Depths of the sea
Well, I suppose no set of post about the process through which Aloysius Kim begins his ascent into a new form through a descent into the depths would really be complete withott a visual reference to pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s “The Depths of the Sea” (1887), shown here to the left.
The visual relevance is perhaps too necessary to merit much further comment. Various vesions of the image float around the web: this one was posted some time ago at Janitor of Lunacy, while the original can be found in the Fogg Museum at Harvard.
Bram Dijkstra reproduces this picture (among many, many others) his Idols of Perversity (p. 269) and has this to say about it:
In Burne-Jones’s “The Depths of the Sea”…a woman with hypnotic eyes and a vampire’s mouth has already completed her seduction and is carrying her prey — as if it were a huge, flowery bouquet of lost male morality — into the oblivion of her sensuality, where, we can be quite certain, he is to suffer the brain death which unfailing accompanied the state of perpetual tumescence promised by the hollows of the siren’s lair.
Gee, Professor, thanks for the fetish fuel!
Created women
The process through which Aloysius and his ad hoc band of resisters swiftly wreck Colonel Madder’s mental equilibrium is the sort of Hail Mary play that makes basically no sense outside of a mad science-driven fictional world…
…and perfect sense within it. The fictional concept of resurrecting the dead to create an artificial woman has a long history. One of its most distinguished moments would be the appearance of ravishing Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein.
(Image source cinemastrikesback.com.) Though for my money, I think I like better the 1967 Hammer Horror production Frankenstein Created Woman, which among many other strengths has some very arresting imagery.
(Image source Frankensteinia, an entire blog devoted to things Frankenstein.) And of course Peter Cushing. Cushing might be best known to American audiences as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, but before that he had a whole series of brilliant British horror-movie roles. Naturally he gets a site of his own, from which this French-language poster is taken:
That’s an EroticMadScience two-fer at least, because not only does it make us of the whole “created/resurrected woman” theme, but it also makes good use of the tube-girl meme.
Unsurprisingly, “woman created to make trouble” is itself a very old idea: certainly as old as Pandora, represented here in an 1872 painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre.
And Pandora is also an Erotic Mad Science two-fer. Not only is she herself a woman created on purpose by a god associated with technology, but she is part of a plot by Zeus to punish mankind for the transgressions of Prometheus who, if mad science ever had a divine patron, would surely be it.
Aloysius’s reading
The reading material with which the somewhat burnt-out Aloysius is trying to relax near the end of Progress in Research is for real, and has a real antecedent in my own developing erotic consciousness.
Background: way back in my early graduate student days I read a comic drawn by Phil Foglio called XXXenophile that made me very happy.
XXXenophile was merry erotic romp through the conceits of fantasy and science fiction: magic, cloning, time travel, sex with aliens, and so forth. It wasn’t heavy material, and nowhere near as dark as many “adult” comics. It was happy and funny and sexy and fun, and doubtless influenced the brighter side of my own writing about Gnosis.
So as I was writing the Gnosis College scripts, perhaps just after finishing the first draft of Study Abroad, it occurred to me to wonder what good ol’ Phil Foglio had been creating as of late, seeing as he had been such a good influence on me in my impressionable youth. So I googled around and found out: a web comic called Girl Genius, which are the adventures of one Agatha Heterodyne in a mad-science, steampunk world.
It was with a peculiar mix of delight and dismay that I discovered that Agatha is a student at an institution of higher learning called Transylvania Polygnostic University.
I didn’t steal the idea, Phil! Honest! It’s just that γνῶσις, a Greek noun meaning knowledge, especially knowledge in a higher or esoteric sense, is one of those things in memetic space that many people are just bound to stumble across.
It’s probably a little late for me to make the change now, and I do like the word Gnosis for any number of private reasons. But I can at least offer the shout out to Phil Foglio. So here it is. You can subscribe to XXXenophile online now at Slipshine, and keep up with the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne’s adventures at the Girl Genius site.
Dr. Faustus sez, check it out.
Born again
Both Kitty and Tricia found themselves in very sticky respective situations, but luckily Aloysius was able to improvise a solution that got them more-or-less back to normal. Among other things, Aloysius proved that having the rudiments of a classical education can come in handy, and not just for the purposes of adding a little seasoning to one’s kinky blog.
The scene is an homage to pregnancy and lactation fetishes, which aren’t really my thing all that directly, but throw in a little spin involving strange machines and syringes and the Apsinthion Protocol, and you have a fun bit of thaumatophilia going on, from my perspective.
I knew of the existence of the fetishes before writing the scene, but I had little idea before doing a little reading up on the subject just how damn much there was on the Internet about it. And I must confess, that some of it is undeniably appealing.
Hat tip on this one to Due Joy, which struck me as one of the nicer blogs on the subject.
The other leg of the crisis
The other leg of the double crisis Aloysius is obliged to deal with involves something icky-squicky even by the standards (?) of this site, so I’m running it, for the first time, below a fold.
Augmentation out of control
One of the twin crises that have Aloysius running back and forth late in Progress in Research is an attempt at breast augmentation that runs way out of control.
Well, maybe I’m just being immature to notice such things, but even this odd little theme has a history. One example (which I only vaguely remembered from video-store box art until I finally got hold of and watched a copy, just for your benefit, dear readers) is the 1982 comedy Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again. I’ll never have those 87 minutes of my life back, but I can report that there is a scene in which a plastic surgeon named Dr. Knute Lanyon gets distracted in the course of a procedure that “injects collagen behind the soft tissue of the breast” or one Mrs. Simpson. This inflation goes on and on. Mrs. Simpson actually seems rather pleased with the unplanned result.
As she admonishes Dr. Lanyon “don’t you dare touch a thing…Bernie’s going to love these.”
A better example of this sort of thing can be found in Vittorio Giardino’s Little Ego (1985). This is an erotic tribute (Wikipedia suggests “parody,” but I think tribute might be better) to Windsor McCay’s extraordinary Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905 to 1914). Nightly, Little Ego has dreams in which all sorts of absurd and wrong and yet highly erotic things happen. (There is an extended “abduction into a harem” sequence which doubtless influenced the “Odalisque” segment of Study Abroad.) It is an exquisite piece of work that belongs in the library of any serious collector of comic-book erotica.
In one of Ego’s dreams, she stands before a mirror, wishing she had bigger breasts. By the merest chance she finds before her a jar of cream the label of which proclaims “increases and firms breasts in minutes.” “Why not?” asks Ego, trying it out. And before you know it…
The dream ends with Ego in a rather unusual modeling career. For a Vittorio Giradino site look here.
Fresh from the bath
Tricia knew what she was doing, attempting her seduction of the by-mad-science-enhanced Aloysius by showing up fresh from a shower, clad only in a towel. It’s a very sexy way to come on, as Pierre Bonnard clearly understood.
Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947), "In the Bathroom" (1907)
(Fine Wet Canvas forum discussion on Bonnard here.) Needless to say the theme continues right down to the present day, and what better excuse than this scene to throw in a picture of an anime goddess, wrapped in a towel.
Click on the image to see more of the same.
What Aloysius is about to discover, rather to his sorrow, is that even if you go through a thaumaturgic transformation like Den, you are not automatically transferred to a sword-and-sorcery realm of abundant sexual gratification. In fact, a surprising number of your life-problems stay with you…
Transforming Aloysius
The strange transformation that Aloysius manages to work upon himself with his wire machine might have any number of precedents.
The fact that he’s pierced by a lot of wires from his machine is evocative, perhaps, of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a subject that found great favor with religious artists and is certainly not without homoerotic interest.
Andrea Mantegna (1431 - 1506), _St. Sebastian_ c. 1506
And in another way Aloysius’s self-induced experience might also be thought a version of the BDSM-related practice of needle play.
Closer to home, perhaps, what Aloysius does to himself is live out a pretty common geek fantasy — go from science nerd to Greek god through a miraculous technological (or just miraculous) intervention.
Searching my own memory for antecedents to this scene the one that leaps to mind most readily is the “Den” sequence from Heavy Metal (1981), in which a nerdy teenager is transformed through the Loc-Nar (a glowing green sphere that represents super-evil, or something) with lightening, (in the best Frankenstein tradition), and then transported to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world far away.
(Heavy Metal definitely deserves to be on any thaumatophile’s preferred viewing list, since not only does it have this transformation sequence going on, but it also has — at least impliedly — woman on funny little robot sex.)
But perhaps most centrally of all to this scene is that Aloysius has decided to jump in with both feet and adopt, with his “death or glory, here I come” remark the operative philosophy that drove both Moira in Apsinthion Protocol and Iris in Study Abroad.
Must be something in the Pleasant Prairie water supply, I guess.
Picking locks
Aloysius Kim is telling us a plausible story when he tells us that he learned about picking locks from something a guy at MIT wrote. This is a real-world document, and you can find a copy of it in PDF form here.
I must confess it was happy day for me when I stumbled on the idea of putting lock-picking into a script as a key idea. It works as such a fine metaphor for the thaumatophile:
- Lock-picking is a fine metaphor for penetration, not just in the sense that a pick fits into a lock, but in that it is a way of opening one’s way into unknown but desired spaces.
- But it’s not just a crude penetration. Merely ramming a pick into a lock will never do. You must caress the lock, know, take your time learning its secrets, it, if you are to have any success in opening it.
- Locks are a technology, and picking them a technological skill, so they fit well into the metaphor of mad science.
- Entering forbidden spaces is not just a metaphor for sex, but the very aim of the scientist, the mad scientist in particular. So sex and knowledge and technology all bind into one here.
- And of course, in a place like Gnosis College, where a bizarre but sexy secret might lurk behind any locked door, it’s a hell of a useful device for advancing plots!
