A Ph.D. in horribleness!

It’s perhaps inevitable that I’d be posting on Joss Whedon‘s freaking awesome musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, so here we go. Neil Patrick Harris plays Billy/Dr. Horrible, a mad scientist who aspires to join the Evil League of Evil. Also to work up the courage to ask out the cute girl he keeps seeing at the laundromat. He is opposed by his nemesis Captain Hammer, played by Nathan Fillion from Firefly (and who appears here to be having the time of his life hamming it up in this production).

I won’t try to summarize the story much (a detailed summary can be found here), but there’s all kinds of awesome going on, even when Neil Patrick Harris isn’t singing. On my own preferred interpretation (obviously not the only possible one) the story is a mad scientist’s Bildungsroman where Dr. Horrible goes from something like this:

To this:

Awesome. Plus he has an evil laugh, a time-freezing ray, a death ray, and a “Ph.D. in horribleness.” Since I also have a Ph.D. in horribleness (my death ray needs a little work, I’m afraid), I can kinda relate.

Now one perhaps might wonder what this musical has to do with erotic mad science in particular. (I mean, aside from the obvious fact that one of the principals here is Neil Patrick Harris, who by his very presence brings Teh Sexy.) To be sure there are some cute superhero groupies as well:

But perhaps the real erotic mad science connection comes in at a deeper thematic level, which is the mad science is motivated by erotic frustration. Dr. Horrible might be able to build a death ray, but his nice-guy alter ego Billy can barely bring himself to strike up a conversation with girl in the laundromat. And when he does, he finds out that she’s fallen for Captain Hammer, who isn’t just a nemesis: he’s also pretty much a complete jerk as well. The science nerd shoved out of the way by the jock.

We’ve seen this before a lot. Remember:

That’s from Metropolis, the ur-mad science movie. The woman represented is Hel, the love interest that Rotwang lost to wealthy industrialist Joh Frederson, a source of unending grievance for Rotwang of course.

There seem to be two cardinal mad-science motivations: Prometheanism and Woundedness. (Note that they are not exclusive: they might both be present in a single character.) The Promethean I’ll discuss in later posts. The Wounded is someone turned to mad science because of some terrible frustration or failure or lack. That lack need not necessarily have anything to do with erotic frustration or romantic failure. But it seems to turn out that way surprisingly often. And Dr. Horrible like Rotwang is a prime example thereof.

In a way Woundedness is the flip side of much of what Erotic Mad Science is about: instead mad science leading to erotic gratification, it’s about erotic frustration leading to mad science. Mad science is the revenge of the nerd or vis compensation. One either uses it to get power that gets the girls (in song Dr. Horrible fantasizes about winning his dream girl’s heart by presenting her with “the keys to a shiny new Australia”) or one simply end-runs the tedious romantic process entirely: hence all those tube girls and created women and sexy robots. Why venture into the minefield of humiliation that is human courtship when you can bypass it with your shiny jetpack or matter transporter ray?

There’s another Erotic Mad Science theme here, but it involves a spoiler, so I’ll run it beneath the fold.

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On making your own III: Fetish Fuel Mining

From the title of the post, what did you think I had in mind?

(Found on a pop-up laden site I shan’t link to.)

Actually it was something a little different.

However strange you are erotically, you’re almost certainly not alone. There are people like you, and they have been creating stuff in the past. And now it’s buried. It might be buried because it really was erotic in some way and the creators had to get it past the censors somehow. Or it might be buried because it isn’t erotic to many people but it is to some. Or it might just be lost, because it’s stuck inside popular culture that isn’t really very interesting or very good on the whole and so is largely forgotten.

But whatever it is, it’s out there, and if you’re diligent you can go out and dig it up and bring it back to life. If you’ve been following Erotic Mad Science for any length of time you’ll have noticed my doing it a lot. I’m into this weird thing with mad science. The evidence is strong that there were a lot of people in the past who were as well. But of course they were weird and unacceptable and so they had to get their crap past the radar somehow if they wanted it to see the light of day.

Crap past the radar: The tube girls are a good example. If you were a sci-fi or fantasy editor working in mid-twentieth century America, you sure couldn’t get away with putting a naked girl right on the cover of a magazine. But a tube, properly constructed, has some interesting properties. It’s transparent, but on obvious way of constructing one involves segments held together by metal rings. So you can put a naked girl in one, and of course her naughty bits will just happen to align with the metal rings. And of course, the tube will play a part in the story: she’s in cryo-sleep! Being abducted by horny aliens! Undergoing a transformation experiment! Presto: your porny art fantasy slips past the censor and onto the cover, which I am sure is most gratifying for both the viewer and for you. Before you know it, there are tube girls everywhere.

Half a century later, a weirdo like me an go collecting them in service of his own ends.

Forgotten fetish fuel: The “personal identity porn” thing is probably not unique to me (I’ll admit it’s weird as a subset of my weirdness) and people who were making movies like The Four-Sided Triangle or Frankenstein Created Woman probably didn’t have weirdos like me in mind when they were filming (although you never really know). They were making movies to make money. Like most pop culture, they were mostly forgotten in a while. But they were not gone, and they were there for me to mine up. Watching these movies, and then being to explain what I think is interesting about them from a thaumatophile perspective, allows them to live again under a new interpretation, which is itself a form of creative act.

Of course, to perform that creative act, finding the little gems of eros amidst the dreck of mostly-dead popular culture can be a dirty business.

(Found on this Russian-language site.)

But don’t let that deter you. The amount of material in the world is massive. I’m willing to be even in my small, strange corner of the erotic world I’ve barely scratched the surface of what there is to know. So get Googling! And then share your finds and your new interpretations with the world. What you find will amaze you.

And arouse you.

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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Rotwang art

The great technologist C.A. Rotwang is with little doubt the most interesting character from Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis (1927). He has the most complex motivation and the deepest backstory of all the characters therein, and unsurprisingly he’s a principle literary hero for this site, celebrated with his own commissioned image. The coming-to-be moment of his creation, the Maschinenmensch, appears at the top of every page here. So I’m delighted to be able to link to a post of Rotwang concept art by Nathan Heigert.

If you’re a fan of this theme, it’s worth checking out the entire post and indeed, Heigert’s entire blog of Metropolis art.

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.

Aesthetics of the Fly III

In the end, Seth Brundle decides he just can’t hack being a human-fly hybrid (one which is becoming more fly than human as time goes on). And there have been complications, in the form of his girlfriend Veronica getting pregnant (with what it’s not clear).

So Brundle comes up with what is clearly very much a mad science idea, which is that he is going to use his transporter to fuse himself, Veronica, and baby into a single hybrid, one which he hopes will be more human than fly.

It’s quite an audacious idea, I must say, and perhaps it’s one source of my idea of fusing Maureen Creel and Jill Keeney into a single woman named Jireen. Unfortunately for science, Veronica is no more keen on the idea of being fused with Brundle than Aloysius was with Jireen, when Jireen proposed exactly that.

It’s a close call for Veronica, though. She almost gets fused. And I must say she makes a fetching mad science almost-victim.

Not a movie that really ends well for any of its protagonists. But it’s a true classic all the same.

Aesthetics of the Fly II

Seth Brundle might not start out mad. As a scientist he doesn’t want to create new life out of dead tissue or take over the world or shake his fist angrily at God. He just wants to create a technology that I’m quite certain would benefit humankind if it could be made to work: a matter transporter. (And if you don’t think it would benefit humankind, there’s a twenty-hour nonstop flight from Newark to Singapore that I invite you to take sometime.)

Now as we all know, matter transporters have a way of not working quite right when people go through them. In poor Seth Brundle’s case, a fly gets into the tranporter pod with him and…well, a certain fusion takes place. Brundle wasn’t careful enough. But even his recklessness isn’t really mad scientist hubris. It’s very human scale: he gets drunk because he (wrongly) suspects that his marvellous new girlfriend Veronica Quaife (played by Geena Davis) is being unfaithful to him. One thing leads to another, he hops in the pod and that sets in motion some bad things. Like his slow transformation into…Brundlefly.

Dear reader, judge Brundle not harshly. How well would you behave if your marvellous new girlfriend played by Geena Davis appeared to be mistreating you?

The impressive thing here is that after he begins transforming (manifested, among other things, by his ability illustrated above to climb walls) is that Brundle does become a good deal more mad-science. Consider this soliloquy to Veronica:

I seem to be sticken by a disease with a purpose wouldn’t you say?…Maybe not such a bad disease after all…I know what the disease wants. It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.

I rather like that — perhaps it influenced the sort of speech that Cleo Mount gives on the day of her final transformation on the merits of embracing what you have become, even if it seems monstrous to others.

Alas, since this is a David Cronenberg movie, this is not a cheerful attitude that Brundle will be able to sustain, as I shall discuss in an upcoming post.

Aesthetics of The Fly I

I’ve recently been rewatching David Cronenberg‘s 1986 version of The Fly and have been reminded of its influence in my consciousness — something worth a series of posts, I think.

The doomed scientist-protagonist of The Fly Seth Brundle (played in this version by Jeff Goldblum) doesn’t actually start out as what I would call a mad scientist. Eccentric, certainly, and perhaps a bit socially inept. But he’s clearly brilliant, and working within the system, mostly.

But the trappings are in place even before things get weird. I love the space that Brundle has chosen for a combined laboratory/living space. An exterior view:

A repurposed factory or warehouse. Probably very influential on my consciousness. I grew up in an old industrial town and there were a lot of these around. I’m sure to most people they just seemed like eyesores, but to me even very young they had a poetry about themselves, seeming to places of mystery or concealment of secrets. I was well primed to receive images of this space.

The interior, with its odd mix of research and living space, does not disappoint.

Between this and what I saw in childhood, you have the seeds for the settings of Corwin’s off-site laboratory in The Apsinthion Protocol, the improvised hideout of Commencement, and the shocking mad-lab of “Teuthology.” (The last bit coming soon…)

If I ever win the lottery (which is unlikely, since Dr. Fautus knows enough about expected value theory not to play the lottery, but kindly bear with the cliché here) I am so getting myself a place like this.

Of course, the aesthetics can only be improved by the presence in the setting of Jeff Goldblum.

Not clear that you can in any lottery where you can set yourself up with this. If only Dr. Strangeways’s human duplication equipment hadn’t gotten itself imploded…

Casablanca/Thaumatophilia

One might wonder whether it’s really worth spending so much time on Casablanca in a Gnosis College script, even if it is a key seduction technology. Aside from that, does this movie have much to do with erotic mad science?

Well, eros first. IMHO, the many close-up images of Ingrid Bergman are among the most beautiful images of a woman’s face ever captured on film, including those seen of her in the climactic scene watched by Rob and Jireen.

Looking at these images I’m sometimes hard-pressed to find a word that expresses what I feel, at least in English. There is a verb in Russian which I’ve encountered from time to time, налюбоваться, which means something like “gaze on in awe and wonder,” (the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary suggests “gaze on to one’s heart’s content”) so maybe that’s what I’m looking for.

But is there mad science? Not directly, as far as I can tell. But let’s look at a pair of members of this movie’s talented cast. Here is Claude Rains, who in Casablanca plays the corrupt but ultimately redeemed French police officer Captain Renault.

And where else have we seen (should we perhaps say, “seen?”) Claude Rains? As the Invisible Man of course. And human invisibility turns out to be a rather central device in the Gnosis fictional world.

(Image source: Movieforum.com.) Readers may amuse themselves, if they wish, trying to think of any A-list Hollywood actor who would be credible as both Captain Renault and the Invisible Man.

Consider now also Conrad Veidt, who plays the Nazi villain of Casablanca, Major Heinrich Strasser. (An irony, perhaps, in light of the fact that Veidt was himself a refugee from Hitler.)

Where have we seen him before? Well, it turns out that Veidt earlier in his career had played the part of Cesare, the hypnotically-controlled somnambulist in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920). (Personal note: Caligari is one of the few movies I have watched that inspired me to immediately go back to the beginning of the DVD I saw it on and re-watch. The only other one I can recall is Hayao Miyazaki‘s Spirited Away. Go figure.)

(Image source: FilmFanatic.org.) Hypnosis put to dubious use. Also a theme we’ve seen before.

The mad science is out there. You just have to look.

Note: Don’t groan about the presence of a weird-looking Russian verb in the post. If you’re a fan of a certain anime series (and I’m sure many of you are)…

It’s right there in the theme music for the title sequence (albeit as an imperative rather than as an infinitive).

Aнгелы и демоны кружили надо мной
Рассекали тернии млечне пути
Не знает счастья только тот,
Кто его зова понять не смог…

Налюбуйтесь, налюбуйтесь,
Aeria gloris, Aeria gloris.

Angels and demons circling above me
Swishing through the hardships and milky ways
The only one who doesn’t know the happiness
is the one who couldn’t understand his call

Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glories, heavenly glories

Worthy of its own minor tribute in Commencement.

And perhaps not all that far from Casablanca; both do seem to draw on a certain spirit of tough-guy stoicism.

La Marseillaise

Jireen goes after Rob with seduction technology that works: movies. And she picks a particularly powerful one.

I can say that I’ve actually had the experience of being in a college movie auditorium where everyone got up and sang the “Marseillaise” at the appropriate point in Casablanca, and about that experience this I can say. If you haven’t been lucky enough to have it, go out and have it. You won’t be sorry. It’s a true testimony to the power of song.

An extended clip of from the classic source:

So all together now:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.