Monthly Archives: June 2010

Willy Wonka Mad Scientist I

If you were to ask someone to name a mad scientist you’d be unlikely to get the answer “Willy Wonka.”  What an injustice!  Because in many ways Wonka is just much a mad scientist as Dr. Frankenstein or Rotwang.  He isolates himself from society, surrounds himself with grotesque assistants, and experiments away endlessly with bizarre substances which can have truly radical effects on those who consume them, wittingly or not.  Also, like a mad scientist, his morality is rather at variance with accepted social norms:  surely no normal person would allow children to play around  in close proximity to a variety of near-death traps into which they fall, repeatedly, right in front of their horrified parents.

And also, try looking at the cinematic versions of Willy Wonka’s invention workshops and just try telling me that you’re not looking at an imaginatively arranged mad lab.  Here is the 1971 version:

And the 2005 version…

If that’s not mad science in action, I’ll eat a case of Slugworth‘s.

But does any of this belong at Erotic Mad Science?  I mean, these are children’s movies, right?

Only half right.  These works might have been largely intended for children, but they clearly left impressions in the minds of young viewers which weren’t erotic experiences at the time they were seen, but which lingered and would eventually become fetish fuel — things not erotic in themselves (at least, not intended that way and probably not seen that way by most viewers), but which would eventually form the visual or conceptual anchors of fantasy.   Fetish fuel is a concept I’ve implicitly worked with before, in the context how an old monster movie might have affected people’s sexual imaginations.  I shall be posting on a few examples of it in the Willy Wonka/thaumatophile context over the coming week.

 

Bonus early mad science

While we’re on the subject of old cinematic mad science that deserves attention, I should bring up The Man Who Changed His Mind, a 1936 feature that starred Boris Karloff, who had recently given a type-creating performance as Frankenstein’s monster and who now gets to be the mad scientist, “Dr. Laurience.”

Providing appeal here is Anna Lee playing Dr. Clare Wyatt, who goes to assist Laurience, believing him to be (mostly correctly) a misunderstood genius.

Laurience, it turns out, has been working with a mind-transfer technology, which he demonstrates to the skeptical Dr. Wyatt through animal testing (unusual prudence for cinematic mad science!) in a well-done mad scientist laboratory scene.

Things spin out of control, as they have a way of doing in the movies.   An ambitious press baron (literally — he is Lord Haselwood) undertakes to finance Laurience’s work, but when Laurience attempts to present his results to the assembled scientific community, he is laughed off the stage.  The furious Lord Haselwood pulls Laurience’s funding, which causes Laurience to throw caution to the winds by testing his mind transfer device on…Haselwood and Laurience’s own crippled assistant Clayton… with success.   It will get worse for the good characters from there on out, because Laurience is falling in love with Dr. Wyatt…who is in turn attached to Lord Haselwood’s journalist son…

I’m slightly surprised that this movie doesn’t have a higher profile than it appears to have.  Karloff gives a strong performance, though perhaps I’m biased toward sympathy with his character (I’ve had my own moments when I realized that professional failure loomed at the same time as I realized that the One You Love Does Not Love You, resulting in a form of inner anguish I wouldn’t wish on the worst person alive).  And Anna Lee is not just eye candy here.  She plays a character who’s a competent and strong-willed scientist in her own right (the opening scene depicts her performing surgery), and obviously there’s appeal there.  (Plus a plot twist that I’ll run under the fold to avoid spoilers…)

Definitely a film to watch, if you want to know the mad science cinematic canon.  It’s available at the Internet Archive and also embedded below:

Personally appealing bit of trivia: The movie was directed by Robert Stevenson, who would have a long, long career that ended with…The Shaggy D.A., which as I recall is the story of a man who finds his mind in the body of a dog.  So I guess history rhymes here…

Additional personally appealing bit of trivia: Anna Lee would have an even longer career and continue acting into her nineties, which I think is awesome.

Bonus plot element below this fold…

Continue reading →

Early and really mad mad science

A movie no aficionado of the history  cinematic mad science science should miss is Dwain Esper‘s Maniac (1934).  It’s a movie that will help you just say no to drugs.  Because with movies like this, who would need drugs?

Oh, it starts out sensibly enough as a simple, innocent tale of your standard-issue mad scientist (“Dr. Meirschultz”) who’ has come up with a chemical formula that will resurrect the dead.  Naturally, he and his assistant Don Maxwell will have to break into the local morgue to test the formula.  Happily, Don Maxwell is an unemployed vaudeville performer who specializes in impersonations, so this is not to difficult.

The morgue itself is is a marvelous high-arched space full of ominous darkness.  I suspect this was because Esper didn’t have the production budget to light the set properly, but the effect still works for me.

Meirscchultz’s “victim” (if that’s the right word for a dead person who you are trying to bring back to life) is a carbon monoxide suicide, who looks like she might have had rather a lot to live for (but what do we know of another’s inner sorrows?).

Mad scientist Meirschultz get right to work.

With success!  The victim is revived, sort of, and smuggled back chez Meirschultz to continue her recuperation.

Unfortunately success goes to Dr. Meirschultz’s head, and on his hubris follows nemesis, as it so often does in the mad science movie.  Wishing to continue his experiments, he hands Maxwell a gun and invites Maxwell to shoot himself, so that he can be the next Meirschultz success.  Bad move, Meirschultz.  Maxwell loses his cool and shoots Meirshcultz instead.

Unfortunately Meirschultz is some sort of psychiatrist in addition to being a mad scientist, and when some of Merischultz’s patients show up, Maxwell decides to try impersonating Meirschultz to keep the law away.

This leads to some unfortunate complications when Maxwell gives one of Meirschultz’s already-unstable patients the wrong injection (of “Superadrenaline”), a screwup which generates The One Drug Freakout Scene to Rule them All.  Said patient then abducts the revived dead girl (possibly — the character is played by an entirely different actress).

He runs off into the woods with her and tears off her dress, leading to a rare post-Code example of on-screen nudity.

(El Santo is hilarious on just how gratuitous this scene is.)

And it only gets stranger from there.  Corpses bricked up in cellars, insane neighbors, more utterly gratuitous scenes of young women lounging around in their undies, bogus “educational” inserts…you cannot miss this one.

Fortunately you don’t have to, because it’s available at the Internet archive.

It’s free, so you can’t ask for your money back.

Update 20111224: I realize that the embedding seemed broken for a long time, but I hope it’s fixed now.

[Faustus May 11, 2018: The embedding apparently broke again, but should now be fixed again, and let’s hope it sticks this time.

Light, more light

One might criticize EroticMadScience for being a little to much inside the hetero male gaze, and that criticism, I fear, would be sound.  So a little relief therefrom (I hope) following the theme of bringing light to the world, which I explored a bit a few days ago.

An illustration cover to a an 1894 novel by Karl May (1842 – 1912), a very prolific German-language writer, many of whose stories were set in an imagined American West.  May was immensely popular in his day:  his reputation is done a grave injustice by the fact that Adolph Hitler liked his books (which, as far as I know, provide no support for Nazi doctrines — note that Albert Einstein was also a major fan of May).  I haven’t been able to find much about this particular cover, although there is some interesting French-language commentary on its homoerotic implications here [Faustus May 11, 2018. I can no longer find the original post, but the blog of which it was a part is preserved in the Internet Archive].

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 source 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?

Electric underwater

Professor Corwin is surely right to observe that “…in salt water, Monsiuer Volt and Madame Ampere are not your friends,” although he’s slightly misquoting when he attributes the line to Charles Stross.  He is at least showing decent taste in casual reading.  The book he’s slightly misquoting from is this:

(Found at Stross’s website antipope.org, which has an even larger version here.)  If you think it’s true. as I do, that it would be very cool to have a version of H.P. Lovecraft who in’t sex negative (or for that matter full of all sorts of racial anxieties), you must read this book, in the unlikely event you haven’t already.

This book and its companions are quite the send-up of the whole James Bond mythos as well.