More girls in tubes

Not only does poor Marie get swallowed in a vore-like scenario as she gets abducted, she also gets deposited in a fluid-filled tube, prepared for transport.

Now this is a subject we’ve visited before here at EroticMadScience.  Further digging has shown just how deep the whole “girls in tubes” trope goes.  The blogger at Posthuman Blues refers to girls-in-tubes as “the meme that wouldn’t die,” and presents impressive evidence from the visual record of classic sci-fi to that effect.  For example, this cover from Amaxing Stories (a publication we have also often visited before here at EroticMadScience).

A check against this astonshing cover archive puts this issue in January 1942.  As usual, it’s hard to dig up much on the story, although one academic source makes it seem even weirder than the cover suggests.

Posthuman Blues also provides us with other fine examples of girls in tubes.  This is my personal favorite example from a whole post dedicated to such.

From August 1955, at least according to one useful source.  Beyond that, it’s hard to dig up much.

And then it gets stranger still.  I recently found this image on Janitor of Lunacy:

And I think this is meant to be a girl in a tube.  There appears to be lots of technical-looking information surrounding her, which seems just ideal from a mad science perspective.   Though it is in Japanese, a language I don’t read.  And since it’s part of the graphic image, I can’t even readily run through Google translate to produce weird-looking English.

If anyone want to pitch in (either explaining what the text in the image is about, or just tossing in your favorite girls in tubes images), by all means, feel free!

Rover

The means through which the shifty Marie is abducted into what the Victorians might have called “a fate worse than death” might look absurd on the surface. But like so many other things (all things?) in the Gnosis world, they’re inspiration stolen from elsewhere. In this case, from one of the most brilliant things ever put on television, The Prisoner.

In this 1967-8 series, a British civil servant played by Patrick McGoohan turns in his resignation and is promptly abducted by sinister forces — perhaps from within the very agency from whence he resigned, and thence is incarcerated in an absurd “Village” and subjected to periodic attempts to extract from him by force or by trick the answer to the question “Why did you resign?”  Escape from the Village is made all-but-impossible by a number of artifices, the most frightening of which is…

…something resembling a large white beach ball that will pursue you and really ruin your day if you get out of line.  It’s called “Rover.”


Now maybe “giant white beach ball” doesn’t sound terribly threatening.  But within the fictional universe of The Prisoner Rover is no joke (it’s a measure of the genius of the series that such a benign-seeming object can be turned into something of such menace).  That fucker can smother you to death if you’re not careful.  And even if it doesn’t, any day you have to deal with Rover is a bad one, even by the standards of the Village.

Marie is hunted down and captured by something that resembles a giant soap-bubble, which allows us to imagine a threat posed by something even more benign-seeming than a beach ball (also that of a wet, nude Marie jiggling in peril across a deserted gymnasium floor)!  And the moment of her capture evokes even if it does not duplicate, with its screaming and its schlurping and popping sound effects, another rather dark fetish.

(Proximate image source People Eaten By, ultimate source almost certainly Voreville.com. [Faustus note: May 11, 2018: Voreville appears lost and cannot be found in the Internet Archive]).  Yep.  Something called “vore,” which is all about swallowing or being swallowed, which is in a sense what happens to Marie, even if she has the (perhaps disputable) good fortune to survive the experience.  We’ve actually encountered this fetish in attenuated ways in the Gnosis world before.  Something like it happens to both Rob (liquified, then drunk) and Bill (swallowed by a whale at the end) in their Michiko-inpsired dreams in Gnosis Dreamscapes.

If you don’t already know this, there is a ton of vore-imagery out there on the Net — just Google image-search on “vore.”  So obviously in writing I’ve stumbled on more than just another one of my own dark crevices in erotic consciousness…

(Postscript:  The Wikipedia article on vore is terribly thin.  Will Erotopedia do better, when it finally launches? [Note by Faustus May 11, 2018: The site appears either never to have launched, or to have disappeared after it did].)

Casablanca/Thaumatophilia

One might wonder whether it’s really worth spending so much time on Casablanca in a Gnosis College script, even if it is a key seduction technology.  Aside from that, does this movie have much to do with erotic mad science?

Well, eros first.  IMHO, the many close-up images of Ingrid Bergman are among the most beautiful images of a woman’s face ever captured on film, including those seen of her in the climactic scene watched by Rob and Jireen.

Looking at these images I’m sometimes hard-pressed to find a word that expresses what I feel, at least in English.  There is a verb in Russian which I’ve encountered from time to time, налюбоваться, which means something like “gaze on in awe and wonder,” (the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary suggests “gaze on to one’s heart’s content”) so maybe that’s what I’m looking for.

But is there mad science?  Not directly, as far as I can tell.  But let’s look at a pair of members of this movie’s talented cast.  Here is Claude Rains, who in Casablanca plays the corrupt but ultimately redeemed French police officer Captain Renault.

And where else have we seen (should we perhaps say, “seen?”) Claude Rains?  As the Invisible Man of course.  And human invisibility turns out to be a rather central device in the Gnosis fictional world.

(Image source: Movieforum.com.)  Readers may amuse themselves, if they wish, trying to think of any A-list Hollywood actor who would be credible as both Captain Renault and the Invisible Man.

Consider now also Conrad Veidt, who plays the Nazi villain of Casablanca, Major Heinrich Strasser.  (An irony, perhaps, in light of the fact that Veidt was himself a refugee from Hitler.)

Where have we seen him before? Well, it turns out that Veidt earlier in his career had played the part of Cesare, the hypnotically-controlled somnambulist in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920).  (Personal note:  Caligari is one of the few movies I have watched that inspired me to immediately go back to the beginning of the DVD I saw it on and re-watch.  The only other one I can recall is Hayao Miyazaki‘s Spirited Away. Go figure.)

(Image source:  FilmFanatic.org.) Hypnosis put to dubious use.  Also a theme we’ve seen before.

The mad science is out there.  You just have to look.


Note: Don’t groan about the presence of a weird-looking Russian verb in the post. If you’re a fan of a certain anime series (and I’m sure many of you are)…

It’s right there in the theme music for the title sequence (albeit as an imperative rather than as an infinitive).

Aнгелы и демоны кружили надо мной
Рассекали тернии млечне пути
Не знает счастья только тот,
Кто его зова понять не смог…

Налюбуйтесь, налюбуйтесь,
Aeria gloris, Aeria gloris.
Angels and demons circling above me
Swishing through the hardships and milky ways
The only one who doesn’t know the happiness
is the one who couldn’t understand his call

Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glories, heavenly glories

Worthy of its own minor tribute in Commencement.

And perhaps not all that far from Casablanca; both do seem to draw on a certain spirit of tough-guy stoicism.

La Marseillaise

Jireen goes after Rob with seduction technology that works:  moviesAnd she picks a particularly powerful one.

I can say that I’ve actually had the experience of being in a college movie auditorium where everyone got up and sang the “Marseillaise” at the appropriate point in Casablanca, and about that experience this I can say.  If you haven’t been lucky enough to have it, go out and have it.  You won’t be sorry.   It’s a true testimony to the power of song.

An extended clip of from the classic source:

So all together now:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.

Quando me’n vò

Connie Morton takes singing in the shower to a high level.

(Image from Self-Pleasureforwomen.com.)   What she sings is from Giacomo Puccini‘s La bohème, specifically Musetta’s rather risqué slow waltz, “Quando me’n vò.”  (Google offers one translation, here is another one from this source, which includes a parallel Italian-English libretto for the entire opera.)

Quando men vo soletta per la via,
la gente sosta e mira
e la bellezza mia tutta ricerca in me
da capo a pie’…
… ed assaporo allor la bramosia
sottil, che da gli occhi traspira
e dai palesi vezzi intender sa
alle occulte beltà.
Così l’effluvio del desìo tutta m’aggira,
felice mi fa!
When I stroll out alone
along the street.
The people stop and gaze at me,
to seek out my beauty from
from head to toe.
…and then I taste the sly desire
that gleams from admiring eyes.
They can see all my beauty which lies
concealed in my heart, perceived
from my outward charms.
So, this scent of ardent desire
surrounds me and fills me with pleasure!

A fantasy of visibility, of being desired.  Quite the thing to sing when pleasuring yourself!

“Quando me’n vò” is a huge crowd pleaser and it’s easy to find versions of it on line.  I’ll offer up two, because why not?  First a concert version with Anna Netrebko

And also a recital version with Maki Mori:

Making beautiful music together

Tanya Yip‘s fantasy of tranforming herself into a cello and then being masterfully played has an obvious visual inspiration:  Man Ray’s famous image Violon d’Ingres:

An erotic inspiration indeed, especially since the model who posed for the picture was the stunning Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), who posed for any number of other striking things, such as this 1920 photograph (thus taken when Kiki would have been 18 or 19) Mädchen mit Vase by Julian Mandel.

I felt well-moved writing Tanya’s fantasy — the analogy between a master musician and a skilled lover seems to me very close.  (And the analogy also works the other way:  cf Honoré de Balzac:  “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”)  I suppose there’s a rather radical bondage element as well as a transformation fantasy element.  After all, if you’re a cello, you can’t move and you’re at the mercy of whoever holds you…

_Commencement_ now available

The seventh Gnosis College script, Commencement, is now available (a PDF version can be found here).  As the title implies, it brings certain plotlines full circle, but it opens a few others.  If you want to know more, you’ll have to read it.  It’s the last one that I have in reserve, so I guess I’ll have to start writing some new material.

Somehow I don’t think that will be all that hard.   But I just might try shifting the format a little.  Stay tuned….

The Wasp Woman

One book I was assigned in my freshman English class in college was the then-current edition of The Norton Anthology of  Poetry, the editors of which, doubtless attempting to appear hip to an audience of jaded 18 year-olds like my then-self, chose to include among the works of Shakespeare and Keats and Emily Dickinson a work by one Lawrence Raab entitled “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” which ended with the immortal lines

Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower. You know I always loved you.
Perhaps not “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or even “My Life has stood – a Loaded Gun – “, (or even “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) but it will do.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was a homage of sorts to to one of the greatest non-great producers and directors of all time, to wit one Roger Corman, who in fact did create Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Now perhaps Corman has a reputation as something of a schlockmeister, but if so he was a sclockmeister with a difference.  He had an eye for talent and that combined with a directorial imperative of tell a story cheaply and keep the audience entertained made him into the world’s greatest One-Man Film School:  Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme all pretty much got started out by Corman, and that alone would probably be enough to earn him immortality among filmmakers.

But beyond that, Corman made some surprisingly intriguing movies for the thaumatophile.  One which deserves some serious attention here would be The Wasp Woman (1959),  which stands as a sort of ancestress to Invasion of the Bee Girls,  which as readers of the Thamatophile Manifesto know, is a key influence for Dr. Faustus.  And it’s certainly a subject worth revisiting here, for that reason and also for some others as well, such as the fact that at least one woman’s intimate encounter with a giant member of arthropod persuasion and subsequent…changes…plays an important part in the developing Gnosis plotline.

The core plot of The Wasp Women is easy to summarize.  Entrepreneur and model Janice Starlin (played by Susan Cabot) runs what has hitherto been a successful cosmetics business, trading on her own glamorous image.  But 40-year old Starlin’s fears that her looks are fading, so she stops appearing as the spokesmodel for her own business, with terrible financial results.   Not to despair, though, as rather mild-mannered mad scientist named Zinthrop happens in with a supposed way to reverse aging, using the “royal jelly” of wasps.  Starlin leaps at the chance, giving Zinthrop his own laboratory and putting him to work developing what she hopes will be not just a way of reversing her own aging, but also a way of creating what will surely be an absolutely unbeatable product.   Overriding Zinthrop’s objections, she even insists on making herself the first human test subject, even going behind Zinthrop’s back to up her dosage of the miracle substance when it isn’t working as fast as she would like.

And what do you know?  The mad science thing works.  There’s just one little side effect…

Now as reviewer El Santo points out, this plot inverts a standard mad science narrative.  In that narrative, the insane/evil/overreaching mad scientist abducts or suborns a pretty girl and makes use of her as an experimental subject, until perhaps she is rescued by the hero.  It’s a variant of the brave knight rescuing the fair maiden from the evil dragon/ogre or what have you.  But the plot of The Wasp Woman is really about female protagonism.  It’s Janet Starlin who pushes hard for the mad science:  the mild-mannered but eccentric Zintrhop here is more the voice of conservatism and caution than anything else.  Starlin is the one who desires to be the subject of the experiment, and she jumps in with both feet.

El Santo reads this as a part of a bit of subtle (and subversive) commentary on gender relations in the 1950s:  women weren’t taken seriously in their own right and had to trade on their youthful looks, so Janice Starlin had an intelligible motive in pushing things along so desparately.  I think El Santo’s point is correct, but the focus of my attention is elsewhere.

Let me put it this way:  why is this movie the subject of a post at EroticMadScience.com?  It’s pretty buttoned-up 1950s.  No nudity.  No sex.  The answer is this:  I find an amazing turn on in subject protagonsim in mad science.  I do not know exactly why this is, but Nanetta Rector’s bold and unsolicited demand “Make me a liquid girl” or Maureen Creel’s taking a deep breath and turning on the invisibility machine or Aloysius Kim’s “Death or glory here I come” are real payoff moments for me.  So when Janice Starlin inists that she will be Zinthrop’s first test subject, it’s also a special moment in a special movie.

And thanks to the glories of the Internet, you can see for yourself for free, if you’re so inclined.  A magnificent resource called the Internet Archive is making available a lot of old movies for free streaming and downloading, and The Wasp Woman is among them.  I’ve embedded it in the post below, but if that doesn’t work (it’s fussy with some browsers), you can always visit the relevant Internet Archive page here.

Enjoy!

Another in the lion’s den

Back when I was writing about a certain lion-related scene in Invisible Girl, Heroine that a certain visual image didn’t seem to exist because, of course, there are certain rather pressing safety-related issues involved in creating one.

As my image-delving has brought home to me (which it does dozens of times a week), illustrators enjoy certain freedoms that photographers do not.

Via Janitor of Lunacy.  Better late than never, I suppose!