The four-sided triangle

Sometimes you get lucky and find a movie that’s not all that well regarded critically but which hits all sorts of notes for you, and a recent discovery, The Four-Sided Triangle (1953), was that for me. An early release of Britain’s mighty Hammer Film Productions, it sure does a lot for the thaumatophile, it’s a personal identity porn forerunner to Hammer’s Frankenstein Created Woman. And it pleases me all the more because my learning of it came from a different post at Erotic Mad Science, one presenting my then-latest search after tube girls.

Plot background: In the sleepy English village of Hardeen impoverished boy genius Bill, the son of the local squire Robin and blond beauty Lena grow up together as best friends. Bill comes under the tutelage of the kindly but slightly dim Dr. Harvey. Lena is in time taken “back to America” by her mother (a good writing cover for the fact that adult Lena will be played by American actress Barbara Payton and won’t really have the accent), while Bill and Robin go off to Cambridge to learn science. Bill and Robin will return to Hardeen and set up shop in an old barn, working on a mysterious mad-sciency project funded by Robin’s father Sir Walter.

Lena returns to Hardeen a little later, a broken woman very young: she’s tried many things and failed and returned essentially to die, as she tells a shocked Dr. Harvey in a line whose nihilistic spirit might have come from Iris Brockman.

Lena

I thought doctors were supposed to understand how little life really matters. There are many scapegoats for our sins and failures, and the most popular is Providence. I shan’t blame anyone but myself. I didn’t ask to be born, so I have the right to die.

(This is perhaps a little scary in hindsight for a reason in addition to the obvious one, given that Barbara Payton was at this point in her career in a downward alcoholic spiral that would lead to her own death at 39.)

Well, Dr. Harvey is having none of that, so he re-introduces Lena to her two childhood friends. Things go well, as Lena rejoins them as an assistant.

It turns out that Bill and Robin are working on a technology that allows them to reduplicate material objects with perfect fidelity. After much effort they succeed. Unfortunately, things don’t go so well on a personal front. Love walks right in and wrecks destruction, as love has a way of doing. Bill and Robin both fall in love with Lena. Repressed-but-sensitive genius Bill dithers over expressing his feelings, while self-confident upper-class Robin has no such hesitation. Robin proposes marriage to Lena, who accepts happily, leaving Bill devastated.

Soon Dr. Harvey finds Bill back in the laboratory, this time using his reproducing technology to recreate not just inanimate objects but living animals and…can we see where this is going, fellow thaumatophiles? Yes we can. Bill is planning to make a duplicate Lena for himself.

And here is where The Four-Sided Triangle takes a more interesting turn. Instead of following a more traditional mad-science script in which Bill would kidnap Lena and have his way with her, Bill instead explains what he wants to Lena, and tender-hearted Lena agrees to take part. Not that I want to dis the traditional plot, which certainly has its appeal, but at least this time I like the way this one was written so much better. Do you remember, dear readers, my post on The Invisible Woman?

Let’s reflect on what Kitty has implicitly gone for here: “So, you want me to take off all my clothes, step into this machine that has hitherto never been tested on a human being, zap me with heaven-knows-what, and turn me invisibile? Sure, I’m game!”

I think I’m in love.

Well, I think I’m in love all over again (perhaps I’m about to get destroyed, who knows?).

So Lena climbs into the apparatus. Switches are thrown, lights flash, and so on. Do you see the eccentric arrangement of the glowing tube in the background? The people who made this film knew their mad science cinema. They’re paying tribute to German Expressionism here, to Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or my name ain’t Faustus.

And of course, there’s the tube girl thing going on here as well. Although contrary to tube girl tradition, and for that matter the “girl in the machine” precedent set by Kitty Carroll herself, she leaves all her clothes on.

Now why is that? Doesn’t wearing clothes somehow make the whole duplication process a little more complicated? This is dangerous stuff, people, and we need to do things right!

Oh wait, there’s that placard that I now remember from the beginning of the movie:

Okay, I get it now.

So anyway, the duplication process works once the duplicate is revived and Bill finally gets the love of his life.

Bill names the duplicate “Helen,” and they set off for a happy holiday together.

Only things don’t work out that well, because Helen is psychologically identical with Lena, and that means she still loves Robin. Uh oh. After a suicide attempt, everyone agrees to a radical measure — electroshock therapy to try to wipe Helen’s memory and give her a clean start. Significantly, Helen herself agrees to this. This is one amazing mad-science woman.

And maybe things work, but at this point the movie chickens out and runs away from its premise. An electrical short happens, the lab burns down, and Bill and either Helen or Lena are lost to us.

That’s unsatisfying, but the movie still has a lot going for it, because it’s the cinematic playing-out of the old dream, brought to me originally through the study of philosophy, and discussed in my Thaumatophile Manifesto:

And he was also sometimes thinking about “…start with some pretty object of desire, gin up a few cloning-and-growth tanks, some superduper neurosurgery, and then maybe there will be…two objects of desire, at least one of whom might be free from certain social obligations, and..” Needless to say, the Inner Mad Scientist was chortling with delight at the prospect.

Some themes are just destined to be encountered, over and over.

Bonus animated gif from Bill and Helen’s “vacation” below the fold.

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Frankenstein and personal identity

We’ve encountered Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) here at Erotic Mad Science before, but surely if any movie would deserve a second post here, it would be this one. And not just because it has a swell mad-lab setup, though it certainly does.

The deeper reason is that this movie constitutes a fine early example of personal identity porn with an erotic twist. An explanation: Baron Frankenstein in this movie has moved beyond just trying to make creatures and is now trying to defeat death by using a sort of force-field to keep the soul from leaving the body at death. (Okay, it’s a lunatic premise but of course this is mad science we’re talking about here.)

Meanwhile in whatever little burg or dorf in which Frankenstein has set up shop, young man Hans is framed for the murder of a tavern-keeper with connivance of the actual murders, a trio of loathsome young dandies. He’s guillotined at the edge of town — thus providing useful experimental material for Frankenstein.

But what to do with Hans’s soul when he’s trapped it? In a human tragedy that works out well for mad science, when Hans’s lover Chritina sees his execution she promptly drowns herself. More material for Frankenstein.

What he creates is a composite creature, Hans’s soul somehow transferred into Christina’s repaired (and improved) body. Quite an advance on the old poetic conceit of two lovers united in death! Her first sentence on revival is that most philosophical of questions: “Please…who am I?”

And indeed, who is she? She’s not a composite like Jireen, the owner of the memories of both her progenitors. But at the same time, she seems in some ways continuous with both of them, as her subsequent actions will show.

The resulting being is quite the seductress, and proceeds to use this ability to execute a program of revenge on the young dandies, giving us in the audience something to ogle.

Definitely not a movie to miss for the thaumatophile.

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…

Conjoinment

At the end of Gnosis Dreamscapes, Aloysius attempts a Hail Mary play with the Apsinthion Protocol to try to save the lives of Jill and Maureen, both gravely wounded in their encounter with Madder’s thugs.

As so often in mad science, what happens isn’t exactly according to plan, and what results is a conjoinment of Jill and Maureen. More personal identity porn

Now with a little bit of effort you can find a fair amount of conjoinment material out there. This example is found at Gammatelier, which has a lot of this sort of thing, very fetchingly done too.

But of course this art, though perhaps appealing, isn’t quite what’s going on in Gnosis Dreamscapes. Jill and Maureen fuse completely to make a single individual, not just a sort of conjoined non-twin (or triplet, or what have you). Artistic representations of that more complete process are harder to find, probably because a single fused being looks rather a lot like just another human being.

But there is at least one fine example of a complete fusion. Back in the 1990s John Byrne , a prolific comic book artist who has worked on more superheroes than most people even know exist (website here) created a short-run series called Babe. Babe was created when five separate women were fused together through some weird process involving alien technology and arcane forces (can you hear the thaumatophiles panting?), creating a being geometrically stronger and tougher (and arguably, more comic-book outlandish) than any of the five women put together.

Eventually the situation got defused and we get to see Babe’s five component women:

Though in a later series Babe was re-created. The scene in which one of her component women vanishes to recreate Babe should have a familiar feel to readers of The Apsinthion Protocol.

I don’t think Carolyn actually melts away — panels in the previous number suggest she spontaneously dematerializes/is teleported away while showering, in a scene reminiscent of one that happens in Mars Needs Women. (If you remember that scene, or indeed anything else in Mars Needs Women, you have my sympathy.)

And as for Maureen and Jill? As the last intertitle says…to be continued.

Personal identity porn

As an ardent thaumatophile, I cannot but love the idea of a person scanner, and so does Iris, apparently.

The idea of a scanner that can take your information for re-creation of you later on somewhere else out of new matter is one that has played an important role in thinking about the metaphysics of personal identity. The beginning of Chapter 10 (“What We Believe Ourselves to Be”) of Derek Parfit‘s Reasons and Persons contains a famous example.

I enter the Teletransporter. I have been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks. The machine will send me at the speed of light. I merely have to press the green button. Like others, I am nervous. Will it work? I remind myself what I have been told to expect. When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness, and then wake up at what seems like a moment later. In fact I shall have been unconscious for about an hour. The Scanner here on earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. It will the transmit this information by radio. Traveling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars. This will create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine. It will be in this new body that I shall wake up.

Happily this process works, and Parfit’s narrator goes through it many times, until one day…

Several years pass, and I am often Teletransported. I am now back in the cubicle, ready for another trip to Mars. But this time, when I press the green button, I do not lose consciousness. There is a whirring sound, then silence. I leave the cubicle, and say to the attendant, “It’ not working, what did I do wrong?”

“It’s working,” he replies, handing me a printed card. This reads, “The New Scanner records your blueprint without destroying your brain and body. We hope that you will welcome the opportunities this new technical advance offers.”

The attendant tells me that I am one of the first people to use the New Scanner. He adds that, if I stay for an hour, I can use the Intercom to talk to and see myself on Mars.

“Wait a minute,” I reply. “If’ I’m here I can’t also be on Mars.”

Someone politely coughs, a white-coated man who asks to speak to me in private. We go to his office, where he tells me to sit down, and pauses. Then he says “I’m afraid we’re having problems with the New Scanner. It records your blueprint just as accurately, as you will see when you talk to yourself on Mars. But it seems to be damaging the cardiac systems when it scans. Judging from the results so far, though you will be quite healthy on Mars, here on earth you must expect cardiac failure within the next few days.”

The attendant later calls me to the Intercom. On the screen I see myself just as I do in the mirror every morning. But there are two differences. On the screen I am not left-right reversed. And, while I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak.

Get all that? Ponder it in your head for a moment while you savor another EroticMadScience picture of a scanner at work (though this one is real, not fictional, as you’ll see if you click through on the link).

The point of Parfit’s example is to sharpen (and challenge) our intuitions about what it means to be ourselves and survive as ourselves. There are many different possibilities, the most salient of which are physical continuity and psychological continuity. Since normally your consciousness and your body don’t separate, we don’t experience challenges of this kind in reality.

But Iris is smart. She knows that the two might be separated. Being forced to decide between the two possible theories is at the core of her disagreement with Professor Gregg in the prologue to Study Abroad. Gregg subscribes to a physical continuity theory of personhood, which is why he thinks that the permanently-vegetative “Tabitha Sibling” (fictitious, but arguably based on a real case) has the same moral status as “you or me.” Iris advances contrary to this the psychological continuity theory of personhood.

There is a problem, of course, which is that if we take a hard line on psychological continuity we might end up with a rather big bullet to swallow, to wit, that if we are in the position of Parfit’s narrator, we shouldn’t at all regret the fact that we are about to die of heart failure in a few days, because the guy on Mars is us, psychologically continuous with us, will have conscious experiences like ours, will carry on our projects, love our spouse, rear our children and so on just like we would have done.

Head spinning yet? Oh, but I’m not letting you off quite that easily. The same issues are entertainingly discussed further in a brilliant short film by John Weldon, called “To Be.” Watch at any time: unusually for something here at Erotic Mad Science, it’s completely SFW. As to whether it’s safe for your peace of mind, I make no warranties.

The awesome thing about Iris is that, unlike most philosophers, she is willing to put everything on the line, her very existence as a test of the theory she espouses. She (with a little boost with tolmemazine, perhaps? — that in itself poses an interesting philosophical problem) shows herself to be an absolutely fearless bullet-biter. This is experimental philosophy à l’outrance.

Just speculating here, but I’d bet that if in the real-world philosophers were half that courageous, philosophy would command much more respect.

ADDED 11 p.m. The woman in the scanner shot is apparently a hoax that appeared on both Gizmodo and Drudge Report so my “real” claim turns out to be wrong. But I at lesat hope the entertainment value remains, and, I think, the larger philosophical point raised by the post is unimpaired.