but with genuine love in the best possible way. Saying, ”you take a look at this labor of love, and we’ve even added some relevant but never post-modern information about it.” History has not been edited to please a particular academic, authoritarian discourse but rather written to whet appetites and honor the creators of culture itself.

These thoughts emerged again when I recently got a beautiful box set containing the key films of the ”Emmanuelle” franchise. I remember these films from when I was a young teenager in Sweden, and was surprised at their massive success already back then. Regardless of what I think of the films themselves, they definitely do deserve to be contextualized like this: in high quality, handled with love & respect by people who know what they’re doing and talking about, and offered with almost child-like obsession.