Monthly Archives: October 2010

Fusion organique

Here’s another Elvifrance cover, from it’s Série Blanche, No. 36, which is intriguing for the thaumatophile, because one has to ask, what on earth is going on here?

Are we looking at

  1. A conjoinment fantasy?  That would seem to be one obvious reading of une fusion organique.
  2. A liquid girl story?  Wiktionnaire gives the first definition fusion as “liquéfaction d’un corps par l’action de la chaleur” and there certainly does seem to be a bit of melting going on at the base of the illustration.
  3. Something A.S.F.R.-related even?  Women are not normally silver or gold like that.

As for the grotesque figure looming over them, I haven’t a clue.

It gets stranger from there, because there is some evidence that whatever was beneath the cover you see above was considered too naughty even to be published in France.  The index page for the cover art in the series tells us “Les n°35 et 36 sont des microtirages destinés à la commission de censure, donc jamais commercialisés.”

Which fact, of course, only makes this thaumatophile want it more.

Flatlining

Combing through my memory for influences I came up with a 1990 film, Flatliners (1990), which I remember, just barely, seeing at a matinee showing in some urban multiplex back when it came out.  Something about it, but somehow it was disappointing…so I got hold of a DVD and checked my memory.  Confirmed.  It was an influence, and disappointing in the end all at once.

It starts so well.  Faustian medical student Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland, reminding me how much I like Kiefer Sutherland when he isn’t friggin’ Jack Bauer) concocts a simple plan to explore what might lie beyond death.  With the help of his friends, he’ll induce his own cardiac arrest and then be revived after a few minutes of clinical death to report on his experiences.

He explains his enterprise with a soliloquy that deserves to live forever in the annals of cinematic mad science.  Why is he doing what he’s doing?

nelson

To see if there’s anything out there, beyond death. Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it’s up to the physical sciences. I think mankind deserves to know.

Oh fuck yes! This hits the right notes for the Promethean mad scientist. All for knowledge!

And, with some reluctance on the part of his friends, he jumps in with both feet and pulls it off.

Nelson has some strange experiences that he can’t quite understand.

But I don’t mind, possibly because I’m distracted by all the action taking place in amazing atmospheric settings of creepy medical school architecture and some of the most lovingly-photographed urban decay you can see in cinema.

But it gets better from there.  While the revived Nelson deals with his own exhilaration at coming back form the dead, his friends head out to pick up beer and snacks.   While this is going on, one of the friends and fellow medical students Rachel (played by Julia Roberts) ponders what has happened and comes up with her own imperative.

rachel

I would like to go next.

Nanetta Rector, we have met your cinematic foremother.

But Rachel doesn’t quite get to go next, because she’s outbid by other male members of Nelson’s twisted little team, including Joe Hurley (played by William Baldwin), who spends his (copious, apparently) free time as a medical student as a serial seducer who surreptitiously videotapes his conquests.  His near-death experience consists of an erotic montage which provides the movie’s true Erotic Mad Science moment:

Maybe death is worth it.

Sadly the movie goes south from there, into a story of atonement and personal redemption that couldn’t be more bathos-laden if it had been written by Oprah herself.

My advice to thaumatophiles:  watch the first hour or so of this movie, on a big screen if you can arrange it.  It will worth the price of your ticket.  Then head out and enjoy the remaining hour in a nice cozy nearby bar.  That will also be worth it.

A philosophical digression

This really is a philosophical post, so if philosophy is something that bores or annoys you today might be a good day to wander off, fix yourself a nice beverage of choice, and perhaps enjoy the fine fall weather (or, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, the fine spring weather) and see you tomorrow.

Metaethics might seem like a very strange thing to post on at all in a blog entitled Erotic Mad Science.  Or it might seem very strange until you reflect on defiant pronouncements like the one that appeared below the fold in yesterday’s post in response to an imagined critical interlocutor:

Finger-wagging moralists will doubtless appear to tell me that I need to feel really bad about myself.  (Or would, since I think anyone answering to the description of “finger-wagging moralist” who attempted to read this site would quickly have to retire with a case of the vapors.) But I think I’ll decline this invitation.

“But Faustus,” you might say, “how could you possibly feel free to decline that invitation.  What if you’re just wrong?”  Well folks, it’s like this:  after a long time sitting on the fence on the moral realism versus moral anti-realism question I’ve decided to hop off the fence and spend my time frolicking in John Mackie‘s garden.  Yes, having already come out of the closet as a thaumatophile, I feel a need also to out myself as a moral error theorist.  Like Mackie, I think there are no objective values.  I’m simply unpersuaded by the attempts of people who believe in the existence of objective moral facts to deal with the reality of human moral diversity, and I find the notion of moral prescriptions somehow woven into the fabric of the universe to be impossibly queer.

(Painting Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489-1534), Allegory of Vice, ca. 1530.  Found here.)

Even I can’t bring myself to be so boring as to discuss the matter at length.  One way of getting to error theory (which I personally find persuasive) is explained in a five-step argument by Richard Joyce in his The Myth of Morality (2001).

  1. If x ought morally to φ, the x ought to φ, regardless of whether ve cares to, regardless of whether φing satisfies any of vis desires or furthers vis interests.
  2. If x morally ought to to φ, then x has a reason for φing.
  3. Therefore, if x morally ought to φ, then x has a reason for φing, regardless of whether φing serves vis desires or furthers vis interests.
  4. But there is no sense to be made of such reasons.
  5. Therefore x is never under a moral obligation.

Finger-wagging moralists can therefore go suck it:  their views aren’t true in any possible world.

Readers who are interested in (or enraged by) this argument are urged to follow up by reading either John Mackie’s classic Ethics:  Inventing Right and Wrong or Joyce’s book.  There’s also a fine new just-published anthology called A World without Values edited by Joyce and Simon Kirchin, although since it’s published by Springer you might have to take out a second mortgage if you actually want to buy a copy.  You can also peruse the “Thinkers” links to the right hand of the page for links to Joyce’s website, as well as to that of Richard Garner (under “Beyond Morality.”)  I aim to provide useful information here…

(Correggio, Allegory of Virtue.)

The implications of moral error theory are startling and, if you’re in the right mindframe, liberating.  It’s as exhilarating as losing your religion all over again, as recent moral de-convert Joel Marks has remarked in a recent essay.  And there are even rather cool atheological implications, as Jordan Howard Sobel (may he rest in peace) shows in Logic and Theism.  (Sure, theists are wrong.  That’s old news.  But many atheists — ones like Sam Harris certainly and many other probably — are also significantly wrong.)

Right.  Enough philosophy. Possibly going there was tedious, but it was something I had to get off my chest.  More proper mad science tomorrow, I promise.

Another spider horror

A cover from a bande dessinée adulte series called Luciféra, about which I know very little, except that it appears to have run from 1972 to 1980 and was published by a company called Elvifrance to which French-language Wikipedia attributes “une réputation sulfureuse.” I wonder why.

I run the illustration here not so much because it’s Erotic Mad Science per se, but because it’s a rather fine example that the initiation ritual that Cleo Mount went through in Study Abroad drew on something that’s captured many other imaginations.

Splice

I finally got around to watching Splice over the weekend, which is something that I qua thaumatophile am practically obliged to do.

I must confess I was rather less impressed by this than I had hoped to be.  Hotshot bioengineers and lovers Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) create a creature out of genetic material from a variety of different animals — including humans.  Well, one specific human, actually.  There’s an appealing Frankenstein-like element here — take things from many things to make one thing — as well as an appealing element of rebellion, since the creature is made in secret and in defiance of corporate bosses (Simona Maicanescu plays the corporate chieftain with an icy self-possession that makes me positively squee).

I have to admit that the creature they produce, whom they name “Dren” does, as a child, make one of the cutest l’il monsters you’ll ever see.

 

And I guess there’s a sense in which there’s mad science going on in this movie.  There’s a willingness to flout moral conventions, lobs of laboratory equipment, and the “science” itself is appropriately crack-brained.  And Dren grows up fast, which leads to something either squee or squick, depending on your tastes in such matters.

But somehow this movie didn’t really grab me.  There are hints at mad science motivations:  Elsa had some sort of miserable childhood and there are hints that her motivation for making Dren might have something to do with compensating for this (in part), although this stab at the mad scientist as Wounded isn’t really played out satisfactorily.  And there are the obligatory Promethean recitations (think of all the good our discoveries could do for mankind!) although these often have the feel of rationalizations, and half-hearted ones at that.   When things spin out of control (as they inevitably do), the supposedly brilliant and strong-willed characters act disoriented and helpless.  What the movie really feels like is Our Dysfunctional Relationship played out in a mad science setting.  I don’t have any objection to entertainment about Our Dysfunctional Relationship, but really, isn’t there enough of that already?  A proper mad scientist needs to be more decisive, willing to cross the line from normality to Beyond-Good-and-Evil Land with verve and commitment.

I’ll confess, though, that the way the movie ended did redeem it for me, because Elsa does finally grow a pair, uh, grow the beard, uh…jump in with both feet.  I won’t give away how the movie ends, except to hint that it owes more to Humanoids from the Deep than the people who made this movie would probably like to admit.  So you might as well go watch it.

Someone making his own

A commenter on my recent series “on making your own” remarked that he enjoyed playing with images and was indeed making his own. Is he ever! I followed the link to his tumblr blog Processed Skin and found some amazing things. What caught my eye most was this image, probably because it suggests the results of an erotic mad science experiment.

But this was not the most remarkable thing there.  What was really striking were images generated out of symmetry, sometimes bilateral and sometimes radial.  The result is a set of erotic images that are simply like nothing else I’ve ever seen, and I wasn’t born yesterday.  So it may well be worth your time to visit…