Monthly Archives: July 2010

Teuthology IV

Script for today

Page 10

Dr. Sin’s lab, full of men in full biohazard suits, collecting evidence, monitoring stuff with geiger counters, etc.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): Since clearly this was something beyond local law enforcement, a call was put in to us…

One man in a biohazard suit looking up at a gurney that tilts up. Another holding a bunch of wires, apparently puzzling over which goes to which.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): Unfortunately it was somewhat beyond us as well….

Three men standing around a video monitor. They are in biohazard suits, but they have removed the hoods so that we can see their faces. They are facing us, but are looking down at a computer monitor showing something.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): We did find out something about what was going on. Dr. Sin was recording his activities….

A view of the monitor. A vague outline of a a nude female form upright, tied to a cruciform gurney. Something that looks like tentacles are starting to sprout from her midsection.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): …and selling them to a certain select audience. There are perverts who are into this sort of sick transformation stuff…

A PROSPEROUS-LOOKING MAN being led away from his McMansion in handcuffs by two burly police officers. His head is bowed with shame. In the background, his JUNE CLEAVER-ISH WIFE looks on, her hand to her face in shock, while his BEAVER CLEAVER-ISH son holds on to his mother.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): This led to some interesting arrests….

The same man in an interrogation cell. A SLICK ATTORNEY sits by his side. The man looks defiant, with his jaw set. The attorney is holding up his hand dismissively. A DETECTIVE is leaning forward, gesticulating angrily, looking frustrated.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): But the sort of people Dr. Sin sold to either know nothing or will say nothing…

Page 11

View of a pile of optical disks, sitting on a table next to a computer.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): We have been going over all this for weeks, but all we find is a lot of data that does not make sense….

View inside one of the tanks. The girl/octopus is cowering in the corner.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): And what we presume were the results of Dr. Sin’s experiments…

Close up on Edith. She is wearing a stunned, half-horrified expression.

View of Shackleford and Chen, close up.

CHEN: You’re the top expert in the field, Professor Sterling.

View of Edith, her hand covering her eyes, head bowed down.

EDITH: What makes you think I could even help here…

Close-up view of Shackleford’s hand, he is pulling a fat looking file off a table.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): We’re not sure, but take a look at this…

Another close up. The file being held by Edith. We see one page in particular, a photograph of a happy-looking teenage girl, clipped to a form.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): Her name was Felicity Bates…she was 17 years old…with a mother and a father…

Very close up view of the Octopus girl’s eyes. They look large and sad.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): She played oboe in her school orchestra…won a scholarship to Smith…now look at what’s left of her…

Edith standing by the desk with the optical disks. She is holding one up, looking at it.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): We only hope someone can do something, Professor Sterling.

Page 12

Edith is standing , her back toward us, looking down at a work table. The table is neatly covered with folders of some kind.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): This is far and away the most depraved thing I have ever heard.

Close up view of a folder. It is a dossier of some kind. A photograph of a s smiling teen-age girl is clipped to the top of the folder.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Kidnapping pretty girls…to turn them slowing into octopuses…

A laboratory bench, with a centrifuge and several racks of test tubes. Edith in a hazmat suit, holding up a test tube.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): From the equipment Dr. Sin left behind I can make an educated guess as to how he did this.

Close up view of a the membrane of a human cell, with a virus making contact with the membrane.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): With a proper engineered virus you can change the DNA of a cell from one thing to another.

Electromicrograph of a ribosome, with a spark on the side.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Hit ribosomes with the right quanta at the right time and you can turn anything into anything…

An elephant in a patch of flowers.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): He could have turned girls into elephants or petunias if he had wanted to…

Edith and Chen standing in front of a screen, examining it.

CAPTION (Edith speaking): But that’s not the really revolting thing. Sin left something unchanged…

Close up view of part of an octopus brain brain

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Chen and I did a fMRI scan on the brain of one of the octopuses…

View of neurons in a brain.

CAPTION (Edith speaking): Superficially it looks like any other octopus, but the deep neural structure…

The notion that one could change one organism into another through “delivery of the right quanta at the right time” might sound like an especially psychotic piece of mad science, but I actually found it in a very well-known source, to wit John Tooby and Leda Cosmides‘s essay “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See for yourself

Teuthology III

Script for today:

Page 7

A MARINE and a SERGEANT, a tough, professional-looking military pair, are standing in a corner of the factory floor. The Marine is wearing a look of fear and nausea. while the Sergeant staring forward, hollow-eyed.

MARINE: Oh no. Oh gawd no…they’re going to uncover that thing again…no no no…

SEARGEANT: Steady, soldier. Get ahold of yourself….

The Marine has sunk to his knees and has burie3d his face in his hands. The Sergeant has his hands on the Soldier’s shoulders, as if trying to comfort him.

MARINE: I’m sorry, sergeant. I just can’t take this anymore. I’m putting in for a transfer back to Afghanistan…

A view inside a tank. What we see is something like a cross between an octopus and a human being. The head is shrunk back into the torso. The four human limbs have become somewhat tentacle-like, but there is some evidence of digits at the ends of them. Meanwhile, four other tentacles are sprouting from the merging head/torso. The eyes of this creature stare back at us pitifully…

CAPTION: Great Cthulhu…

Page 8

Edith is tuning into our point of view (motion captured in mid turn) . She is pointing angrily at the thing in the tank, which is dimly visible in the background.

EDITH (jagged balloon): What in hell are you doing here, Admiral?

Shackleford, backing away, his hands up in a placatory gesture.

SHACKLEFORD: Not us, Professor Sterling. This is something we found…

View of a young woman, dressed for club-going or some similar activity. She is being dragged into an alley by a shadowy figure who is holding a cloth over her face.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): It began as a law enforcement matter, investigating the disappearances of a number of local young women…

View of a “police detail” room (like the sort seen in The Wire). In the foreground DETECTIVE #1 is pinning something onto a bulletin board, while in the background, DETECTIVE #2 is listening to something over headphones.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): A special task force followed up leads, on the theory that they were dealing with either a white-slavery ring or maybe even a serial killer…

Page 9

A SWAT OFFCIER in full tactical gear is bashing in the side door to the factory with a hand-held battering ram.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): Surveillance and analysis eventually led them to this site. They came in prepared to face the worst..

The same Swat Officer holding aside a curtain, looking appalled. Another OFFICER is to his side, beginning to vomit.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): …but not for what they actually found.

A group of SWAT team members surrounding the prone, face-down form of DR. SIN. One is pointing his assault rifle at Sin’s head.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): The laboratory was being run by a character who called himself Dr. Sin. He was captured…

Dr. Sin sitting in a padded room, wearing a straightjacket. He is staring blankly into space.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): But he refuses to say anything and indeed has become rather non-responsive since his arrest.

Not what the shocked Edith Sterling is looking at today, exactly, but an arresting image on theme:

Done by the Japanese artist Masami Terokoa and found at this blog.  Or perhaps more on point, consider this image at Deviant Art by “venominon.”

Teuthology II

Script for today:

Page 4

Edith and Shackleford are walking across what looks like an abandoned factory floor. Disused machinery is strewn about. We se them from behind. The scene is poorly lit.

EDITH: I hope that you could be a little bit more exact than you were on the phone a few days ago.

SHACKLEFORD: The phone would not have been appropriate.

Edith and Shackleford are standing in front of an elevator shaft. An old-style industrial freight elevator has just arrived, and a MARINE (presumably the elevator operator) is saluting.

SFX: WHHRRrrr…

EDITH: Inappropriate, Admiral? For security reasons?

SHACKLEFORD: No, not security reasons.

The gate on the elevator is being closed shut.

SFX: Rrrrr…CLANG!

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): It is rather, Professor Sterling, that some information is better taken in by being seen.

Page 5

Edith and Shackleford are seen in profile inside the elevator.

SFX: whrrr

EDITH: And so what is it that I am being taken to see?

The soldier who is operating the elevator is opening the gate on another floor. Shackleford and Edith are standing side-by-side with Shackleford making a gesture indicating “look this way.”

SHACKLEFORD: Something that is decidedly in your area of expertise, Professor Sterling.

A long view of another floor of the factory. To the left are a number of curtained-off areas. To the right is a large, mad-scientists lab bench full of chemistry equipment, electronic equipment, and various medical-looking things, including beds and gurneys. In the middle, wearing a white lab-coat, is DR. EDWARD CHEN.

CAPTION (Shackleford speaking): But something which I fear you might find a little disturbing…

Page 6

Edith and Chen are shaking hands in the middle of the floor, while Shackleford looks on.

CHEN: Professor Sterling? I am Dr. Chen. I’m with DOD bioresearch…

EDITH: I didn’t know you military types had any interest in octopuses…

Chen is standing by one of the curtains his hand on it, about to draw it aside. He is looking back at us over his shoulder.

CHEN: There is no active DOD project at this time, but we discovered this…

A “split panel” view. To the left hand of the panel is the inside of some sort of large aquarium. Inside the aquarium floats an octopus with yellow rings against a dark background skin-color. The panel is divided by the aquarium’s glass wall. On the other side of the panel is Edith, in profile, looking into the aquarium at the Octopus.

EDITH: It’s a Thaumoctopus mimicus. A most interesting species to be sure, but hardly something that would seem to require DOD attention..

A view inside the tank. The octopus has swiftly retreated, leaving a trail of bubbles behind it.

CAPTION (Upper left, Edith speaking): A very clever invertebrate, good at camouflage and capable of mimicking many other species. Is that perhaps…

CAPTION (lower right, Chen speaking): No. Take a look at this second tank over here…

View inside another tank. This tank contains something octopus-like, resembling the species seen in the previous panels, but somehow deformed. It’s body seems misshapen, and four of its arms are longer than normal.

CAPTION (Edith speaking): Ugh…a genetically engineered specimen? Is that what’s been going on here?

Chen and Shackleford are standing next to each other. Both are wearing grim expressions.

SHACKLEFORD: Better show her the tank at the far end, Dr. Chen.

The mimic octopus is a real species, which I was delighted to learn was given the name Thaumoctopus mimimus after I had used the same Greek root to come up with my peculiar preferences.

It’s a very pretty critter, IMHO.

And smart too.  It’s an invertebrate full of tricks.

Awesome.

Teuthology I

Today we begin a little experiment here at EroticMadScience.

Over the next week or so I’m going to be a bit busy with a personal obligation. The obligation in question is a good thing and a welcome one, but it will limit the amount of attention I’ll be able to give to EroticMadScience while it’s going on.

In order to keep a flow of posts to you the deserving readers, I’m going to serialize a sequence of posts — about thirteen, I think — which represents the first chapter in a script for the next set of Gnosis College tales, tentatively entitled Gnosis Quest, which is meant to advance the story of certain characters (remember the poor abductees Bridget and Marie?) from earlier scripts.

In keeping with my possibly imprudent desire to experiment with para-literary forms that enforce writing lean and showing rather than telling, it takes the form of a comix script, done in tables that indicate possible underlying panel and page geometry, and form which I’ve dabbled with a little bit before. I’ll through in delved images and commentary to try to keep things light.

Hope you enjoy these, but if you don’t, console yourself with the thought that I’ll be more back to the job in about two weeks.

Script for today:

Page 1

A close-up view of EDITH, who is cradling a phone handset and listening intently.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): I’m a bit surprised now that I even took that call.

Edith an airport, handing a boarding pass to a gate agent. Edith is somewhat frumpily dressed, wearing a GNOSIS COLLEGE and sweatshirt and carrying a small laptop bag over her shoulder.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): But I guess I am answering it.

Edith is standing full length in the shower, showering. Her head is tilted back, her eyes closed. We can see that she is indeed a more beautiful woman than her initial frumpy dress indicated.


CAPTION (Edith thinking): Perhaps it’s time for a fresh start…

Edith is sitting on a plane in a window seat (the aisle seat is empty). Her laptop is sitting on the tray table in front of her and she is typing.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): It’s not like the prospects for tenure as a teuthologist are terribly good.

Close up on Edith’s face. She is gazing out the plane window.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Especially if you’re young and pretty and not that receptive to certain hints…

Edith is standing at a luggage carousel, claiming a bag.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): So I guess answering is the right call.

Edith is in a hotel room, tipping a bellhop. The bellhop’s expression suggests that he doesn’t think the tip is enough.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): I should take what I can get…

Page 2

This is a “splash page,” indicating the title of the book: GNOSIS QUEST PART 1: TEUTHOLOGY. A large octopus entwines its tentacles around the lettering of the title.

Page 3

Edith is walking toward a black sedan. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses is holding a rear door open for her.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): The government men arrive right on time to pick me up.

A view “through the windshield” of the car. Two expressionless, dark-suited men sit in the front seat. Edith can be seen, more faintly, in the back seat, peering forward.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Where do they find such expressionless men?

A “helicopter shot,” showing the car proceeding through what looks like an “old factories and warehouses” district of a city that has seen better days.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Not that I mind having them around, though.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): This doesn’t look like the nicest part of town.

The car is drawn up by a curve next to a factory building. A small door can be seen in the side of the building, which is sealed off with “crime scene” tape. A pair of policemen are standing at either side of the door.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Why would they want to guard this so carefully?

Edith and one of the suits. The suit is tugging at the door to open it.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): They really haven’t told me what to expect here.

REAR-ADMIRAL SHACKLEFORD emerges from the other side of the door. He has his hand extended in greeting.

CAPTION (Edith thinking): Ah. So this must be Admiral Shackleford.

SHACKLEFORD: Professor Sterling? Thank you for coming down on such short notice.

Exploitative of me to stick the shower scene on the very first page, I suppose, but hey, surely it has, uh, symbolic significance.

Found at this free gallery of images from Met-Art, which is a damn splendid site for this sort of glamour photography.

Pleasure and essences

I decided to take a little break from fictional mad scientsts recently and devote some energies to reading something by a real sane scientist, in this case Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who has a splendid new book out called How Pleasure Works:  The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.

Now How Pleasure Works is a remarkably rich book in spite of its short length and it is difficult to do much justice to it in something like a blog post, but one major take-away therefrom is a lot of evidence for the thesis that the pleasure we take about things depends critically on our beliefs about their natures and histories, and not just their sensory properties.

Let’s bring that down a few levels:  Bloom is defending at least three theses here:

  1. People are innate essentialists.  They think that things are what they are not just be virtue of their perceptible properties, but that they have some sort of deeper structure or inner nature that makes them what they are.  A robot that simulates the behavior and appearance of a tiger is not a “real” tiger, even if it can fool an experienced observer.  Your spouse’s monozygotic twin is not your spouse, even if ve is so identical that ve can fool you.
  2. The history of how things is (usually) a part of their essences.
  3. Our beliefs about the essences of things affect the pleasure we take in them, over and above just how they strike our senses.

That’s still abstract, so perhaps some illustrative examples will help:

  1. People will take a lot of pleasure in a painting that they think was done by Vermeer, but if the painting is subsequently shown to be a forgery, they will take a lot less pleasure in it (and its value will drop precipitously), even though it’s the same painting as before and presents the exact same image to the retinas as before.
  2. Children who have comfort objects (teddy bears or dolls or special blankets, as examples) really do not want substitutes for these items, even if the substitutes are identical.
  3. You might be turned on a lot by an attractive model in an erotic photography shoot, but if you were to suddenly that she was your mother at age nineteen, your attitude might change.

I guess I read Professor Bloom’s book with unusual fascination, because if his understanding of pleasure is correct, it becomes easier for me to make sense of some of the stuff that spills from my fingers onto the page.  Bizarre claim?  Well, consider the notion that something has an essence that remains even if its perceptible qualities change.  It’s a curious piece of common sense, only in light of which can a weird declaration like the following even make narrative sense:

 

Corwin holds the phial up. Its contents are pale green and appears to glow slightly.

CORWIN

And there we have her.

NANETTA

(looking fearful and disbelieving)

Her?

CORWIN

Anwei!

NANETTA

Anwei?

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.

The conceit here relies on an essentialist notion. The appearance of what’s in the phial is a warm pale-green liquor, but its essence is that of a pretty young woman. (Hard to read this over without thinking that perhaps it’s a satire of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and perhaps that’s what it really is.)  Without a certain kind of essentialist intuition, you wouldn’t even be able to make sense of the action here, which I am sure you can, even if you think it’s very weird.

Indeed, pretty much any kind of transformation fantasy relies on a certain kind of essentialist notion in order to be readily accessible.  At the moment in Progress in Research when Willie and Professor Waite engage in their Freaky Friday Flip, we can still locate a character who is “really Willie” and another who is “really Waite” and make sense of characters who appear to be other that what they are on that basis.

Professor Bloom also spends rather a lot of time discussing cannibalism, of all things, drawing on the notion that somehow essences might be transmissible across objects (one anthropological explanation of cannibalism is that cannibals are trying to absorb properties of the people they are eating). He even discusses the notorious Armin Meiwes voluntary cannibalism case (don’t read if you squick easily).  Fascinating, because I ran into that before.  There’s an exchange between Jill and Iris in Study Abroad about Iris’s experience of being cannibalized but (maybe) surviving due to being re-created:

 

JILL

Why not just make a backup, and eat it?

IRIS

I did think to ask. I was told that the clientele thought that experienced meat tastes better.

BRIDGET

Ew.

 

Apparently the diners in Club Cuisine preferred eating a real American college student with a real life history to merely a simulacrum of one. Like I said, don’t read if you squick easily…

The notion of essences transmitted over history might also be of help in understanding phenomena like agalmatophilia.  When Iris queries Mr. Takayama about why anyone would go the trouble to petrfy another person, he responds in terms that Iris can immediately understand.

 

TAKAYAMA

There will always be a deep appeal to whatever it was that was once alive. In luxury goods markets, real leather, real silk, real fur will always command a premium over their synthetic substitutes, precisely because of the seductive fact that they were all part of something once alive. Add to that the natural erotic appeal of a well-formed sculpture, and you can see commercial viability.

IRIS

Yes. I see. That was certainly the appeal I sensed behind the Club Cuisine.

A statute that was once a beautiful woman is a very different sort of thing from merely a statue of a beautiful woman, and (for at least some people) something that carries a vastly greater erotic charge.

Indeed, Paul Bloom’s analytical framework might even give a way of explaining what thaumatophilia is.  It’s someone who gets a real kick out of pushing the boundaries on essentialism, either by imagining scenarios where appearance diverges wildly from essence (human subjects become liquid, or statues, or giant spider goddesses), or we push beyond our essentialist intuitions altogether:  people are happy to be replaced with copies of themselves just to prove a philosophical point, or rejoice in being the fusion of two previously existing people.

A reflection that occured to me after reading Bloom’s book is that a thaumatophile is someone not content merely to be a sexual deviant.  Ve wants to be an ontological deviant as well.

While I heartily encourage anyone interested in the subject of this post to buy How Pleasure Works, you can get good stuff for free on the subject by watching Professor Bloom’s recent Bloggingheads diavlog with Robert Wright. And I also heartily recommend this excerpt in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the pleasures of the imagination, something this site itself is all about and which is not merely and instructive discussion of pleasure, but a fine source of it.

Mad Science non-essential: Mesa of the Lost Women

Having enjoyed myself writing a tale of a woman who turns into a giant arachnid, I thought it fitting to watch a movie about arachnids turned into women.  Is there such?  Of course there is!  Probably there are many, but one of the most readily accessible is a 1953 oddity called Mesa of the Lost Women.

Told largely in flashback, the core story of on Leland J. Masterson, World Famous Specialist (in what exactly it isn’t clear) who answers a summons of the mysterious but brilliant Dr. Aranya, who’s running a laboratory inside a mesa in a Mexican desert.

A mad-lab, it turns out.  Dr. Aranya has figured out a way to transform tarantulas into beautiful women.  There are a few seconds of half-way decent mad-lab footage.

Dr. Aranya is the gentleman on the left in the white lab-coat.  Do you recognize the actor?  Neither did I.  But a little digging turned up that he was someone genuinely Hollywood famous:

Yes, Jackie Coogan.  “The Kid” in Charlie Chaplin‘s The Kid.  He would go on to play Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family television series.   Possibly he did not look back on this movie as the high point of his career.

Masterson, upstanding Pillar of the Establishment he is, throws an absolute fit when he finds out what Aranya is up to.  I really don’t understand what Aranya’s problem is:  it looks like Aranya’s work is succeding brilliantly.  His creations are intelligent enough to help him with his scientific research, can communicate telepathically, can regenerate lost limbs (although we don’t see them do this), and recover in minutes from what would be fatal bullet wounds (we do se this).

Oh, and did I mention that some of the female ones are smokin’ hot?  The most successful in this regard is “Tarantella,” played by Tandra Quinn.  She treats us to a dance in  a cantina, which doesn’t really do much to advance the thin plot, but which at least provides a few more minutes of watchable footage.

Since Masterson (played by Harmon Stevens) refuses to help Aranya, Tarantella gives Masterson an injection which turns Materson (temporarily) into an idiot.  In this condition, he looks eerily like a prototype for Peter Sellers‘s role of Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979).

I mean, maybe it’s just the power of hats, but the resemblance is uncanny.   There are even moments in which the speech mannerisms in Stevens’s performance seem to prefigure those in Sellers’s.

This movie clocks in at 67 minutes and feels overlong.  Such an interesting premise, so little done with it.  Most of the movie has to do with a bunch of very unlikeable characters trying to survive attacks from Dr. Aranya’s creatures.  A useless and intrusive narrator appears at the beginning and the end of the movie to warn us that mankind is outclassed by the insects (tarantulas are arachnids, not insects) and “the hexapods” (tarantulas have eight legs, not six).  It features one of the most headache-inducing musical scores to hit my eardrums ever.

Oh, and even if you can pardon the patronizing way this movie treats Mexican people, we get Wu, an Asian valet right out of Stereotype Central:  fatalistic, servile, and prone to communicate primarily in cornball pseudo-Confucian aphorisms.

There are things that I do genuinely miss about old movies, but characters like Wu are not one of them.

Still, I should think this is worth mining for a few minutes of footage for the mad science completist.  It’s public domain and available at the Internet Archive.

Link here in case the embedding doesn’t work.

Aesthetics of not-the-Fly

The thought of people turning into flies means that now I just have to post this disturbing comix advertisement, to which my attention was directed by Bacchus and which appears on the tumblr blog Comically Vintage.

“She’ll turn into a fly, heh heh.”  Well, that’s at least thematically apropos this week.  My initial reaction to the ad was a lighthearted “it’s Poser for the pre-computer era!”  But there are naturally some darker strains here.

There’s a wealth of weird in this ad, beginning with the strange cast of characters:  Vampirella, Frankenstein’s Monster (misidentified as “Frankenstein” in the ad) and an obscure mad scientist called “Dr. Deadly.”  (Guess his experiments don’t work so well.) I wonder how disturbed we should be that there’s a specific action figure designated as “Girl Victim,” or that these are apparently action figures meant as children’s toys.

The line “Don’t Worry, this is New York, no one will help her” marks a special (and, to my mind, ugly) cultural moment, perhaps an indication of the long shadow cast by the 1964 Kitty Genovese incident, which of course has its own deep comics resonance — awful real life intersecting with popular culture.

In a children’s toy, a reflection of the “New York = hell” meme that would be so common in the popular culture of the 1970s. (One manifestation of which would be the 1974 movie Death Wish, which would mark — you guessed it — the first screen appearance of Jeff Goldblum, so it all comes full circle, yes?)

On a side note:  isn’t Vampirella supposed to be a heroine?  If not entirely benign, then at least certainly not the sort who would help kidnap innocent young women into horrible mad-science experiments.  Am I misssing something here?  Perhaps someone more familiar with the history of the character can set me straight in the comments.

Aesthetics of the Fly III

In the end, Seth Brundle decides he just can’t hack being a human-fly hybrid (one which is becoming more fly than human as time goes on).  And there have been complications, in the form of his girlfriend Veronica getting pregnant (with what it’s not clear).

So Brundle comes up with  what is clearly very much a mad science idea, which is that he is going to use his transporter to fuse himself, Veronica, and baby into a single hybrid, one which he hopes will be more human than fly.

It’s quite an audacious idea, I must say, and perhaps it’s one source of my idea of fusing Maureen Creel and Jill Keeney into a single woman named Jireen.  Unfortunately for science, Veronica is no more keen on the idea of being fused with Brundle than Aloysius was with Jireen, when Jireen proposed exactly that.

It’s a close call for Veronica, though.  She almost gets fused.  And I must say she makes a fetching mad science almost-victim.

Not a movie that really ends well for any of its protagonists.  But it’s a true classic all the same.

Aesthetics of the Fly II

Seth Brundle might not start out mad.  As a scientist he doesn’t want to create new life out of dead tissue or take over the world or shake his fist angrily at God.  He just wants to create a technology that I’m quite certain would benefit humankind if it could be made to work:  a matter transporter.  (And if you don’t think it would benefit humankind, there’s a twenty-hour nonstop flight from Newark to Singapore that I invite you to take sometime.)

Now as we all know, matter transporters have a way of not working quite right when people go through them.   In poor Seth Brundle’s case, a fly gets into the tranporter pod with him and…well, a certain fusion takes place.  Brundle wasn’t careful enough.  But even his recklessness isn’t really mad scientist hubris.  It’s very human scale:  he gets drunk because he (wrongly) suspects that his marvellous new girlfriend Veronica Quaife (played by Geena Davis) is being unfaithful to him.  One thing leads to another, he hops in the pod and that sets in motion some bad things.  Like his slow transformation into…Brundlefly.

Dear reader, judge Brundle not harshly.  How well would you behave if your marvellous new girlfriend played by Geena Davis appeared to be mistreating you?

The impressive thing here is that after he begins transforming (manifested, among other things, by his ability illustrated above to climb walls) is that Brundle does become a good deal more mad-science.  Consider this soliloquy to Veronica:

I seem to be sticken by a disease with a purpose wouldn’t you say?…Maybe not such a bad disease after all…I know what the disease wants.  It wants to turn me into something else.  That’s not too terrible is it?  Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.

I rather like that — perhaps it influenced the sort of speech that Cleo Mount gives on the day of her final transformation on the merits of embracing what you have become, even if it seems monstrous to others.

Alas, since this is a David Cronenberg movie, this is not a cheerful attitude that Brundle will be able to sustain, as I shall discuss in an upcoming post.