Tag Archives: Aloysius Kim

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.

Fresh from the bath

Tricia knew what she was doing, attempting her seduction of the by-mad-science-enhanced Aloysius by showing up fresh from a shower, clad only in a towel.  It’s a very sexy way to come on, as Pierre Bonnard clearly understood.

Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947), "In the Bathroom" (1907)

(Fine Wet Canvas forum discussion on Bonnard here.)  Needless to say the theme continues right down to the present day, and what better excuse than this scene to throw in a picture of an anime goddess, wrapped in a towel.

Click on the image to see more of the same.

What Aloysius is about to discover, rather to his sorrow, is that even if you go through a thaumaturgic transformation like Den, you are not automatically transferred to a sword-and-sorcery realm of abundant sexual gratification.  In fact, a surprising number of your life-problems stay with you…

Transforming Aloysius

The strange transformation that Aloysius manages to work upon himself with his wire machine might have any number of precedents.

The fact that he’s pierced by a lot of wires from his machine is evocative, perhaps, of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a subject that found great favor with religious artists and is certainly not without homoerotic interest.

Andrea Mantegna (1431 - 1506), _St. Sebastian_ c. 1506

And in another way Aloysius’s self-induced experience might also be thought a version of the BDSM-related practice of needle play.

Closer to home, perhaps, what Aloysius does to himself is live out a pretty common geek fantasy — go from science nerd to Greek god through a miraculous technological (or just miraculous) intervention.

Searching my own memory for antecedents to this scene the one that leaps to mind most readily  is the “Den” sequence from Heavy Metal (1981), in which a nerdy teenager is transformed through the Loc-Nar (a glowing green sphere that represents super-evil, or something) with lightening, (in the best Frankenstein tradition), and then transported to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world far away.

(Heavy Metal definitely deserves to be on any thaumatophile‘s preferred viewing list, since not only does it have this transformation sequence going on, but it also has — at least impliedly — woman on funny little robot sex.)

But perhaps most centrally of all to this scene is that Aloysius has decided to jump in with both feet and adopt, with his “death or glory, here I come” remark the operative philosophy that drove both Moira in Apsinthion Protocol and Iris in Study Abroad.

Must be something in the Pleasant Prairie water supply, I guess.

Picking locks

Aloysius Kim is telling us a plausible story when he tells us that he learned about picking locks from something a guy at MIT wrote.  This is a real-world document, and you can find a copy of it in PDF form here.

I must confess it was  happy day for me when I stumbled on the idea of putting lock-picking into a script as a key idea.  It works as such a fine metaphor for the thaumatophile:

  • Lock-picking is a fine metaphor for penetration, not just in the sense that a pick fits into a lock, but in that it is a way of opening one’s way into unknown but desired spaces.
  • But it’s not just a crude penetration.  Merely ramming a pick into a lock will never do.  You must caress the lock, know, take your time learning its secrets, it, if you are to have any success in opening it.
  • Locks are a technology, and picking them a technological skill, so they fit well into the metaphor of mad science.
  • Entering forbidden spaces is not just a metaphor for sex, but the very aim of the scientist, the mad scientist in particular.  So sex and knowledge and technology all bind into one here.
  • And of course, in a place like Gnosis College, where a bizarre but sexy secret might lurk behind any locked door, it’s a hell of a useful device for advancing plots!