Category Archives: Tales of Gnosis College

The Wasp Woman

One book I was assigned in my freshman English class in college was the then-current edition of The Norton Anthology of  Poetry, the editors of which, doubtless attempting to appear hip to an audience of jaded 18 year-olds like my then-self, chose to include among the works of Shakespeare and Keats and Emily Dickinson a work by one Lawrence Raab entitled “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” which ended with the immortal lines

Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower. You know I always loved you.
Perhaps not “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or even “My Life has stood – a Loaded Gun – “, (or even “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) but it will do.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was a homage of sorts to to one of the greatest non-great producers and directors of all time, to wit one Roger Corman, who in fact did create Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Now perhaps Corman has a reputation as something of a schlockmeister, but if so he was a sclockmeister with a difference.  He had an eye for talent and that combined with a directorial imperative of tell a story cheaply and keep the audience entertained made him into the world’s greatest One-Man Film School:  Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme all pretty much got started out by Corman, and that alone would probably be enough to earn him immortality among filmmakers.

But beyond that, Corman made some surprisingly intriguing movies for the thaumatophile.  One which deserves some serious attention here would be The Wasp Woman (1959),  which stands as a sort of ancestress to Invasion of the Bee Girls,  which as readers of the Thamatophile Manifesto know, is a key influence for Dr. Faustus.  And it’s certainly a subject worth revisiting here, for that reason and also for some others as well, such as the fact that at least one woman’s intimate encounter with a giant member of arthropod persuasion and subsequent…changes…plays an important part in the developing Gnosis plotline.

The core plot of The Wasp Women is easy to summarize.  Entrepreneur and model Janice Starlin (played by Susan Cabot) runs what has hitherto been a successful cosmetics business, trading on her own glamorous image.  But 40-year old Starlin’s fears that her looks are fading, so she stops appearing as the spokesmodel for her own business, with terrible financial results.   Not to despair, though, as rather mild-mannered mad scientist named Zinthrop happens in with a supposed way to reverse aging, using the “royal jelly” of wasps.  Starlin leaps at the chance, giving Zinthrop his own laboratory and putting him to work developing what she hopes will be not just a way of reversing her own aging, but also a way of creating what will surely be an absolutely unbeatable product.   Overriding Zinthrop’s objections, she even insists on making herself the first human test subject, even going behind Zinthrop’s back to up her dosage of the miracle substance when it isn’t working as fast as she would like.

And what do you know?  The mad science thing works.  There’s just one little side effect…

Now as reviewer El Santo points out, this plot inverts a standard mad science narrative.  In that narrative, the insane/evil/overreaching mad scientist abducts or suborns a pretty girl and makes use of her as an experimental subject, until perhaps she is rescued by the hero.  It’s a variant of the brave knight rescuing the fair maiden from the evil dragon/ogre or what have you.  But the plot of The Wasp Woman is really about female protagonism.  It’s Janet Starlin who pushes hard for the mad science:  the mild-mannered but eccentric Zintrhop here is more the voice of conservatism and caution than anything else.  Starlin is the one who desires to be the subject of the experiment, and she jumps in with both feet.

El Santo reads this as a part of a bit of subtle (and subversive) commentary on gender relations in the 1950s:  women weren’t taken seriously in their own right and had to trade on their youthful looks, so Janice Starlin had an intelligible motive in pushing things along so desparately.  I think El Santo’s point is correct, but the focus of my attention is elsewhere.

Let me put it this way:  why is this movie the subject of a post at EroticMadScience.com?  It’s pretty buttoned-up 1950s.  No nudity.  No sex.  The answer is this:  I find an amazing turn on in subject protagonsim in mad science.  I do not know exactly why this is, but Nanetta Rector’s bold and unsolicited demand “Make me a liquid girl” or Maureen Creel’s taking a deep breath and turning on the invisibility machine or Aloysius Kim’s “Death or glory here I come” are real payoff moments for me.  So when Janice Starlin inists that she will be Zinthrop’s first test subject, it’s also a special moment in a special movie.

And thanks to the glories of the Internet, you can see for yourself for free, if you’re so inclined.  A magnificent resource called the Internet Archive is making available a lot of old movies for free streaming and downloading, and The Wasp Woman is among them.  I’ve embedded it in the post below, but if that doesn’t work (it’s fussy with some browsers), you can always visit the relevant Internet Archive page here.

Enjoy!

Another in the lion’s den

Back when I was writing about a certain lion-related scene in Invisible Girl, Heroine that a certain visual image didn’t seem to exist because, of course, there are certain rather pressing safety-related issues involved in creating one.

As my image-delving has brought home to me (which it does dozens of times a week), illustrators enjoy certain freedoms that photographers do not.

Via Janitor of Lunacy.  Better late than never, I suppose!

A different perspective

I must say I’m still not sure what dark crevice of my mind this bit of dialog in Where Am I? came out of:

TAKAYAMA

Don’t you feel, what is the word? “guilt” at having in effect murdered one of your professors?

iris

Thanks to you and your associates, Mr. Takayama, I have already been dead any number of times. It changes one’s perspective.

TAKAYAMA

Ah, an excellent answer, Miss Brockman.

Or even further and odder the moment where Iris gazes on the petrification device provided by Takayama’s mysterious and somewhat sinister organization and contemplates something awful — to most people.

Iris picks up the camera-petrifying device, which is sitting on her desk, and looks into its business end.

IRIS

(to herself)

It has its appeal, doesn’t it?

But it must be said that even these strange and disturbing thoughts have some sort of science-fiction antecedent.

(My source for this image is the blog Posthuman Blues.) If that isn’t as mad-science as it gets,  I’ll eat my rheostat.  I don’t know much about the story, although the Wikipedia entry on author Paul W. Fairman indicates that the story “The Girl who Loved Death” was published in 1952.  Casual nosing around hasn’t yet turned up a copy of the text of the story (did nobody ever love it? — the closest thing to a review I was able to find wasn’t terribly positive) but the cover itself surely speaks volumes.

The 1950s were supposedly a bland and conformist decade, the time of Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, but looking more carefully one finds some very strange stuff back there.

Suborn and petrify

The means through which Iris dispatches Professor Mora once and for all draw on a certain curious A.S.F.R. micro-genre which, for want of a more obvious name, I’ll call the “suborn and petrify panel.”

To make something in the micro-genre, someone takes a picture of a pleasing model (usually female, usually naked or near-to-it) and modifies the image of the main figure (I assume using image software) to make it look like the model’s flesh has turned or is in the process of turning to stone, gold, or some other hard inanimate substance.   One then attaches a micro-narrative to the image, which explains how the figure was gotten out of her clothes in the first place (a pretext, like a modeling assignment or an assignation or just something as simple as taking a shower) and then turned into a statue by some magical or technological means.   Needless to say, this transformation comes as a surprise (probably a rather shocking and unpleasant surprise) to the character depicted.  It’s an intended petrificaton, unlike that which happened to Ashley Madder back in the Apsinthion Protocol, which was an accident.  Sort of.

A large source of these panels can be found at the Medusa Realm here.  One example, from the artist calling verself Eocene, is this.

Kinda twisted, yes?  (Yes! Yes!)  I don’t want to speculate too much about the psychology that drives the creation of images and micro-narratives of this kind.  I do know what drives Iris and her elaborate set-up that leads to doing the same to Professor Mora.  Iris is really mad, and it’s not enough just to dispose of the problem professor.  She wants to humiliate an enemy in the process.

What a process, at that!  Another image from the artist calling verself Rodin.

And Iris’s revenge runs deep, not just because it’s humiliating to find yourself naked when you really shouldn’t be, but because Iris has created a living metaphor:  the process of exposing Professor Mora’s body is at the same time the process of exposing Mora as intellectually fraudulent.  Well done, Iris!

That last is an entry in the micro-genre from the artist calling verself “Drake,” who I think went on to more ambitious projects over at Medusarrific.

In her web

We might feel some pity for Dolly and her fate, but we might feel perhaps less so for Buck.  It would that Cleo Mount came back from her rainforest adventure with both some unusual appetites and some unusual abilities, and Buck is about to find out that sometimes your partner has some unusual plans for your relationship.

That the spiderweb — a complex structure of lines designed to catch and hold living things fast — should show up as a fantasy bondage prop is perhaps unsurprising.  Here is an example:

If you visit the source for this image, you’ll find it’s actually a Harry Potter fanfiction scenario.  It’s a big Internet; I’m sure it’s not the strangest.

Spiders themselves work in quite nicely, playing into a sexual archetype of creatures who lure men to their doom…

…but perhaps do make them happy before the end, as Cleo promises to do to Buck.

The previous two images from the “Spider and other bug girls” board up at Monster Girl Unlimited.  You wantz monstergirls?  They gotz monstergirls. [Update on May 9, 2018: Well, they don’t gots them anymore, as the board has been taken offline for some nebulous ToS violation. What’s here might be all that’s left of it.]

Like I wrote: big, big Internet.  Or should I say, big big web? 🙂

Spider encounter

Well, Cleo Mount, little heard from in the last three Gnosis scripts, is about to re-appear in a big way in Where Am I? It might be worthwhile to reflect that way back in Study Abroad Cleo had a rather…intimate encounter with a rather…gigantic spider.  For a good cause, of course.

All good fun.  And I swear at the time I wrote that scene I was not aware of the following image, which appears to be circulating various places around the web.

As I read the caption in the lower-right of the photo (you can click through to get a larger version), this picture is also in a good cause — AIDS awareness, if I read it right.

Who says mad science isn’t good for something? Even if the the spider, while ginormous, does look a little fake. Perhaps a better looking spider could be found in the image to the left, which illustrates a story called “Spider” by Donna George Storey at The Erotic Woman.  If it appeals, you might want to check out this post at ErosBlog.

Watching the power

It’s no surprise that after her unusual music lesson, Tanya Yip starts developing and acting on a rich inner erotic life. And it’s probably also no surprise that, stumbling on the view of Tanya’s activity, Tom and Dick get a little distracted…

Rojan colored drawing, circa 1930

Seeing another masturbate can quite the experience for the seer, especially if things are going well for the seen.  It can even be quite the experience reflexively:  Susie Bright, dispensing auctorial wisdom for writers of erotica in How to Write a Dirty Story, recommends filming your own face at the moment of orgasm and watching that.

Happily in this day and age you can also readily see the faces of others as well:  there’s even a (subscription) site called ifeelmyself.com dedicated to erotica of exactly this kind — click through on the left to see their (free) promotional trailer.  I promise that you’ll get a little distracted…

Higher superstition

Sometimes the running sores of prior life experience don’t quite heal altogether and thus show up in things we write years or even decades later.

Adherents of the academic movement known as postmodernism, at least with respect to the the poseur attitudes they struck toward science and technology, were the viri that made me break out in such sores for years.  Condescending, glib, smug…and for the most part shockingly ignorant of the substance of what they aimed to criticize. they blighted my academic years and left me with the enduring sense that the academic enterprise was at least in part fraudulent.   So it was perhaps inevitable that I would create a character like Aphrodite Mora and the seminar she runs at Gnosis.

I wish I could point to something erotic about this particular scene, but sadly I find willfully cultivated obscurity something of a turn off.  But I can at least point to a source text for the scene, which is to wit the excellent and witty book shown to the left, especially pp. 54-5 thereof.  Enjoy!