Live-action tube girl…Perfume
With a few exceptions, there aren’t that many live-action as opposed to fantasy-art tube girls, and given how tricky that must be to do as an in-camera effect, I’m not too surprised. But I have found one that’s a real doozy.
It’s from an astonishing movie called Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006). Set in mid-eighteenth century Paris and Grasse, it is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille a man with a transcendent sense of smell. Unfortunately for the maidens of Grasse, the smell that Jean-Baptiste finds most transcendent is that of a young woman, and this, in turn, leads him to become a serial killer who attempts various means of extracting and preserving the scent of women.
What he’s attempting here is an experiment to extract and preserve the scent of a young woman using a technique actually used by real-world perfumers called enfleurage. Result: tube-girl.
For such an unpleasant subject director Tom Tykwer sure gives us a lot of angles.
Although this particular method does not succeed, Jean-Baptiste eventually does come up with a means of extracting the scent of young women. He often refers to this as their very essence or soul. A familiar notion to readers of the scripts at Erotic Mad Science, I should think.
CORWIN
Yes, Anwei. The beautiful young Anwei, as liquid essence. Liquid girl! Feel..
Corwin tries to press the phial into Nanetta’s hand.
corwin
…she is still warm.
Even the visual image seems right to me. While a lot of critics seemed pretty put out by Perfume, you’d better bet that Dr. Faustus was mesmerized by it.
And when you combine the essences of many girls together, you get perfume just as magical as you do in The Apsinthion Protocol. Though just what the magic is, you’ll have to watch this rather squicky, scary movie to see.
On a sidenote, I have to say that a perfumer’s workshop, at least as created in this movie, is very much in the mad-scientist’s-laboratory, what with all the jar and phials of essential oils and distillation apparatus.
Yes, that is indeed Dustin Hoffman as a perfumer Baldini, giving Jean-Baptiste some of his first lessons. Look later in the film for Alan Rickman in a tense, understated performance as the father of one of Jean-Baptiste’s would-be victims.
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!
Gooey
The strange fluids that flow from Anwei’s body and envelop Aloysius, the precipitous manner in which both vanish into the sea, to say nothing of the the mad science process that was the apparent causal antecedent of Anwei’s taking on her eventual strange form make one suspect that she has begun to take on certain characteristics of this sort of strange creature:
You’ll find her dwelling in some of more erotically-fixated, anime-centered back country of the Internet. She goes by the name of a “goo girl” or “slime girl,” someone in female form constituted out of something liquid or semi-liquid and having (I would guess, anyway) a consistency of something like jello. An intuitive state for a young woman like Anwei who has in her life repeatedly be turned to liquid and is now a sea dweller.
Make of this what you will. I shall note that not only can I see the goo-girl concept have a certain wiggly-jiggly appeal, but that I’m also surprised it hasn’t received more pornographic development. For as you’ve probably already figured out even if your eyes haven’t skipped this text and traveled down the page (ha!), the goo-girl, being semi-transparent, presents a unique possibility for depicting penetration scenes, even beyond that already explored in the Gnosis fictional world with an invisible girl.
A whole gallery of such (and the source for the images above) can be found at Danbooru here.
If you’re intrigued and want to follow up with stories with a goo-girl theme, a good place to begin would be Oblimo’s Story Wiki.
Oceanic feeling
In celebration of the reappearance of Li Anwei and in recognition of what she has become, an illustration.
(Proximate image soure Janitor of Lunacy.) It would seem that Anwei in her new transform often has what might be called the oceanic feeling, a feeling of sensual limitless, or lacking strict boundaries to oneself, combined with the perception that one is flying that would come of life in warm tropical water.
Who hasn’t at least sometimes fantasized about become some sort of sea creature?
Why liquid girl?
“You get warmer and warmer, and then you melt.”
If you had to come up with the genesis of the strange fantasy of Li Anwei and Nanetta Rector and eventually others orgasmically turning to liquid, a conceit on which The Apsinthion Protocol turns, you might do worse than that, a description of what orgasm felt like, given to 18 year-old me by a female companion.
But there’s doubtless some reason why this particular metaphor stuck so soundly in my mind. Could it be, perhaps, that liquids, and water especially are such erotic elements? Venus is intimately connected with the sea: she was neither gestated in a womb nor constructed as a piece of technology like Pandora, but emerged from the sea foam, the product of sea-water and the blood from the castrated genitals of Ouranos. Her emergence is commemorated in perhaps the greatest masterwork of the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
It is a subject painters will return to again and again. Consider Odilon Redon’s twentieth-century sumbolist version of the same, which I find particularly striking.
But the association of women and water and eros is not limited to Venus. Consider also, as just one example, Gustave Courbet’s Woman in the Waves.
Women, eros, liquid. So powerful an association that there’s even a genre of erotica (printed in water resistant volumes, like that depicted at the left) devoted to it. And if you survey photographic erotica, you’ll find that it’s a prominent theme — so much is shot in our around water — on beaches or in oceans or near waterfalls or ponds. Or in baths or showers or hot tubs. Surf over to a frequent poster of tasteful female nudes — GoodShit for example — on any day of the week and count the number of young lovelies who are in, or near, or covered with water.
And so I suppose it is hardly an accident also that some odd person like me might drive the metaphor into a more literal sort of fantasy…
