I don’t prowl the Internet at random. There’s always a question in my mind, and the question is who else is like me? Who else has arrived at the strange visions that swim through my head? It surely can’t be the case that I’m alone, can it?
He gives us a little one-page comic story called “Life Mushroom,” and in it we have we have a cheerful protagonist who’s fully willing to go the same distance as Iris Brockman did in her Study Abroad adventure. We meet her right in the first panel (I apologize for the cropping, but it’s the best I can manage):
Her confidence in the life mushroom is supreme, as she shows in the very next panel:
And if you want to see how it all turns out (and don’t squick easily), then by all means look at the full version at Hitori9’s blog. She’s okay. I promise!
And there’s something very tasty coming for dinner as well…
Readers of The Apsinthion Protocol should remember this being from a scene that starts with something like this:
Two more tentacles, very slender ones, also move through the water.
ANWEI
Try extending your hands slowly, as we discussed.
Moira does so. The slender tentacles move forward and gently brush against her fingertips.
Moira gingerly extends one hand further. A tentacle slowly wraps around the tip of one one of her fingers.
MOIRA
Strange feel. Not slimy or scaly, but sort of…sleek-feeling if that means anything.
The tentacles move forward and begin entwining themselves around the fingers of both of Moira’s hands.
And proceeds, perhaps inexorably to something like
MOIRA
After all…oh…it makes sense…ah..to go…oh my…where the most nerve endings are.
ANWEI
Moira, this is leading…
MOIRA
Yes, yes, yes. I know. And it’s wrong, and it can’t be and I won’t…
Moira opens her legs on the stool. A larger phallic tentacle moves between them.
MOIRA
And I mean I will…I mean…
(moans deeply)
…oh…inside me…
The tentacle thrusts back and forth
And still further thence as Moira has quite the encounter, observed (for SCIENCE!) by Professor Corwin and Anwei, who you can see in the watery background here. I can see no objections: after all, they’re all consenting adults.
Well, maybe the tentacle creature isn’t. Did anyone think of that?
While it’s topical, I should note that the same Japanese “flexible-invisible” blog that was the source for yesterday’s melting girl art post also has a cute invisibility-transformation sequence. Since the ladies of Apsinthion Protocol have been getting a lot of artistic attention lately, I thought it only fair to throw some to invisible girl Maureen Creel.
Uh, to be sure Maureen wasn’t quite that voluptuous in my own imagination but okay, I can roll with this.
Also one thing that Maureen clearly understood from the get-go that perhaps this girl hasn’t figured out yet is…
…that if your invisibility tech turns only you invisible you’re still going outlined by the clothing you wear.
Though I guess if you had her outlines there might be good reason for keeping them!
And as for the fine blog that gives us all this — it has been added to the blogroll, because there’s plenty of interest there. Its name appears to be 消えます、溶けます、捻れます。 (“Disappears, Dissolves [something]”) according to not-too-useful Google translate. If anyone wishes to propose a better reading, by all means please do so.
Last week’s new Apisinthion Protocol art and the recent post on Altered States got me inspired to go looking for some additional melting girl art and look, I found me some. One example:
You know, maybe TV is better in other countries. The German television program Liebe Sünde(literally “Love Sin”) which broadcasts on the VOX channel provides us with an example of a live action tube girl, which is rare but not unknown. One screencap:
The weakness of human memory means you’re often surprised when re-encountering your influences.
I saw Ken Russell‘s movie Altered States(1980) sometime when I was in high school, I think by passing myself off as a student at a local college and attending one of its film society’s screenings (I did that a lot — it made adolescence vastly more bearable). And I recalled thinking at the the time that it was weird and sort of interesting and then largely forgot about it at least consciously.
Just this weekend I re-watched for the first time and realized that it must have lodged a lot more deeply in my subconscious than my conscious mind.
William Hurt played a psychology professor named Edward Jessop who was obsessed with the idea of finding deep secrets from the human evolutionary past — perhaps the universe’s entire past — buried within the self. He thought he could do this by inducing various altered states of consciousness. One of his initial techniques involved the use of sensory deprivation tanks, which meant a real mad-science setting. His initial experiments were with student volunteers, and then he began trying out the apparatus himself.
A psychology professor who’s something of a mad scientist who experiments on his students using a fluid-filled tube. Looks like that was something that would be popping back out of my own consciousness later on. In addition, we get to see an example of William Hurt as a tube guy.
Later on Jessop will travel into central Mexico and experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms. He has an erotic vision of his wife Emily, played lusciously by Blair Brown.
In the course of the vision “Emily” is covered by some sort of blowing sand or dust, which gives an A.S.F.R. feeling to the whole vision.
That’s something that wouldreturn to my erotic consciousness later on.
Putting the magic mushroom juice together with the isolation tank produces very strange results — a man who begins dissolving into something like primal protoplasm:
And eventually into a swirling vortex of liquid, before being reconstituted into his normal self, or at least, as normal as his self ever really gets.
I could probably go on mining this movie for plenty more if I really wanted to try to decode all its drug imagery (I can’t help but note that crucifixions are common). But for now I’ll just leave with a bit of dialog that left me drop-jawed. It’s Emily early in the movie, talking to Jessop.
emily
You don’t have to tell me how weird you are. I know how weird you are. I’m the girl you bedded the past two months. Even sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant which can be very nice but I sometimes if it’s me that’s being made love to. I feel like being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God. And you are a Faust freak, Eddie. You’d sell your soul to get the Great Truth.
And she’s delivering this remarkable speech in the course of proposing to Jessop that he marry her. Talk about a girl willing to jump in with both feet!
You might recall a warning from a few days ago that when you go fetish fuel mining in old pop culture you might get a bit dirty. That’s sort of how I feel about today’s post, but somehow I can’t resist the underlying material all the same.
The character of Fu Manchu is one of the earlier characters one might call a supervillain. He was created in 1913 by the English novelist Sax Rohmer (1883-1959), and he must have scared the willies out of contemporary audiences as the embodiment of some rather deep fears. As Rohmer’s protagonist Nayland Smith described him in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu:
Imagine a person, tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.
Yes, I’ll agree that racism really burns here — a topic I’ll be returning to shortly, I promise. But for the moment, I’d like to focus on Fu Manchu as an early cinematic erotic mad scientist. Obviously, here was a subject that Hollywood could not resist.
The instance I have in mind here is The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). The plot revolves around the struggle between a group of British archaeologists and Fu Manchu over possession of a mask and scimitar that supposedly belonged to Genghis Khan. Fu Manchu believes that with them he can be recognized as the new Genghis Khan and rouse the masses of Asia to rise up and wipe out the white people of the world. Because of course everyone in Asia can instantly recognize centuries-lost artifacts as genuine on sight, right? Hey, I didn’t say the plot had to make any sense. What I’m here for is the erotic mad science.
Which we get in satisfying doses, this being a pre-Code production. Fu Manchu is in fact an accomplished scientist, possessing at doctorates in “philosophy from Edinburgh, law from Oxford, and medicine from Harvard.” (In spite of this, not a single white character in the movie addresses him as “Dr. Fu Manchu.” That’s a jerk move on their part. I’ll take the opposite tack and pay him the respect one man of learning owes another and include his honorific for the rest of the post.) He’s played by Boris Karloff, who, while he doesn’t look noticeably Chinese, at least can be said to have appeared on this site before. Also, he gets the mad science thing going good, testing a candidate scimitar with the power of SCIENCE.
And Dr. Fu Manchu also has a daughter, Fah Lo See, played by Myrna Loy, who’s also not noticeably Chinese, but at least is fun to watch. Especially when she’s supervising the flogging of one of the English guys, which I must say, she really gets off on.
You’re a long way from Nora Charles here, Miss Loy. There’s a single YouTube clip which shows both exciting events, which I’ll attempt embedding here.
We also get to see Dr. Fu Manchu show off his surgical skills when he injects flogging-guy with a mind control drug. I’ve seen a commenter who identifies the scene in which it happens as “the most homoerotic surgery scene I’ve ever seen.” I must say I’m hard-pressed to disagree.
The guys standing around in short-shorts are big-muscled African men. Since the action for this film is set deep in the interior of China in 1930s, I’m not really sure exactly how Dr. Fu Manchu managed to recruit them. Perhaps there was some sort of special agency for that. I’m also not sure why they have to stand around like that, although they sure look cool doing it.
So anyway things spiral downward for the British Empire as Dr. Fu Manchu manages to capture the pretty blond (of course) girlfriend of our hero and set her up for a blood sacrifice (of course).
Would you all have maidens like this for your wives?
(pauses while the assembled crowd roars approval)
Then conquer and breed! Kill the white man and take his women!
Well, naturally we can’t have that now, so Nayland Smith escapes from the overly-elaborate, easily-escapable deathtrap which the genius but not-genre-savvy Dr. Fu Manchu has placed him in and saves the day.
By using an energy weapon created by Dr. Fu Manchu to massacre a lot of Asian men who haven’t really done anything. We sure know where this movie’s value system is.
Yeah. Dirty, and not in a good way.
But of course, the awfulness can’t really stop there. There’s a concluding scene on a ship back to England, in which Nayland Smith has a conversation with a steward who’s just arrived to inform everyone that dinner has been served.
nayland smith
Good evening.
steward
(in an affected “Chinese” accent)
Good evening, sir.
nayland Smith
You aren’t by any chance a doctor of philosophy.
The Steward laughs and shakes his head in negation.
nayland smith
Law?
The steward shakes his head again.
nayland smith
Medicine?
steward
I don’t think so, sir.
nayland smith
But are you sure?
steward
Oooh yes. Very sure.
(laughs again)
nayland smith
(shaking the Steward’s hand)
Then I congratulate you.
steward
Thank you.
(walks off, banging a gong and calling out)
Dinner is served!
Yeah, yeah. I get the point the filmmakers clearly wanted to make here. Educated and competent Asian: bad. Servile and comical Asian: good. And if you don’t believe me, take a look at the steward himself.
Do you think that there were no Asian actors in 1932 with decent dentition available, or was this some sort of casting choice meant to drive home a certain point?
You know, I’m beginning to sympathize with Dr. Fu Manchu’s point of view. If I had to live in a world full of people who took this who think my role in life is to be servile and hold my life cheap because of my ethnicity, I’d be seriously pissed off as well. I wouldn’t go for genocide (I think — just how attractive are the enemy’s women again?), but a delivering a serious collective ass-kicking would be a formidable temptation. Evidence, perhaps, of Dr. Fu Manchu as a mad scientist motivated at least some by woundedness.
I don’t doubt that many, perhaps most, readers of Erotic Mad Science have at some point seen Tim Burton‘s The Nightmare Before Christmas(1993). And those of you who have seen it would be surely not forget Sally, an animated ragdoll created by Halloweentown’s resident mad scientist (though perhaps in context he isn’t so mad) Dr. Finklestein. She served as a love interest for the main protagonist and, I must say, I can think of no other cinematic character who makes stalking like quite so adorable.
Now in the context of the actual movie, Sally seems to serve Dr. Finklestein as a sort of combination ersatz daughter/houseservant. But I recently discovered a concept art sketch of Sally…
…and that suggests that perhaps creators had some rather other ideas about the reason why Finklestein might have created Sally. Guess that old erotic mad science really is everywhere.
An additional thought: when Sally doesn’t work out as planned for Dr. Finklestein, he creates a new woman, whom he animates by removing half his brain and donating it to her. “Think of the brilliant conversations we’ll have!” Hmm. This act rather reminds me of something. I wonder if Derek Parfit was serving as a consultant to Tim Burton…
It’s perhaps inevitable that I’d be posting on Joss Whedon‘s freaking awesome musicalDr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, so here we go. Neil Patrick Harris plays Billy/Dr. Horrible, a mad scientist who aspires to join the Evil League of Evil. Also to work up the courage to ask out the cute girl he keeps seeing at the laundromat. He is opposed by his nemesis Captain Hammer, played by Nathan Fillion from Firefly (and who appears here to be having the time of his life hamming it up in this production).
I won’t try to summarize the story much (a detailed summary can be found here), but there’s all kinds of awesome going on, even when Neil Patrick Harris isn’t singing. On my own preferred interpretation (obviously not the only possible one) the story is a mad scientist’s Bildungsroman where Dr. Horrible goes from something like this:
To this:
Awesome. Plus he has an evil laugh, a time-freezing ray, a death ray, and a “Ph.D. in horribleness.” Since I also have a Ph.D. in horribleness (my death ray needs a little work, I’m afraid), I can kinda relate.
Now one perhaps might wonder what this musical has to do with erotic mad science in particular. (I mean, aside from the obvious fact that one of the principals here is Neil Patrick Harris, who by his very presence brings Teh Sexy.) To be sure there are some cute superhero groupies as well:
But perhaps the real erotic mad science connection comes in at a deeper thematic level, which is the mad science is motivated by erotic frustration. Dr. Horrible might be able to build a death ray, but his nice-guy alter ego Billy can barely bring himself to strike up a conversation with girl in the laundromat. And when he does, he finds out that she’s fallen for Captain Hammer, who isn’t just a nemesis: he’s also pretty much a complete jerk as well. The science nerd shoved out of the way by the jock.
We’ve seen this before a lot. Remember:
That’s from Metropolis, the ur-mad science movie. The woman represented is Hel, the love interest that Rotwang lost to wealthy industrialist Joh Frederson, a source of unending grievance for Rotwang of course.
There seem to be two cardinal mad-science motivations: Prometheanism and Woundedness. (Note that they are not exclusive: they might both be present in a single character.) The Promethean I’ll discuss in later posts. The Wounded is someone turned to mad science because of some terrible frustration or failure or lack. That lack need not necessarily have anything to do with erotic frustration or romantic failure. But it seems to turn out that way surprisingly often. And Dr. Horrible like Rotwang is a prime example thereof.
In a way Woundedness is the flip side of much of what Erotic Mad Science is about: instead mad science leading to erotic gratification, it’s about erotic frustration leading to mad science. Mad science is the revenge of the nerd or vis compensation. One either uses it to get power that gets the girls (in song Dr. Horrible fantasizes about winning his dream girl’s heart by presenting her with “the keys to a shiny new Australia”) or one simply end-runs the tedious romantic process entirely: hence all those tube girls and created women and sexy robots. Why venture into the minefield of humiliation that is human courtship when you can bypass it with your shiny jetpack or matter transporter ray?
There’s another Erotic Mad Science theme here, but it involves a spoiler, so I’ll run it beneath the fold.
