Category Archives: Thaumatophilia

Live-action tube girl…Perfume

With a few exceptions, there aren’t that many live-action as opposed to fantasy-art tube girls, and given how tricky that must be to do as an in-camera effect, I’m not too surprised.  But I have found one that’s a real doozy.

It’s from an astonishing movie called Perfume:  The Story of a Murderer (2006).   Set in mid-eighteenth century Paris and Grasse, it is the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille a man with a transcendent sense of smell.  Unfortunately for the maidens of Grasse, the smell that Jean-Baptiste finds most transcendent is that of a young woman, and this, in turn, leads him to become a serial killer who attempts various means of extracting and preserving the scent of women.

What he’s attempting here is an experiment to extract and preserve the scent of a young woman using a technique actually used by real-world perfumers called enfleurage.  Result:  tube-girl.

For such an unpleasant subject director Tom Tykwer sure gives us a lot of angles.

Although this particular method does not succeed, Jean-Baptiste eventually does come up with a means of extracting the scent of young women.  He often refers to this as their very essence or soul.   A familiar notion to readers of the scripts at Erotic Mad Science, I should think.

CORWIN

Yes, Anwei. The beautiful young Anwei, as liquid essence. Liquid girl! Feel..

Corwin tries to press the phial into Nanetta’s hand.

corwin

…she is still warm.

Even the visual image seems right to me. While a lot of critics seemed pretty put out by Perfume, you’d better bet that Dr. Faustus was mesmerized by it.

And when you combine the essences of many girls together, you get perfume just as magical as you do in The Apsinthion Protocol. Though just what the magic is, you’ll have to watch this rather squicky, scary movie to see.

On a sidenote, I have to say that a perfumer’s workshop, at least as created in this movie, is very much in the mad-scientist’s-laboratory, what with all the jar and phials of essential oils and distillation apparatus.

Yes, that is indeed Dustin Hoffman as a perfumer Baldini, giving Jean-Baptiste some of his first lessons.  Look later in the film for Alan Rickman in a tense, understated performance as the father of one of Jean-Baptiste’s would-be victims.

Another naughty robot

…or Desperate Housewives Twenty Minutes into the Future.  Found on this art blog.

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She looks like she keeps a remarkably clean kitchen, but I guess that’s easy to do when you have a humanoid service robot, which frees up your time for, well…

Artist Nerijus Čivilis (from Lithuania, I’m pretty sure) not only has the mad science theme down, but what I take is his self-portrait (reproduced on the left) indicates that he even has the mad science look down.  That’s really swell.

Weird Science pwns me again

What was it over at Weird Science?  Did the spirit move Bill Gaines about once a year to shout across the office to Al Feldstein, “Al, we really need another story about a melting woman.  Write one up and get Jack Kamen to draw it, stat!”

Well, maybe so.  From Weird Science #6 (March/April 1951):

Similar conceit to that of “Something Missing,” down to the agreeable fetishist’s detail of her melting out of her clothes.

Here’s the context, taken from the story “Divide and Conquer.”  A middle-aged scientist is working on a technology — in this case, some sort of drug — that causes living organisms to dissolve, divide, and re-form.  Consistent with the principle of conservation of mass (Science!) the re-formed organisms will be copies of the original, but half-sized unless they do so in the presence of an appropriate nutritive medium.

Our scientist is married to a beautiful woman and, because he lives in the EC fictional universe, it’s a horrid marriage.  She’s cheating on him and plotting murder.  She discovers to her considerable sorrow that it’s pretty tough to murder someone who can copy himself, and it’s even tougher when the surviving copy returns to exact retribution with his copying formula.

(Ah, suggestions of comic book nudity. And created by science! And of course entirely-necessary-as-part-of the-plot-nothing-exploitative-here-please-move-along.)

Of course, since there are now two Glorias, this isn’t just the liquid girl fetish in action, but an early example also of personal identity porn.  The question of which is the “real” Gloria is just as salient here as the questions of which is the “real” Iris or the “real” Jill in the Gnosis College scripts.

Sometimes, I’m almost afraid that someday I’ll be perusing Weird Science and come across the trope of a whole college full of reckless, oversexed students and a faculty which regards them as experiment fodder…

Continuing the shrinking thought

We’re more in the terrain of Aliens Behaving Badly than Mad Science here (though obviously there’s a lot of overlap between the two), but the image of the shrunken Professor Quartermass from yesterday’s post brought to mind a gender counterflip, involving women shrunken by a collecting alien and placed in strange-looking jars for transport back to the homeworld.  The images can be found on the Minimizer’s animation and video page:

The ultimate source here is a movie called Bad Channels (1992).  The Minimizer’s Shrinking woman and tube girl tropes are present, although since the captured women hit the sides of the tube and try to escape, or at least emote, A.S.F.R. isn’t.

Yet another tube girl

Were I sane, I might weary of the theme.  But I ain’t, so I don’t.

She appears to be conscious of her fate, and not particularly pleased about it.  It’s the work of Marcos “Hogwarts Prefect” Pashias, and found here, along with much of his other interesting art. [Faustus update, May 13, 2018: The original link to the art appears to be broken, but at least one version of Pashias’s page is preserved in the Internet Archive.]

Not so Amazing Transplant

Strange filmmaker Doris Wishman (1912-2002) certainly deserves a place of honor in the pantheon of weird cinema.  The unusual fact that she was a woman filmmaker who worked in both sexploitation and hardcore (the latter featuring the transcendent Annie Sprinkle) would get her in the door here.  But beyond that, ho would have thought not just to make a nudie-cutie movie, but try to make a sci-fi nudie-cutie movie (really, see Nude on the Moon [1961]).  Or not just to cast a voluptuous star, but the cartoonish (as in 73″) Chesty Morgan in not one but two movies.  (Really!  There’s Deadly Weapons [1973] in which Chesty uses her endowment as a means of assassination, and Double Agent 73 [1974], in which she has a camera installed in, well, you can guess where.)

So obviously it’s worth a look-in to see if there’s some mad science in the œuvre of this unequaled cinéaste.  There is, and it’s depicted just above, even if it is a little disappointing.

The Amazing Transplant is the story, told mostly in a curious unravel-the-mystery flashback structure, of one Arthur Barlen, a shy young man who blackmails a surgeon into transplanting his deceased friend Felix’s superior (supposedly, we don’t really get to see) male member onto him.

This little bit of mad-ish science certainly helps Arthur with certain confidence issues.  For one, it gives him the strength to proposition his sort-of girlfriend, a young woman who appears to enjoy sitting around playing the zither in the nude.

Unfortunately young Arthur has to live with a cinematic conceit that goes back at least as far as The Hands of Orlac (1924), which is that along with transplanted organs comes transplanted bits of personality, and it turns out that the late Felix was characterized by a rather specific and powerful fetish which poor Arthur is ill-equipped to handle.  Things do not go well…

It’s probably best to read this movie as a sort of commentary on the fetishistic nature of male sexuality, at least as perceived by Wishman.  It’s also an opportunity to look at some really hideous interior design.  The doctor’s office, for example:

I swear, James Lileks could have put together an entire extra chapter of his book on how truly awful interior decoration was in the 1970s just by taking screenshots from this movie.

The mad science quotient is surprisingly low given the movie’s medical-horror premise.  We get some very simple operation scenes, and little else.

Probably not a hit unless you’re a Doris Wishman completist or really into movies about penises.  Something Weird does offer an edition.

Wicked Wanda’s Mad Scientist

Some of the older readers might recall that back in the 1970s Penthouse magazine ran a adult comics feature called Oh, Wicked Wanda! Scripted by already-famous novelist Frederic Mullally and rather lovingly drawn by comics artist Ron Embleton, Wanda as the story of the utterly depraved and fabulously wealthy Wanda von Kreesus, who lived in a Schloss on Lake Geneva.  Together with her blond nymphet-of-all-work Candyfloss she traveled the world having adventures and collecting..specimens to bring back to her castle (and giving Mullally plenty of opportunities to engage in political and cultural satire along the way).

Should we be surprised to find that Wanda has amidst her servants her own mad scientist?  Of course not!   His name is Homer Sapiens and he’s depicted below, along with another of Wanda’s staff, the soulful jailer J. Hoover Grud.

Homer is preparing to convert the two victims in the background, “Brigitte Bidet,” and the “self-appointed British pornophobe Cyril Bluestocking,” into some sort of living sculpture at the behest of Wanda. Something more for A.S.F.R. fans!  And what’s more, there’s also Wanda’s dead father, preserved under green glass to watch for all time the depravity in what was once his Schloss.

Pretty twisted, but I can’t help but wonder if these weird tropes weren’t originally inspired by that key influence on my inner life, The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist.  The Moon Squad had a thing for preserving the dead in erotic poses:

Well, as it happened, weird reality got there first.  Sometime around 1832, as it happens. Jeremy Bentham, who has as good a claim as any to be the founder of my philosophical order, had himself preserved and mounted post-mortem as an inspiration to the future.  He called the result an auto-icon.

That’s the mad science spirit, Jeremy!  (Thanks to this blog for the image.)

If you’re ever visiting University College, London, be sure to stop in and say hi.

Origins of tube girl meme?

I’ve done a lot of posts here at Erotic Mad Science about what I call the “tube girl meme,” the visual depiction of a pretty woman, often nude or scantily clad, sealed in some sort of transparent tube (often suspended in fluid) for the purpose of preservation, experiment, or some perverted purpose — let your imagination run free there.  It’s clearly a pretty prominent visual motif in the mad science genre and really takes off with pulp covers after the Second World War.  But where did it come from?

I’ll offer a conjecture, and kindly keep in mind that it’s only a conjecture so if any of you who read this blog know of an earlier or better one by all means please comment.   It goes back to a locus classicus of cinematic mad science, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

In this film, Dr. Septimus Pretorius, one of Frankenstein’s former teachers, demonstrates to Frankenstein a set of experiments in creating life, in this case Pretorius’s creation of a set of homunculi that live in cylindrical glass jars. It’s a pretty good effect, given that it’s 1935.

Among these are a dancer, (who, Pretorius laments, will only dance to Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song”)…

..and, perhaps more on visual point, a mermaid.

Origin of the concept?  Maybe.  I’m willing to bet that all those pulp artists and the public that patronized their work both watched Bride of Frankenstein a lot.

Bonus erotic trivia: The mermaid in the jar is played by Josephine McKim, a swimmer who won a gold medal in 1932 Olympics and who was the body double for Maureen O’Sullivan during her famous pre-code “nude swim” sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

Is there video? You betcha!

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Of course we have also visited the contributions of Olympic swimmers to erotica on this blog before.