Tag Archives: Cleo Mount

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!

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.

Why Tondelayo?

The linguistic appropriateness of a name like “Tondelayo” for a young woman from a bumiputera group somewhere on Borneo can certainly be questioned (although we should note that she tells us that it is not her real name).  But I wanted a tribute to a particular steamy namesake, the character played by Hedy Lamarr in White Cargo (1942).

Hedy has gotten tributes in the Gnosis College world before, and she well deserves it.  In Ecstasy (1933) not only did she do a very bold nude scene:

but she also created what might well have been the first depiction of female orgasm in a “mainstream” movie.

But were it just for those things alone Hedy might not deserve the multiple tributes.  What really puts her over the top is that in 1942 she, together with bad-boy composer George Antheil, took out one of the first patents for spread-spectrum radio communications — the technology your mobile phone uses.  (They were supporting the war effort by trying to create a torpedo that could be guided by wireless transmissions.)  The government took the patent and sat on it, but at least in 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy a special award in recognition of her pioneering effort.

I mean, can you think of any Hollywood sex symbol working today who you could see as an engineer? Talk about deserving tribute from Erotic Mad Science!

And never forget — the sexiest organ a woman has…is her brain.

Steamy locales

Cleo’s adventures abroad invoke a different line of wishful thinking about possible abroads free from morality.

As far back at least as Denis Diderot‘s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) the dream of a tropical paradise free from labor, free from politics, and largely free from clothes has loomed large in the imagination of Greater Europe.  It is probably not hard to see why, above and beyond the fact that the tropics are fecund and also a place in which you can comfortably run around naked (indeed, might often be more comfortable if you are).  They also had the advantage of being very remote, and therefore a convenient literary topos for writing a critique of your own miserable, prudish, Christian society — the more remote the place, the harder it would be for your beautiful theory to be slain by unpleasant facts.

Small wonder that Tahiti ended up being the place Paul Gauguin chose to flee to, and whence he provided us with some of the most beguiling art in service of the myth, even if the myth turns out not to really have had much going for it.

Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903), "Annah, die Javanerin" (1893)

Of course in time this tradition of “tropical paradise” would be given a sick twist in cinema in the form of the Italian jungle cannibalism film: a subject which I’ve  written on briefly before.  Here the morality-free zone once imagined as a Rousseauian paradise is replaced with one imagined as a Sadean hell. Witness for example Janet Agren here in deep erotic peril in Mangiati vivi (1980).

No cannibalism for lucky Cleo, though.  The people she meets are altogether more benign.

Being eaten has to wait for another character entirely…

Pretty pretty spider

P.Z. Myers over at Pharyngula and Jerry Coyne at Whyevolutionistrue both have fine weekend traditions of coming up with pictures of exotic fauna to brighten up everyone’s weekends, and I couldn’t be happier than to follow in such illustrious footsteps, at least occasionally.

So for those of you who care about such things (which I am sure is all of you), the little spider that jumps on Cleo and so terrifies her is a member of a real species, Telamonia dimidiata, and she certainly is a pretty one (the spider, I mean, though certainly Cleo is too):

I picked this species in part precisely because the female is so pretty, but also because it was the subject of an enteratining e-mail hoax a while back about its crawling out from under public restrooms in Florida and fatally biting people.  Status of the myth:  false, as this discussion at snopes.com show.  Still, good as the sort of thing out of which fiction can be made.