Category Archives: Tales of Gnosis College

A Prisão

I wouldn’t want the impression from my insane asylum post that the women-in-prison precedent was unimportant in creating the grim storyline of the State Home for Wayward Girls.  In fact, it was.  And unsurprisingly, too.  The prison of the sexploitationeer’s imagination might not be the voluptuous setting that a harem might be, but it certainly has the potential as a modern setting for “women beyond the reach of normal rules.”  It’s an ideal setting for shower scenes, sadism, and all the girl-on-girl action you can imagine.  Consequently, it’s something of an irresistable subject, and has given rise to its own genre of movies.

One could point to any number of films as an antecedent.  Possibly the best of them was Caged Heat (1974), which was written and directed by Jonathan Demme (a product of the illustrious film school known as “working for Roger Corman“) who would later go on to cinematic glory as the director of Silence of the Lambs (1991), thus circling from sexploitative prison movie to truly scary insane-asylum movie.

But much as I admire Caged Heat’s extraordinary energy and anti-authoritarian spirit, perhaps a more direct women-in-prison movie is the Brazilian A Prisão, which has been released in English as Bare Behind Bars, a movie I knew I would be destined to see when I read the first sentence of El Santo’s review:  “…I picked up Bare Behind Bars because I was in the mood for something sleazy, but seriously— holy living fuck!“

It takes a truly heroic filmmaking effort to bring a reviewer like El Santo to the point of “holy living fuck,” believe me. And A Prisão does not disappoint.

Abuse of medical practice for sexual gratification?  Check.

Helpless prisoners used in white slavery ring?  Check.

Gratuitous shower scenes?  Check.

Brutal and sexually humiliating punishments?  Check.

And something that I would not normally check, but which ends up here anyway (perhaps predictably in this movie) are ventures right out of the normal boundaries of the genre into straight-up hardcore.

Wow.

State Home

A twisted institution like the State Home for Wayward Girls has obvious cinematic precedents in the women in prison film and, more grimly, in movies like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, but it also comes out of a certain dark place with deep roots in my imagination, for I have always had a fear of something that might be described as “the confining institution in which no one gives a fuck about you.”  So while the scenes that take place in the State Home might be a twisted form of erotica, they might also be a product of long-standing fears.  (Perhaps that’s what makes twisted erotica possible.)

As a child, I remember as soon as I acquired the concept of “orphanage” I remember being afraid, really afraid, that if I didn’t behave myself, I might find myself consigned to one.  (I was good.  Believe me, I was good.)  As soon as I understood what a “prison” was I was afraid of it.  Not just of finding myself in one, but of being sent to one and forgotten, so that that I would never be let out.  Don’t even get me started on how repulsive it was to have to register for what the U.S. government euphemistically calls “Selective Service.”

But perhaps, even though the State Home is technically more of a reformatory or juvenile detention center, the institution after which it is most modeled is the insane asylum.  In part, it’s because they are such total institutions where scary things go on.  I own a coffee-table book of photographs by Christopher Payne called Asylum:  Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, which consists exclusively of pictures taken at, or of, abandoned insane asylums.  The photographs are all beautifully executed.  Some of them haunt me.  Some of them downright scare me.

And there’s something particularly mad science about the insane asylum that a prison or the even the Army doesn’t have.  Because while weirdos like me might fantasize mad science, it seems as if twentieth century psychiatry has been busy figuring out ways to practice it, and on many of society’s most marginal and vulnerable individuals at that.  Mad as I am, I’ve never come up with the idea of shooting high voltages through people’s skulls, or lifting up their eyeballs and chopping up parts of their brains with an icepick, or insinuating “memories” of Satanic ritual abuse into the minds of unhappy people, in the name of therapy.

Small wonder that I find a mad science connection to madness.

Inane asylums also figure importantly in the sort of fantastic literature that was the matrix in which my early strangeness was nourished.

Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain’t welcome around Innsmouth. I’ve heard personally of more’n one business or government man that’s disappeared there, and there’s loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.

–H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931)

It was with a strange mixture of fear and pleasure that I discovered that “Danvers” was a real and not a fictional place:  the Danvers State Insane Asylum in Massachusetts.  And it was plenty creepy-looking:

So it was an obvious model for the “old building” at the State Home site in which Strangeways conducts his terrible experiments.

Danvers would become the setting for one of my favorite minor horror movies, Session 9, about a crew of workmen hired to remove the asbestos from the abandoned asylum.  Things go very wrong, predictably.

And thus it’s perhaps just as predictable that things will go wrong with Strangeways.

Up against it

There’s a certain special pleasure in being able to write parallel scenes involving some of American society’s most privileged offspring and some of its least privileged that converge on a single erotic image, in this case that of a naked woman squashed up against glass.

I’ve covered some of this material before in a post I wrote at ErosBlog over a year ago, which was prompted by my discovery of this image of actress Yukari Sakurada, up against the glass in some interesting showertime activities.  I’ll re-run the images for the benefit of the new audience.  They’re bigger this time.

The images are bigger, I mean.

Naturally this brought to mind a scene that stuck firm and fast in my mind since I first saw it as a teenager:

The awe-inspiring Uschi Digard putting her natural endowments to good use in the “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” sequence in Kentucky Fried Movie (1977). A real two-fer, and no I don’t mean in the obvious sense:  I mean in that it served both as a prime inspiration for the parallel scenes in Invisible Girl, Heroine and for the whole concept of Mary Magdalene College.

Well, since we’re into mad science here it means that the research goes on and on, and I’m pleased to note that we can add another image to the collection of inspiration for the scene, this one from Good Luck Chuck (2007).

I’m afraid that even Jessica Alba couldn’t save this film from making Kentucky Fried Movie look urbane by comparison, but we’ll always take what we can get.

IMDB seems to indicate that the actress playing the woman in the shower is named Susan McClellan, but I fear I haven’t more to add.

Dreaming of orgies

The rather exciting, aphrodisiaic-driven Sigma formal that Maureen gets such a close view of of course has its own long pedigree:  another dream of a morality-free zone, a melting world of pleasures taken and given.  The idea of the orgy appears over and over in the world’s erotic art, so it behooves me to give a few examples.  Take, for instance, this exquisite carved-ivory reel from Japan.

In a very different cultural context, consider the temple sculptures at Khajuraho:

One thing you’re supposed to learn about in a modern college education, of course, is other cultures.  The Sigmas and their dates are putting this precept into practice.

Of course, I wouldn’t be a a sex blogger worthy of the name if I at least once post one other very famous orgy scene, this one drawn by the great Wally Wood for Paul Krassner‘s The Realist.

(Click on image for larger version.)

Popular culture is a common area of study in contemporary higher education, too.

_Invisible Girl, Heroine_ now available

I’ve been busy enough with my blue pencil to get the fourth Gnosis College script out, Invisible Girl, Heroine.  Set the semester after the events of Progress in Research and re-introducing some of the protagonists of Study Abroad, it marks Maureen Creel‘s beginning to come into her own as a mad-scientist aspirant.  It also introduces the villain who will keep life dangerous for our Gnosis heroes for this and the next three scripts.  On top of all this, you get to indulge your inner perv with a look into some of the grim goings-on at the State Home for Wayward Girls.  So do have a read, yes?

Aloysius’s reading

The reading material with which the somewhat burnt-out Aloysius is trying to relax near the end of Progress in Research is for real, and has a real antecedent in my own developing erotic consciousness.

Background: way back in my early graduate student days I read a comic drawn by Phil Foglio called XXXenophile that made me very happy.

XXXenophile was merry erotic romp through the conceits of fantasy and science fiction: magic, cloning, time travel, sex with aliens, and so forth. It wasn’t heavy material, and nowhere near as dark as many “adult” comics. It was happy and funny and sexy and fun, and doubtless influenced the brighter side of my own writing about Gnosis.

So as I was writing the Gnosis College scripts, perhaps just after finishing the first draft of Study Abroad, it occurred to me to wonder what good ol’ Phil Foglio had been creating as of late, seeing as he had been such a good influence on me in my impressionable youth.  So I googled around and found out:  a web comic called Girl Genius, which are the adventures of one Agatha Heterodyne in a mad-science, steampunk world.

It was with a peculiar mix of delight and dismay that I discovered that Agatha is a student at an institution of higher learning called Transylvania Polygnostic University.

I didn’t steal the idea, Phil!  Honest!  It’s just that γνῶσις, a Greek noun meaning knowledge, especially knowledge in a higher or esoteric sense, is one of those things in memetic space that many people are just bound to stumble across.

It’s probably a little late for me to make the change now, and I do like the word Gnosis for any number of private reasons.  But I can at least offer the shout out to Phil Foglio.  So here it is.  You can subscribe to XXXenophile online now at Slipshine, and keep up with the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne’s adventures at the Girl Genius site.

Dr. Faustus sez, check it out.

Born again

Both Kitty and Tricia found themselves in very sticky respective situations, but luckily Aloysius was able to improvise a solution that got them more-or-less back to normal.  Among other things, Aloysius proved that having the rudiments of a classical education can come in handy, and not just for the purposes of adding a little seasoning to one’s kinky blog.

The scene is an homage to pregnancy and lactation fetishes, which aren’t really my thing all that directly, but throw in a little spin involving strange machines and syringes and the Apsinthion Protocol, and you have a fun bit of thaumatophilia going on, from my perspective.

I knew of the existence of the fetishes before writing the scene, but I had little idea before doing a little reading up on the subject just how damn much there was on the Internet about it.  And I must confess, that some of it is undeniably appealing.

Hat tip on this one to Due Joy, which struck me as one of the nicer blogs on the subject.

Augmentation out of control

One of the twin crises that have Aloysius running back and forth late in Progress in Research is an attempt at breast augmentation that runs way out of control.

Well, maybe I’m just being immature to notice such things, but even this odd little theme has a history.  One example (which I only vaguely remembered from video-store box art until I finally got hold of and watched a copy, just for your benefit, dear readers) is the 1982 comedy Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again.  I’ll never have those 87 minutes of my life back, but I can report that there is a scene in which a plastic surgeon named Dr. Knute Lanyon gets distracted in the course of a procedure that “injects collagen behind the soft tissue of the breast” or one Mrs. Simpson.  This inflation goes on and on.  Mrs. Simpson actually seems rather pleased with the unplanned result.

As she admonishes Dr. Lanyon “don’t you dare touch a thing…Bernie’s going to love these.”

A better example of this sort of thing can be found in Vittorio Giardino‘s Little Ego (1985).  This is an erotic tribute (Wikipedia suggests “parody,” but I think tribute might be better) to Windsor McCay‘s extraordinary Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905 to 1914).  Nightly, Little Ego has dreams in which all sorts of absurd and wrong and yet highly erotic things happen.  (There is an extended “abduction into a harem” sequence which doubtless influenced the “Odalisque” segment of Study Abroad.)    It is an exquisite piece of work that belongs in the library of any serious collector of comic-book erotica.

In one of Ego’s dreams, she stands before a mirror, wishing she had bigger breasts.  By the merest chance she finds before her a jar of cream the label of which proclaims “increases and firms breasts in minutes.”  “Why not?” asks Ego, trying it out.  And before you know it…

The dream ends with Ego in a rather unusual modeling career.  For a Vittorio Giradino site look here.

Girl, suspended

Invisible Maureen witnesses an initiation at Sigma Epsilon Chi that makes the Omega initiation in Apsinthion Protocol look like a merry little romp (if you discount the SWAT team raid at the end, anyway).  What is going on here?

Well, if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have to go one of those corporate training thingies where you do “trust exercises” like falling backwards and trusting your colleagues to catch you (good luck!) then you might have something of the flavor of it.  Want to prove your trust, Kyra?  Well, here’s an exercise where you can really prove it.

Because what Kyra’s having done to her here, well… Let me put it this way: it can’t plausibly be described as anything other than dangerous.    Unlike humanity’s evidently-endless number of paternalists and pokenoses I regard it as no part of my remit in this world to dictate to other grown-ups what they may and mayn’t do with themselves.   But I am obliged to point out that responsible people more knowledgeable than I about practices like the one depicted just cannot be done very safely.  Autoerotic asphixia is believed to have killed the pioneering cartoonist Vaughn Bodé and the actor David Carradine and might kill as many as 1000 people in the U.S. alone.  So it’s not to be trifled with, by any stretch of the imagination.

But… considering at least just the fictional context here, the danger might be the point.  If you really want to signal to someone just how amazingly comitted you are to some group or cause, wouldn’t the fact that your signal is not just costly, but really scary and dangerous for you, make it all the more effective?