On this, the busiest travel day of the year here in the United States, I find an illustration which prompts us to ask whether we are seeing a sex machine, a mad-science experiment of some other kind, a medical exam or…refueling?
Found here.
Added 10:30 GMT:Or maybe it’s a prototype for those new TSA inspections. Happy traveling everyone!
Nicolas Roeg‘s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) contains little or nothing in the way of mad science (it does contain copious nudity and sex), but re-watching it recently on a Criterion Collection DVD I did note a certain kind of theme that seems to have influenced me over and over — something that might be called Overcoming the Fear.
A very brief plot summary might help. An alien world is dying, devastated by planet-wide drought. One of the planet’s inhabitants, played by David Bowie sees terrestrial television broadcasts depicting a planet brimming with water and resolves to try to get some for his homeworld. He comes to earth, where he takes the name Thomas Jerome Newton. Acquiring a series of patents on his world’s superior technology, he becomes a vastly wealthy industrialist as part of his plan to build a spaceship back to his home planet.
Scouting a research location in New Mexico, he meets a lonely hotel worker (played by Candy Clark) named Mary-Lou. Mary-Lou falls in love with the enigmatic stranger.
Eventually Thomas and Mary-Lou fall into a marriage-like relationship, which entails cohabitation. And marriage-like fights as well. When Mary-Lou bitterly denounces her lover as “an alien,” he decides to remove the prostheses which make him look human and reveal his native appearance.
This leads to one serious freak-out on the part of Mary Lou.
Eventually she masters her fear.
And makes her way back to the bedroom where the naked Thomas is lying.
A strange scene occurs, intercut with somewhat hallucinatory footage suggesting erotic between human woman and alien.
It doesn’t quite all work out (it is very hard to follow what in the movie is happening on a literal level), but there still something very compelling about what happens here. Think Nanetta observing the Apsinthion Protocol for the first time, or any number of implied backstories of other characters in the Gnosis College canon (for example, I’ve never written the Iris backstory in any detail, but I’ll bet her reaction to a proposal of being reduced to dinner and resurrected was not to squee), and you’ll see what I mean.
Oh, and as a bonus, there’s a hint of liquid girl going on in that last screencap, isn’t there?
The Internet is so large, and so diverse, that you cannot help but encounter images that match up with your own visual inspirations, even when those inspirations were arrived at independently. Consider this…
…which I found here. It’s not just erotic mad science. It shares a visual theme with a specific scenario which I wrote down from Invisible Girl, Heroine.
INT. THE GOLDEN TURNTABLE ROOM – DAY
Strangeways and Colleen enter the adjacent room.
A circular area on the floor in the middle of the room is shiny and gold. A trapeze-like bar hangs from the high ceiling in the middle of the circular area. On the edge of the area is a podium
COLLEEN
It is so warm in here, doctor.
STRANGEWAYS
It should help you feel less shivery and relax, yes. Now could you please disrobe completely and step into the middle of the gold circle on the floor?
COLLEEN
Uh…
STRANGEWAYS
It is alright. I am a doctor, after all.
(gesturing toward a basket next to the wall)
You can leave your clothes right there.
Strangeways returns to making notes on his clipboard.
Colleen hesitates, then undresses, placing her clothes in the basket, then steps into the middle of the gold circle.
Strangeways looks up, smiles, and puts his clipboard aside.
STRANGEWAYS
Excellent. Now, do you think that you could reach up and grasp the bar above your head.
Colleen does so.
STRANGEWAYS
Good. Now just take a deep breath and let it out slowly…
Strangeways flips a few switches on his podium.
There is a HUM. The gold circle begins to rotate slowly.
A gold latex-like substance begins to cover Colleen’s hands and feet, then work its way up her legs and down her arms.
An alarmed expression appears on Colleen’s face.
COLLEEN
My hands and feet…they’re stuck!
Well, there’s at least some resemblance.
More of a “case girl” than a tube girl, but still mad sciency, and something that makes me wonder what the backstory might be.
Found at the Japanese-language site Adult Beach.
You know that your message about Erotic Mad Science is getting across when two of your readers independently draw your attention to the same photograph that appeared in Life magazine back in 1961.
This device was apparently created by Hughes Aircraft. That fact that it gets featured in a major American publication suggests that it was — or was perceived to have been — a perfectly innocent picture. Our useful mechanical servant is helping a nice lady zip up her dress — a common enough task for the clothing of that era which she would have difficulty doing herself.
Of course to a certain modern eye this is Fetish Fuel — that zipper is moving down. And those arms — so tentacular in appearance. Oh dear…
Which of course leads me to wonder — just how many people were in on the Fetish Fuel joke back in 1961? (I have a similar wonder about the 1930s shrink wrapped girl noted at Bondage Blog a while back which, curiously, also drew on Life magazine.) It can’t have been no one, surely…
An astute reader brought this paperback cover (and, of course, the novel underneath it) to my attention:
I haven’t been able to find the time to read the whole thing, but the first paragraph seems very promising indeed.
AT THE ORGASM RESEARCH FOUNDATION Dr. Roger Prong, who was known by some foundation employees as “a bloody Peeping Tom”and a “horny old voyeur” was in fact very scientific, or so he always insisted as he watched the girls having orgasms.
Was there ever an opening paragraph that was more erotic mad science than that?
And I’m pretty sure that it is that same Robert Anton Wilson who achieved such great and deserved fame as the co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I mean, how many of them can there be, really?
Not really mad science, but certainly in the spirit of the season, an Elvifrance cover.
Happy Halloween and pleasant dreams to all!
Would the season be complete without a beautiful woman being turned into a statue? I think not.
Squick or squee!
From a visual Halloween party staged by that magnificent obsessive Drake.
Back to mad science, I offer a pretty evil-looking experiment.
Squick or squee!
Provenance unclear, but I found it at this photoblog.
