Monthly Archives: March 2010

Abuse of the confessional

My first post on Jill’s adventure abroad will be on the rather unusual use of a confessional for purposes of furthering a conspiracy.

Confession is a ritual surrounded in secrecy, and pretty much anything surrounded in secrecy will be the breeding grounds for inappropriate speculation and interesting narrative.  This is something that the artist (and children’s book illustrator!) Rojan understood rather well.

Rojan, "Colored Drawing," ca. 1930

So as usual, I continue in the well-worn paths of artistic tradition.

Why Tondelayo?

The linguistic appropriateness of a name like “Tondelayo” for a young woman from a bumiputera group somewhere on Borneo can certainly be questioned (although we should note that she tells us that it is not her real name).  But I wanted a tribute to a particular steamy namesake, the character played by Hedy Lamarr in White Cargo (1942).

Hedy has gotten tributes in the Gnosis College world before, and she well deserves it.  In Ecstasy (1933) not only did she do a very bold nude scene:

but she also created what might well have been the first depiction of female orgasm in a “mainstream” movie.

But were it just for those things alone Hedy might not deserve the multiple tributes.  What really puts her over the top is that in 1942 she, together with bad-boy composer George Antheil, took out one of the first patents for spread-spectrum radio communications — the technology your mobile phone uses.  (They were supporting the war effort by trying to create a torpedo that could be guided by wireless transmissions.)  The government took the patent and sat on it, but at least in 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy a special award in recognition of her pioneering effort.

I mean, can you think of any Hollywood sex symbol working today who you could see as an engineer? Talk about deserving tribute from Erotic Mad Science!

And never forget — the sexiest organ a woman has…is her brain.

Steamy locales

Cleo’s adventures abroad invoke a different line of wishful thinking about possible abroads free from morality.

As far back at least as Denis Diderot‘s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) the dream of a tropical paradise free from labor, free from politics, and largely free from clothes has loomed large in the imagination of Greater Europe.  It is probably not hard to see why, above and beyond the fact that the tropics are fecund and also a place in which you can comfortably run around naked (indeed, might often be more comfortable if you are).  They also had the advantage of being very remote, and therefore a convenient literary topos for writing a critique of your own miserable, prudish, Christian society — the more remote the place, the harder it would be for your beautiful theory to be slain by unpleasant facts.

Small wonder that Tahiti ended up being the place Paul Gauguin chose to flee to, and whence he provided us with some of the most beguiling art in service of the myth, even if the myth turns out not to really have had much going for it.

Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903), "Annah, die Javanerin" (1893)

Of course in time this tradition of “tropical paradise” would be given a sick twist in cinema in the form of the Italian jungle cannibalism film: a subject which I’ve  written on briefly before.  Here the morality-free zone once imagined as a Rousseauian paradise is replaced with one imagined as a Sadean hell. Witness for example Janet Agren here in deep erotic peril in Mangiati vivi (1980).

No cannibalism for lucky Cleo, though.  The people she meets are altogether more benign.

Being eaten has to wait for another character entirely…