Embracing what you have become

Quoth Cleo as she walks deeper into the rain forest shedding clothes “You needn’t bother collecting, unless you want it for yourself. I for one will never be needing it or any other clothing again. I take a straightforward visual inspiration from Me Me Lai, who would get naked as could be in any number of Italian jungle cannibal movies, including Ultimo mondo cannibale, whence these screenshots come.

If we can tear our attention away from naked jungle frolics for a few moments, we might wish to ask ourselves what on earth is going on here. The answer, I guess, comes not from the frolics but from the satirical speech Cleo gives to Aloysius and Jireen: “I would work hard, get some sort of professional degree, then some sort of boring professional job. Get married to some boring professional guy. Live in a suburb in a McMansion with a brace of S-U-V’s and perhaps a brace of kids going to soccer practice. “

I suppose that Cleo’s rather astonishing rebellion mirrors ones I’ve had. Cleo is doing exactly what she should not. I’m not a huge admirer of David Brooks, but I must say that his Atlantic magazine piece “The Organization Kid” is rather on the mark. Our elite colleges swarm with compliant, hard-working kiss-asses — and boy do I know, because I taught a lot of ’em. The last time they rebelled against anything was during potty-training, and since then they have been building their resumes. They accept the system (easy to do, I suppose, when you have such a privileged place within it) and look forward to their professional degrees and professional jobs. I taught quite a few of them, and after a while I rather began to long to teach someone with a little fire in the belly for a change. So maybe Cleo involves a bit of personal wish-fulfillment for me, and not just because she’s so cheerful about getting naked out of doors. I mean, leave college to turn into an immortal spider-goddess? Talk about rebellion! You’ll never get a job with Goldman Sachs that way, young lady.

At a deeper level, I suppose, Cleo’s serenity at her own change might reflect another conviction, the one I put in the Thaumatophile Manifesto, which is that if you want a worthy life, you ought to embrace what you are (or have become) rather than trying to suppress what you are, even if other people will think it’s gross. You’ll surely die with regrets if you live any other way.

Spider horror!

There’s a visual inspiration for what happens to Colonel Madder in the end, and also for much of what happens to Cleo Mount over her interesting Gnosis days, and that’s a strange little movie often called Horrors of Spider Island, or sometimes by its original German title Ein Toter hing im Netz, or sometimes by Yog-Sothoth-alone-knows what title under its shifty distributors attempted to market it over the years.

We are talking very simple plot here: a cast of young women (and one man) are lost on a Pacific island when their plane to Singapore goes down, leaving only them as survivors. Their situation doesn’t seem so bad, as they have supplies and fresh water, except that there’s some sort of creepy spider-critter who has the ability to turn people into were-spiders (the first example of such a thing I know of).

Not that I can really recommend the experience unless you’re very much into the were-spider thing, but the film is in the public domain, and you can watch it at the Internet Archive. It probably counts as a good bad movie. Nothing too explicit that I can remember — there is one unconvincing girl fight and what looks like some skinny-dipping in ill-focused long shot.

The were-spider thing is supposed to be horrible, although as it will turn out, Cleo has something of a different interpretation of her fate.

Bonus Dr. Faustus bleg: Many years ago I came across a volume at (I think) Forbidden Planet NYC which consisted of various adult cartoonists doing work showing how they were inspired by cheesy sci-fi. There was at least one section that I’m sure was inspired by Horrors of Spider Island that contained some illustrations that were rather more explicit on the concept of woman/were-spider interaction than anything that shows up in the actual movie. But at the time I was living on a very meager graduate-student stipend so I reluctantly put the book back on the shelf. I didn’t regret it as much as walking away from The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, but I still feel sorry not to at least remember the book’s title. If anyone remembers this volume and can give me some information about it, I’d be grateful if you could let me know, either in correspondence or in comments.

Bringing light to the world

Looking for the appropriate link about Jules Joseph Lefebvre for yesterday’s post brought my eye to this lovely image, which I thought worthy of a digression.

La Vérité (Truth) the original of which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The Wikipedia caption notes “The painting is contemporary with the first small scale model made by Lefebvre’s fellow-Frenchman Frédéric Bartholdi for what became the Statue of Liberty, striking a similar pose, though fully clothed.”

Great Cthulhu, thinks I. If only they had used Lefebvre’s version for what now stands in New York Harbor, instead of the severe and heavily-draped figure created by Bartholdi! I for one would be so much more patriotic. (Maybe it’s a bit late but if you’re a U.S. citizen and want to write your congressman and protest the choice, you can use this form.)

All well and good, but any link to Erotic Mad Science, except the bloggage? Well, I suspect there is a connection to patron divinity Prometheus, anyway, through this piece of artwork created by Maxfield Parrish. I for one suspect a visual influence:

Prometheus bringing light to the world. In the form of light bulbs made by Edison Mazda, it would seem. A reproduction hangs right outside my study. Honest.

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.

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!

Slavery morals

Let it not be said that Colonel Madder is an amoral individual. Clearly he thinks things like Marie’s abduction through.

MADDER

(handing him the dossier)

Transmit this to the Kupler op, and make arrangements to receive a transfer into the special operations account.

HORST

(leafing through the dossier)

She’s very pretty. Are you sure nothing about these ops bother you, sir?

MADDER

(leans back, calmly)

Nothing in either Hebrew or Greek scriptures forbids slavery, Horst, and some of us are inclined to the view that its classification as an evil is merely a heresy of secular liberals. Did not St. Paul himself enjoin slaves to obey their masters? In any event, we are having no one killed, and as long as the girl still lives, there will be an opportunity for repentance, as I once explained to your predecessor, prior to his unfortunate disappearance.

HORST

The girl will suffer terribly, I do not doubt.

MADDER

The evil of suffering is another liberal heresy, Horst. The presence of suffering reminds us of our fallen nature and brings us closer to God.

HORST

It is heartening to see that you have thought this through, sir.

And that’s worth reflecting on, and not just because it’s an opportunity for posters like me to post from the world’s abundant collection of slave-market art.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, "Slave Auction in Rome"

No, clearly this is an opportunity to look a little more at Colonel Madder’s reading, because when he tells us that nothing in the Greek or Hebrew scriptures forbids slavery, he’s not making it up. And he could have gotten it from Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation. Read below, or if the embedding doesn’t work, follow this link.

Food for thought.

Henri-Frederic Schopin, "The Slave Market" (detail)

Back in my graduate school days we sometimes had a saying: “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens,” and that seems to be true here.

Harem bath 3D

Well, poor Marie, her usefulness in Colonel Madder’s plots now at an end, ends up getting haremized for her troubles. And her new life — curiously paralleling Iris Brockman’s — begins with a bath.

There are worse ways to get started, I suppose, even if Marie’s experience isn’t exactly smiley.

/p>

(Proximate image source GoodShit.)

Now harems and baths are obviously a subject that appeals to me, since they’ve turned up in posts here before, illustrated either with classical art or photographs. For a bit of visual inspiration here I’ll turn in another direction, which is CG art. I found a relevant example in a set of CG harem pictures at site called verywierd.com (yes, that is the correct spelling).

Now this is not ideal in any number of ways, but there’s still some appeal here. CG is getting better all the time, and for the thaumatophile or anyone else who is into things that are so weird that they would be prohibitively expensive (or just plain impossible) to actually photograph or film and costly to create as hand-drawn art, it remains the great visual creation hope. So let’s not be too critical of CG just yet — let’s lend it a hand instead.

And hope that perhaps it will soon get as good as hand-drawn art.

(Found at The Abyss.) [Faustus May 11, 2018: The site appears to be lost.]

One way to cause thug fail

Readers of the EroticMadScience blog in its early days might recall a post on the real-world models for the four studiers-abroad in which I commented that Iris Brockman was a bit more buxom than her model Hedy Lamarr and insisted further that this really was a plot-relevant detail.

See? It was. Iris was able to play on the fact that there are certain things for which men (straight ones, anyway) are fools in order to effect the rescue of Cleo.

Well, maybe that all still seems adolescent. Rather than resist I’ll just play along by throwing in a fake motivational poster that is (I hope) on point.

Found 2010/06/04Dr. Faustus Cleo Mount, Iris Brockman 1 Comment

Spider girl triumphant

In celebration of the victory Cleo Mount achieves over national security thuggery using her curious emerging powers, a picture of a body-paint spider girl.

Appears (and, sadly, often disappears) in various places but this one is from here.

Comix footnote: I had been vaguely aware that Marvel Comics had created a slinky and appealing Spider Girl character, but in researching the Spider Girl meme I discovered somewhat to my surprise that there was also a DC universe Spider Girl who appeared briefly in the 1960s. Her primary super power was…super-strong prehensile hair.

By Cthulhu, that sounds like something out of the Tick‘s fictional universe…

Paragraphing a little hosed

Due to my (perhaps hasty) installation of a new plugin the paragraph breaks on historical posts might be a little messed up for a few days until I can fix matters. (The plugin works fine for what what I had wanted, and for some future publication formatting I also want, but as so often with mad science, there was a little side effect.) Please bear with me…things should be fixed in a day or so.

Update I:Basically the plugin changes the way WordPress interprets the HTML I write in, so that now paragraph and line breaks need to be explicitly specified using HTML tags. Prior to the plugin’s installation, Worpress interpreted line breaks in HTML as line breaks to be reproduced in text, which was a major pain for script production. But I now have to manually fix a large number of paragraph breaks in previous material. As of now (the morning of 6/3/2010) I think I have this done for the pages and the most recent month of posts, and I hope to have the rest done in a few days. If you see anything that looks anomalous, however, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to fix it more promptly. Thanks for bearing with me here. It will benefit the site in the longer term, I’m sure.