Monthly Archives: September 2010

The four-sided triangle

Sometimes you get lucky and find a movie that’s not all that well regarded critically but which hits all sorts of notes for you, and a recent discovery, The Four-Sided Triangle (1953), was that for me.  An early release of Britain’s mighty Hammer Film Productions, it sure does a lot for the thaumatophile, it’s a personal identity porn forerunner to Hammer’s Frankenstein Created Woman. And it pleases me all the more because my learning of it came from a different post at Erotic Mad Science, one presenting my then-latest search after tube girls.

Plot background: In the sleepy English village of Hardeen impoverished boy genius Bill, the son of the local squire Robin and blond beauty Lena grow up together as best friends.  Bill comes under the tutelage of the kindly but slightly dim Dr. Harvey. Lena is in time taken “back to America” by her mother (a good writing cover for the fact that adult Lena will be played by American actress Barbara Payton and won’t really have the accent), while Bill and Robin go off to Cambridge to learn science.  Bill and Robin will return to Hardeen and set up shop in an old barn, working on a mysterious mad-sciency project funded by Robin’s father Sir Walter.

Lena returns to Hardeen a little later, a broken woman very young: she’s tried many things and failed and returned essentially to die, as she tells a shocked Dr. Harvey in a line whose nihilistic spirit might have come from Iris Brockman.

Lena

I thought doctors were supposed to understand how little life really matters. There are many scapegoats for our sins and failures, and the most popular is Providence. I shan’t blame anyone but myself. I didn’t ask to be born, so I have the right to die.

(This is perhaps a little scary in hindsight for a reason in addition to the obvious one, given that Barbara Payton was at this point in her career in a downward alcoholic spiral that would lead to her own death at 39.)

Well, Dr. Harvey is having none of that, so he re-introduces Lena to her two childhood friends. Things go well, as Lena rejoins them as an assistant.

It turns out that Bill and Robin are working on a technology that allows them to reduplicate material objects with perfect fidelity.  After much effort they succeed.  Unfortunately, things don’t go so well on a personal front.  Love walks right in and wrecks destruction, as love has a way of doing.  Bill and Robin both fall in love with Lena.  Repressed-but-sensitive genius Bill dithers over expressing his feelings, while self-confident upper-class Robin has no such hesitation.  Robin proposes marriage to Lena, who accepts happily, leaving Bill devastated.

Soon Dr. Harvey finds Bill back in the laboratory, this time using his reproducing technology to recreate not just inanimate objects but living animals and…can we see where this is going, fellow thaumatophiles?  Yes we can.   Bill is planning to make a duplicate Lena for himself.

And here is where The Four-Sided Triangle takes a more interesting turn.  Instead of following a more traditional mad-science script in which Bill would kidnap Lena and have his way with her, Bill instead explains what he wants to Lena, and tender-hearted Lena agrees to take part.  Not that I want to dis the traditional plot, which certainly has its appeal, but at least this time I like the way this one was written so much better.  Do you remember, dear readers, my post on The Invisible Woman?

Let’s reflect on what Kitty has implicitly gone for here:  “So, you want me to take off all my clothes, step into this machine that has hitherto never been tested on a human being, zap me with heaven-knows-what, and turn me invisibile?  Sure, I’m game!”

I think I’m in love.

Well, I think I’m in love all over again (perhaps I’m about to get destroyed, who  knows?).

So Lena climbs into the apparatus.  Switches are thrown, lights flash, and so on.  Do you see the eccentric arrangement of the glowing tube in the background?    The people who made this film knew their mad science cinema.  They’re paying tribute to German Expressionism here, to Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or my name ain’t Faustus.

And of course, there’s the tube girl thing going on here as well.  Although contrary to tube girl tradition, and for that matter the “girl in the machine” precedent set by Kitty Carroll herself, she leaves all her clothes on.

Now why is that?  Doesn’t wearing clothes somehow make the whole duplication process a little more complicated?  This is dangerous stuff, people, and we need to do things right!

Oh wait, there’s that placard that I now remember from the beginning of the movie:

Okay, I get it now.

So anyway, the duplication process works once the duplicate is revived and Bill finally gets the love of his life.

Bill names the duplicate “Helen,” and they set off for a happy holiday together.

Only things don’t work out that well, because Helen is psychologically identical with Lena, and that means she still loves Robin.  Uh oh.  After a suicide attempt, everyone agrees to a radical measure — electroshock therapy to try to wipe Helen’s memory and give her a clean start.  Significantly, Helen herself agrees to this.  This is one amazing mad-science woman.

And maybe things work, but at this point the movie chickens out and runs away from its premise.  An electrical short happens, the lab burns down, and Bill and either Helen or Lena are lost to us.

That’s unsatisfying, but the movie still has a lot going for it, because it’s the cinematic playing-out of the old dream, brought to me originally through the study of philosophy, and discussed in my Thaumatophile Manifesto:

And he was also sometimes thinking about “…start with some pretty object of desire, gin up a few cloning-and-growth tanks, some superduper neurosurgery, and then maybe there will be…two objects of desire, at least one of whom might be free from certain social obligations, and..” Needless to say, the Inner Mad Scientist was chortling with delight at the prospect.

Some themes are just destined to be encountered, over and over.

Bonus animated gif from Bill and Helen’s “vacation” below the fold.

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Aphrodisiacs lab

The electrifying Vinnie Tesla recently sent me a link to a snippet of German-language movie that might not be the Citizen Kane of hardcore, but which does have a nice bit of mad science in it.  Entitled “New Spanish Fly,” it has a scientist at work amidst the classic thicket of chemical glassware.  His assistant takes notes:

I can’t follow it too well.  I’d like to blame the sound on the clip but, more realistically, my German just isn’t all that good.  One bit of dialog that came across as rather funny:

Scientist

Fantastisch.

Assistant

Ah, ja?

Scientist

Notieren sie: Ich bin geil.

“Fantastic!” “Oh, yes?” “Note this down: I am horny.”

Because taking notes is an important part of SCIENCE!

Of course, another part of SCIENCE is actual experimentation, and they proceed to this right away. Safety protocols? Animal testing? Ha!

Where this leads to you may use your imaginations to figure out. Or you can watch the clip, linked to above. You can see some really nice tubes.

By the way, what is the Citizen Kane of hardcore? I’m afraid I don’t know…

Rachel Maines on new sex technology

Many readers of this blog, I hope, will be familiar with a certain work by historian of technology Rachel P. Maines called The Technology of Orgasm:  “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. If you’re not familiar with it, you might owe it to yourself to head down to your local library and check it out.  Short summary:  in 1970s, when Dr. Maines was reading turn-of-the-century women’s magazines in the course of researching a rather different topic in social history, she kept coming across advertisements for what were clearly (gasp!) electric vibrators.  What was going on here?  Well, it turns out that physicians for a long time had a lucrative practice in performing massages of women’s genitals for the treatment of “hysteria,” which in reality meant that they were manually stimulating women to orgasms that they presumably weren’t getting by other means in their repressive Victorian and Edwardian environments.  (Cf. Honoré de Balzac:  “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”)  It had to be physicians, because of course no one could just come out and admit that women were paying for sexual pleasure.  No indeed:  must honor those puritanical sexual norms by providing what Dr. Maines calls “social camouflage,” here by pretending that women’s lack of orgasms was a medical condition requiring treatment by a doctor.  The only catch was that doctor’s didn’t actually like performing this service all that much, and so once someone finally invented a small electric motor, it was technology to the rescue in the form of the vibrator!

All an excellent read:  I commend it to your attention.  It’s a real science analog of something we’re really into here at Erotic Mad Science.

So it was a great pleasure for me when I stumbled across a bit of video of Dr. Maines recently discussing recent advances in sex technology, like Real Dolls and newfangled sex toys.  (Link here in case the embedding doesn’t work for you.)

What struck me most of all his just how funny much of this came across as being.  Especially the bit in which Dr. Maines comments about how “you’ve got something hot and something wet and…electronics and those are not a good combination.”

Well, that’s also a subject we’ve got covered here.

Hyperspatial cincture inspiration

A browse through my library the other day brought to mind a possible inspiration for the hyperspatial cinctures that play such an important technological role  in the parascreenplay Where Am I? If you’re not up to speed here, the hyperspatial cinctures were devices that allowed someone to section off a part of ver body without harm — blood, nerve sensations, etc. would continue to flow across some sort of hyperspace, so you could put your limbs in one place and your trunk in another.  Quite the mad science bondage toy.   Potentially quite dangerous, as Dolly Gibson would find out.

Well, it turns out that these mad science devices have a magical antecedent in cinema, from the wild Hong Kong movie Erotic Ghost Story 2 (1991). (*) Want to take a guess as to what’s going on in the scene below?

Yes, you got it right.  An evil demon has kidnapped a pretty peasant girl and cloven her magically in half, copulating with her lower half, while her upper half complains of lack of satisfaction.

This movie has a hell of a lot going on in it.  Sure, it’s not great by any reasonable cinematic standard, but it does have lots of energetic softcore sex, copious male and female nudity, demon sex, underwater sex, very creative use of a swing, and even an A.S.F.R.-like scene in which one of our heroes is frozen naked in a giant block of ice.

He gets better, though.

Why oh why don’t we have movies like this in English-language cinema?  Lots of unapologetic sex integrated with goofy-fun mad science/magical effects inside an actual story in which we do care, at least some, what happens to the characters?   Granted there are a few, like Invasion of the Bee Girls.  But where is our Robotrix? We need more of these, dammit!

I guess that’s a large part of the reason I ended up writing parascreenplays.  More ordinary people can have movies that enact sexual fantasies, but thaumatophiles like me have to fantasize even the movies…

(*) Chinese-language title 聊斋艳谭2, which in pinyin I believe would read liáo zhāi yàn tán èr. Unfortunately my feeble attempt to excavate a literal translation generates gibberish: “chat fast beautiful Tan two,” so not only do I get too few movies, I suck at Chinese also. Darn.

Girlsicles

Janitor of Lunacy, commenting for the first time here at Erotic Mad Science, has pointed my attention to a small trove of tube girls, some of which I’d seen before, but others of which were new to me.  For example, this illustration is identified as being for Le Triangle a Quatre Côtés by W. Temple — I believe the British science-fiction writer William F. Temple, who wrote the novel that was made into the film The Four Sided Triangle (1954).

The context for these is a page at the site Project Rho, devoted to the problem of space travel, and how damn difficult it would be to stay alive long enough to actually get anywhere.  One possible solution:  freeze yourself, which is of course especially appealing if you are an attractive female and freeze yourself in a tube.  An illustration to Frozen Limit by “Volsted Gridban” (I think actually John Russel Fearn, another British sci-fi writer.)

A disadvantage of suspending your animation would appear to have been that you might have missed out on exciting events in your vicinity.

Another illustration, this I think from a story “Newscast” by Harl Vincent that ran in Marvel Science Stories, April/May 1939.

Trying to research the last turned up a bonus tube girl illustrating the Wikipedia article:

Like, wow.

The author of the Project Rho page remarks, perhaps a little apologetically, “I did not intentionally limit these illustrations to just frozen women. Apparently the artists of the time were not interested in painting men under glass.”  Well, let’s not be too sure.  I suspect rather that it was an audience consisting of hetero men and boys that wasn’t interested in looking at men under glass.  As for what might have been in the artists’ private sketchbooks, I do not know.

Though I really wish I did.

Frankenstein and personal identity

We’ve encountered Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) here at Erotic Mad Science before, but surely if any movie would deserve a second post here, it would be this one.  And not just because it has a swell mad-lab setup, though it certainly does.

The deeper reason is that this movie constitutes a fine early example of personal identity porn with an erotic twist.  An explanation:  Baron Frankenstein in this movie has moved beyond just trying to make creatures and is now trying to defeat death by using a sort of force-field to keep the soul from leaving the body at death.  (Okay, it’s a lunatic premise but of course this is mad science we’re talking about here.)

Meanwhile in whatever little burg or dorf in which Frankenstein has set up shop, young man Hans is framed for the murder of a tavern-keeper with connivance of the actual murders, a trio of loathsome young dandies.  He’s guillotined at the edge of town — thus providing useful experimental material for Frankenstein.

But what to do with Hans’s soul when he’s trapped it?  In a human tragedy that works out well for mad science, when Hans’s lover Chritina sees his execution she promptly drowns herself.  More material for Frankenstein.

What he creates is a composite creature, Hans’s soul somehow transferred into Christina’s repaired (and improved) body.  Quite an advance on the old poetic conceit of two lovers united in death!  Her first sentence on revival is that most philosophical of questions:  “Please…who am I?”

And indeed, who is she?  She’s not a composite like Jireen, the owner of the memories of both her progenitors.  But at the same time, she seems in some ways continuous with both of them, as her subsequent actions will show.

The resulting being is quite the seductress, and proceeds to use this ability to execute a program of revenge on the young dandies, giving us in the audience something to ogle.

Definitely not a movie to miss for the thaumatophile.

All hail Dr. Impossible

If you want to see a really excellent addition to the canon of mad scientists, allow me to commend to you attention Dr. Impossible, from Austin Grossman‘s Soon I Will Be Invincible (2007).

Soon is a superhero story, basically.  It’s a book for grown-ups, but unlike other superhero books for grown-ups like Watchmen it doesn’t so much deconstruct the superhero genre as take its characters seriously and write a story around them.  Since most of the superheroes and supervillains therein are sort-of humans or at least used-to-be-humans, this means that like any literary characters, they have lives and stories and goals and loves.  And hurts.  Lots of hurts.

Dr. Impossible is one of the two viewpoint characters:  he’s a supervillain, a mad scientist who keeps trying to take over the world.  His tragedy is that even though he has an IQ of 300 he doesn’t realize that the world he inhabits is made of stories rather than atoms, and the rules that govern these stories make it such that he the “good” guys will always foil his plans for taking over the world.  But this doesn’t at least prevent him from almost succeeding a lot of the time, and in the process generating one of the most thoroughly-imagined mad scientist characters out there.  He has internal monologues that really hit the right notes.  (My page references are to the U.S. Vintage edition).

I remember those nights, planning technologies that didn’t exist yet, outsider science, futurist dreaming, half-magical.  The things I could do outside the university setting, now that I didn’t have to wait for the pompous fools at the college!  I was building another science, my science, wild science, robots and lasers and disembodied brains.  A science that buzzed and glowed; it wanted to do things.  It could get up and walk, fly, fight, spout garish glowing creations in the remotest parts of the world, domes and towers and architectural fever dreams.  And it was angry.  It was mad science. (76)

Yes!  Though at the same time, Grossman is really good at showing how difficult and lonely it would be to actually have to be someone like Dr. Impossible.

But if that alone isn’t enough to qualify as Erotic Mad Science (and for me at least, that alone would be, but then I have rather unusual values), then consider the two female characters.  The other viewpoint character is a cyborg named Fatale (much appeal there, especially for the technosexual), and then consider the awesome blue girl who appears in the background of the (much cooler) UK cover illustration to the novel.

(Image source this Forbidden Planet blog.)  This character has a bit of self-narrated backstory that has an erotic embrace what you are character.  Since it has a hint of a spoiler about it, I’ll run it below the fold:

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Vulnavia

The titular character of The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) surely counts as a mad scientist, though he’s surely unique in the mad science canon.  Not only is he the only one I can think of who has a doctoral degree in theology (*) of all things, but he’s a mad scientist with curiously limited objectives.  He wishes to inflict bizarre deaths on the eight doctors and one nurse who were part of the surgical team that failed to save his wife’s life, deaths modeled upon the ten plagues God inflicted on Egypt to compel the Pharaoh to release the Israelites.  (Take religion seriously –> become homicidal lunatic.  Shades of Colonel Madder!)

There’s plenty in Phibes that is entertaining, but that which really catches my attention is Vulnavia, who appears to be some sort of creation of Phibes’s.  She was played by Virginia North, an actress we sadly see very little of outside this movie.

She might be some sort of clockwork, but she’s good enough as a seductress to help suborn at least one of Phibes’s victims.

Seductive indeed.   Enough to propel Phibes from just mad science into outright Erotic Mad Science.  Vulnavia’s nature is mysterious.  I have a difficult time fathoming even the meaning of her name, although it might be derived from the Latin vulnero, meaning “to wound.” (Phibes himself is clearly wounded by life.)

Obviously she wouldn’t be complete mad science creation if she didn’t help out in the lab.

Wow.  I suppose I could go no further than cite El Santo’s remark in the course of his review of Phibes.

I always thought it would have been fun to be an evil genius when I grew up, and now that I know one of the fringe benefits is the possibility of having Virginia North for a pet, I’m really thinking I need to find myself a university that offers a graduate program in Advanced Evil.

You and me both, pal.

(*)  Though I am aware of course that my illustrious namesake did at least study theology, though he didn’t seem to get as much out of it as Phibes.

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerey und Medicin,
Und leider auch Theologie!
Durchaus studirt, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Thor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doctor gar,
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr,
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm,
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum –
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!

Text source here.

Update 20100913: The phrase “Vulnavia’s nature is mysterious” originally read “Vulvania’s nature is mysterious,” and this mistake has now been corrected.  It was Vinnie Tesla who discovered the mistake.  In his gentlemanly fashion Vinnie suggested in comments that this was a typo, but looking at it, I think it more likely that I made a Freudian slip. one rather obvious when you think of the context.

Well the machine says you had one

Bacchus brought my attention to this illustration.  Probably more junky pop science than mad science, but the aesthetic is definitely right for Erotic Mad Science.

(Click on image to see full-size.)  It’s from Adam magazine, November 1965 and can be found at the fun blog Vintage Girlie Mags.

(Addendum:  this post’s title is a caption of a cartoon that supposedly appeared in the New Yorker but which I can’t find.  If anyone knows if this is really true and when it might have appeared, I’d be most grateful if you would let me know.)