Teuthology VII

Script for today:

Page 19

View of Edith, lying on her back underneath some sort of panel. Lots of wires hang down. Edith is holding a flashlight in her mouth pointed up, and she is reaching up into the mess of wires and electronics.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Properly handling the data…

Close up Edith’s P.O.V. In the mass of wires we saw in the previous panel. We can see her gloved hands, each holding a piece of cable, one of which is run into an adapter.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): …that involves a special arrangement…

Even closer P.O.V. On the two ends of cable, which have just been joined into the adapter.

SFX: Snap!

CAPTION (Edith thinking): ….which I must take care of myself.

“From above” view. Edith is strapped, naked, to the cruciform gurney. Various IV lines run into her and she is also wired up to a variety of sensors. Chen stands at her side, holding a clipboard.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): At long last, the time comes to undertake a most difficult experiment…

CHEN: Are you sure you want to go through with this, Professor Sterling.

Page 20

Close up on Edith’s face. She has turned her head to the side.

EDITH: Let’s do this thing…

Full-length view of Edith on the gurney, which is tilting upward. Edith is beginning to hang down by her bonds.

EDITH: Unngggh…..

Head-and-shoulders view of Chen, who is looking backwards and pointing.

CHEN: Initiate sequence alpha

View of a hand, throwing some sort of large switch.

SFX: Whrrrr….

Page 21

View up Edith, ¾ behind, upper half. We can see her head slumped down.

CAPTION (Upper, Edith thinking): Great Cthulhu this hurts.

CAPTION (Lower, Edith thinking): Small wonder crucifixion is associated with martyrdom.

View of Shackleford and Chen. They are both wearing radiation suits and dark goggles.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Aw, crap.

SHACKLEFORD: Everything all right, Professor Sterling?

View of Edith’s bare midsecdtion. Two “ray-gun” like objects are in the frame, pointing at her.

SFX: Whrrr

CAPTION (Edith thinking): It wasn’t even obvious that this part of the ordeal was necessary. It might just have been sadism on Dr. Sin’s part. But I don’t want to deviate unnecessarily from…

Close up on Edith’s face. She is showing grim determination.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): He isn’t here out of scientific interest. Or out of compassion for me.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): He likes seeing me like this.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Asshole.

What a nasty thing Edith has put herself up for! There are so many images of crucified women out there. Two examples (which could be multiplied manyfold), both from Janitor of Lunacy:

and

And from such different cultural backgrounds and artistic traditions as well.

Be ashamed, O humanity. Be very ashamed.

Bound in the wheel

For the longest damn time I had a visual image of the sort of thing that poor Marie gets bound into and rolled away in, but had no damn idea what it was called. I had vague memories of seeing them in at least one Janet Jackson video and perhaps a martial arts movie or two, but was still clueless. But thanks to a searchable Internet, I know now. It’s called a rhönrad, and it’s a gymnastic device invented in Germany in the 1920s. It looks like a remarkably tricky gymnastic discipline.

(Image source this Dutch-language page.) Using these things is a real sport with a real international organization devoted to them.

Which is not to say that they aren’t sometimes used for cheesecake appeal. Note this vintage image.

Chorus girls in ‘Rhonrad’ wheels roll across Bondi beach,” Flickr image from here.

Now Marie’s wheel isn’t for cheesecake or for gymnastics. She’s bound in it to be humiliated and disoriented (more than she already is), and for this I must admit a rather different, but still real-world inspiration, which is this:

This is an illustration of something called “Field Punishment No. 1,” and it really was used as a form of military discipline on British soldiers in the First World War. (The illustration above is from the website of the Canadian War Museum.) It involved strapping a soldier motionless to something like a wheel or a fence for two hours. Very unpleasant if you have to itch, which given the ubiquity of things like lice in a trench environment meant often. The punishment was common enough for Paul Fussell to conjecture in The Great War and Modern Memory that it might have been a source for common Great War urban legend: “the myth of the Crucified Canadian.”

Funny given all that that an attempt to find something that answered to the description of “rhönrad bondage” came up empty. (Might just be too damn impractical, even for a rhönrad on flanged wheels to prevent tipping or escape like Marie’s.) But I did encounter this curious image at what appears to be a German-language bellydance site, which does seem to fit the overall theme.

Bet you wish you could have seen how all that was put together!

The crux of the matter

I didn’t construct this scene in Study Abroad with all that much foresight; it was just something that boiled up from the darker regions of my mind and onto the page. On looking back after writing I did think “By Great Cthulhu this one will annoy all sorts of folks.” (Among other things it is quite the act of blasphemy, against at least two major religions. Perhaps I shall soon be facing prosecution in Ireland.) I toyed with the idea of taking it out, but eventually decided that it made more sense to leave it in. Not only does it make a significant point (and prefigure menaces that will become more manifest in later scripts), but it draws on its own significant artistic tradition, whether people like it or not.

I have speculated before about the existence of an inner connection between sadistic spectacle and a certain kind of spirituality. And you needn’t take my own word for it; you can attend to those of Thomas Aquinas, that celebrated Saint and Doctor of the Church, who tells us in all seriousness “Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.” (See one F. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, I.15.) If that sentiment doesn’t disturb you more than anything else you see in the post, you might want to sit down and meditate quietly on your values for a while. (It’s possible that Nietzsche didn’t get the wording quite right but he was dead-on correct in diagnosing the sentiment. As he will remark later on, “…alle Religionen sind auf dem untersten Grunde Systeme von Grausamkeiten.”)

In an event, you can certainly look into art history and find images similar to what appeared in my scene, whether as images of pious martyrdom or voluptuous cruelty (or, if I am right if I am right about the connection between the two, both).

Since there is probably no image quite as broadly distributed as that of crucifixion in Europe (Catholic Europe especially), it is hardly surprising that it will crop up all over the culture, for example in the rumor of the Crucified Canadian that was common in British trenches in the First World War. And since it is a sacred symbol, it is hardly surprising that there were illustrators willing to repurpose it for especially transgressive pornographic purposes, e.g.

And that the idea would spread far in time, eventually all the way to Japanese cinema.

And, in the end, become an object even of eroticized satire, drawing on the artistic conventions of anti-Semitic caricature as in this part of Phoebe’s “backstory” from The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. (And yes, based on the context in which the image appears, I really am sure it is meant as satire.)

And so now, with the help of Springer and O’Donoghue, I’ve blasphemed against all the Abrahamic religions.

But if I can’t be transgressive, then what am I doing here?