Waldron Lee’s inspiration

The bizarre satirical short film that Aloysius appropriates for erotic-dream fodder, “Hygiene and You,” has its own inspiration. albeit one more funny than erotic. It’s a real short called “Body Care and Grooming,” which got razzed but good by the Satellite of Love crew on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The short was part of MST3K episode 510, The Painted Hills. Later in the episode the two robots staged a debate on whether the short’s college-girl protagonist was more appealing as a clean girl or a dirty girl.

The bound Samson

The binding and suspension of the transformed Samson didn’t have a specific visual inspiration. It had rather a concept, to wit Japanese rope bondage (called kinbaku or shibari), which is a striking example of just how high-tech you can get with a little bit of hemp and a will. One itty-bitty example, involving a fetish model named Nicotine:

This via a site called Shibari Sex, which will show you lots and lots about this interesting practice. They even provide a cute DIY guide:

Click through for larger image. You surely want to.

Pwned petgirl

The fate of John Samson inside a Michiko-dominated dreamscape is an opportunity for me as a writer to let loose, because as a culture warrior on the side of bad (and, oh yeah, a rapist and murderer as well) he deserves whatever Michiko unloads on him.

One thing he gets after his forced feminization is treatment as a petgirl. This scene in the montage had a specific inspiration, an image created by Asaji Muroi. There’s no English-language Wikipedia article on him that I can find, but he’s prominently featured in Agnès Giard’s L’imaginaire érotique au Japon. The image is this one.

Muroi seems to have mad something of a specialty out of the woman as doggie thing; I guess we all have to find some way of making our mark on the world. If it appeals, Muroi has a slightly hard-to-navigate website here and he’s featured in an exhibition at the Musée de l’érotisme de Paris here.

Athletic performances

The scene in which John Samson finally gets underway on his primary mission of using his biological weapon in the culture war is written as close to straight-up bonehead porn as I normally get: a sequence of what Alex in A Clockwork Orange would have called “the old in-out.”

I did have one twist, in Noreen’s use of simple exercise equipment for doing an athletic variant on intercourse in the reverse cowgirl position, a commentary on the erotic inspiration provided by athletes and their abilities.

Does the inspiration have a visual component? But of course! Here is a very recent example:

From a site called Nude Sports Blog, the existence of which should surprise exactly no one, I should think.

But probably a more direct inspiration was this erotic watercolor by “Stika.” You can click through for a larger image.

Athletic indeed!

PDFs of all scripts available

With a little additional tweaking, I now have PDFs of all scripts available, and I’ll try to make these available on a go-forward basis for future scripts. I do think these will be a little easier on the eyes for two reasons: (1) I can use a slightly heavier Courier font (Courier 10 Point) in producing them than the Courier New that is generally supported by browsers and (2) there will be fewer strange line breaks that I don’t catch in the middle of blocks of text. (WordPress, while in many ways a truly excellent software package, goes to war with my hand-coded HTML by interpreting line breaks between <p> and </p> tags as breaks to be reproduced in the text, and sometimes I don’t catch the breaks. Bad software!)

I might update the PDFs from time to time — occasionally I spot typos or other minor mistakes that escape my initial too-quick editing process. If I make any material changes in the future I’ll probably issue new PDFs under version numbers.

In addition to being available in links on the main script pages, you can download the PDFs for scripts directly from this post.

Happy reading, all.

I shall also try to put together a PDF version of the Thaumatophile Manifesto, but this might be a little while more, as that document presents greater production challenges due to internal links and complex formatting.

One sharp young woman

When John Samson makes a crude (and racially loaded) pass at Michiko after his own dream experience, Michiko retorts with a reference to someone named “Abe Sada.” And who was Sada?

A real person, it turns out, whose activities were in fact significant enough for her to have a movie made about her, just as Michiko says. (The historical Sada is depicted in the picture to the left, after her arrest in 1936.) The movie is indeed called In the Realm of the Senses, made in 1976 by Nagisa Oshima. Sada is a former prostitute who starts a torrid affair with her boss, an inn-owner in 1930s Japan. In the movie she’s played by Eiko Matsuda.

Sada conducted a torrid affair with her employer, an inn owner named Kichizo Ishida (played in the movie by Tatsuya Fuji). Things apparently got pretty kinky and erotic asphixia got into the game.

…and eventually strangled him to death. (You have been warned that these practices are dangerous.)

Sada probably wouldn’t have enjoyed that much celebrity had it not been for what she did after asphixiating her lover.

She carried it with her for three days.

So implicitly, Michiko is responding to Samson’s crude overture with a suggestion that he be castrated. (Don’t mess with Michiko!) Sadly, Samson has been spending his life learning how to kill people and listening to talk radio, so he doesn’t get this rather subtle cultural reference.

I’m pleased, by the way, to be able to tell you that In the Realm of the Senses is now available in fine new editions from the Criterion Collection, so by all means give it a look in.

BS of A

“The Scouts taught me to to my duty.”

Okay, so I’m a Really Bad Person for having a villain invoke the Boy Scouts in the course of committing a sex murder. I got my inspiration from Penn & Teller, who devoted a whole fourth season episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit to pwning the Scouts.

These splendid entertainers make the point that the Scouts discriminate against gays, bisexual, transgendered people, and atheists. “[W]e won’t let in any faggots…” Yeah, I’d give the Scouts the finger, too.

On the plus side, Penn & Teller propose an alternative organization with its own merit badges. And very much in the spirit of things here, there is a merit badge for porn.

Hot damn! I wish these guys had been around when I was a lad. In the meantime, I can hope their producer calls if they ever need a thaumatophilia expert. (If ve does, I can even promise to say the word “cunt” and not break down laughing, like that John McWhorter guy did back in season two.)

For a different vision of a better kind of Boy Scouts, see Tom Lehrer, who had it right decades ago.

A hanging

Alfred Hitchcock attributed to the playwright Victorien Sardou the maxim “torture the women” as good advice for constructing dramatic plots. Even if Sardou never said such a thing (I haven’t been able to find an unambiguous French-language source for it), as the creator of the source-text for Tosca he would surely have had that maxim in his heart if not on his lips. I might more modestly note that if you’re going to construct a plot in a world like that of Gnosis which has its share of paranoid melodrama, you’re going to have to have villains. And you can’t make a villain by just by putting a character in a t-shirt that says “I’m depraved.” You need to show their depravity.

John Samson sure shows his depravity, and that of his boss. In line with the rules of his universe, he makes the wrong woman his victim. That’s bureaucracy for you.

Whether it is to my credit or demerit that the scene in which Jill-Prime is murdered has a clear precedent, rather than being a full-blown product of my imagination I leave to others to judge. It’s from one of the most notorious exploitation movies ever made, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. (A film which also leaves its imaginative marks on Invisible Girl, Heroine, in that it depicts helpless incarcerated innocents being destroyed in “experiments.”)

In this film, a group of Nazis visiting a concentration camp in which medical atrocities are taking place are entertained by a sadistic spectacle. A young woman is placed at the end of a dinner table.

She is bound, and wired by a noose, not quite taut, to a rafter in the ceiling.

And she is made to stand on a block of ice.

It does not end well.

Two appetites together

I suspect that many young women might not be all that pleased to have a lover quote the Monster of Malmsbury at them, even in the pleasantest of afterglows. But Jill (and therefore Jill-Prime) is a scholar as well as an athlete (sexual and otherwise), and so it goes pretty well.

Frontispiece to _Leviathan_ (1651). Click through to see an amazing collection of politico-religious visual references in the larger image

Now you, dear reader, might well at this point be scratching your head and wondering what a 17th century English political philosopher is doing in the middle of all this erotic mad science. Well, for one thing, Hobbes is a natural go-to for the thaumatophile, because in his striking image of a political commonwealth as a sort of man-made man, he got close to the whole Frankenstein theme a century and a half early. From the introduction to Leviathan:

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

And the erotic is not an element lacking in Hobbes. The passage quoted by Rob is real. It’s cited seriously by the contempoarary Cambridge philospher Simon Blackburn. Blackburn’s a delight as a writer. Not only did he administer a well-deserved intellectual spanking to theism-apologist John Polkinghorne in the pages of The New Republic a few years back, but he also gave the lecture on “Lust” as part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins put on at the New York Public Library. It’s there that Blackburn actually quotes Hobbes. Have a look, if it’s your thing.

(Well, it’s at least my thing.)

Suction

The means through which Bridget O’Brian is abducted from Gnosis are of course implausible and absurd, but since they invoke a cinematic scene so important in my thaumatophile development, I couldn’t really help myself.

The scene is a tribute — somewhat more explicit one than the original, since Bridget loses all her clothes — to the famous “girl at the piano” scene in Weird Science (1985). And I know I’ve shown these pictures before, but I still can’t quite help myself.

Writer and director John Hughes died last year, so we can’t inquire as to his inspiration to the scene, though with writing like this I hope he managed to make it to thaumatophile heaven. Naturally if anyone has any background to add I’d welcome it in comments.

The unnamed girl at the piano was played by Kym Malin, who was Playboy’s Miss May 1982. As I rolled her famous Weird Science scene around in my head I hit upon a backstory for her indignity: the gods themselves decided they wanted Kym as a plaything, and so that’s why supernatural winds stripped her naked and sucked her up the chimney.

The gods probably had a point…