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!

Mad science essential: Re-Animator

I started writing this post because I was pondering Dolly Gibson’s misadventures in Where Am I? and wondering about possible inspirations for a storyline in which a head is separated non-fatally from a body. Something did come up, and I hope it’s of interest, but I have to get there with a bit of a digression.

Now normally decapitation is a means of death, is indeed almost symbolic of death most inescapable. And death means the end: in Hamlet’s fictional universe it is the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns. But in mad science, and therefore in the Gnosis universe, death has become something more of an exotic tourist destination, as Iris Brockman herself could tell you from lived (?) experience.

And that’s no coincidence. Dead matter turned living is a core topos of mad science. We can go all the way back to Ovid‘s Metamorphoses for the appropriate inspiration if we like.

Sanctius his animal mentisque capacius altae
deerat adhuc et quod dominari in cetera posset:
natus homo est, sive hunc divino semine fecit
ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo,
sive recens tellus seductaque nuper ab alto
aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli.
quam satus Iapeto, mixtam pluvialibus undis,
finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum,
pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram,
os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre
iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus:
sic, modo quae fuerat rudis et sine imagine, tellus
induit ignotas hominum conversa figuras.

I’m not as good at Latin as I really ought to be, so I’ll rely on A.S. Kline‘s prose translation:

As yet there was no animal capable of higher thought that could be ruler of all the rest. Then Humankind was born. Either the creator god, source of a better world, seeded it from the divine, or the newborn earth just drawn from the highest heavens still contained fragments related to the skies, so that Prometheus, blending them with streams of rain, molded them into an image of the all-controlling gods. While other animals look downwards at the ground, he gave human beings an upturned aspect, commanding them to look towards the skies, and, upright, raise their face to the stars. So the earth, that had been, a moment ago, uncarved and imageless, changed and assumed the unknown shapes of human beings.

Prometheus takes dead matter and makes it living, in forms that resemble the very gods themselves.

And unsurprisingly, when Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein, (Project Gutenberg text here) the locus classicus of mad science, she will subtitle it The Modern Prometheus. Once-dead matter becomes living.

And then when H.P. Lovecraft choses to parody Frankenstein, he will create a story called “Herbert West–Reanimator,” (Wikisource text here), in which the mad science gets even madder, and in which of course a decapitation features prominently and then, of course…

…exploitation filmmakers get hold of the concept and push it still further, resulting in an extraordinary mad science movie.

Dead matter becomes living in an amazing way. And of course, there is a head in a dish on a desk.

But that’s not all. While Ovid is lofty mythology and Mary Shelley is high literature and even Lovecraft writing a story that seems full of his own neuroses (his story contains racist elements that really burn, I’ll have you know), kickass filmmaker Stuart Gordon is clearly going in his own direction here — a direction that brings the whole dead-matter-is-living and decapitation-is-not-the-end thing right into Dr. Faustus territory with what tireless reviewer El Santo identifies as “what could be the most disturbingly vile sexploitation-horror set-piece of its era.”

Yes. And it wouldn’t be EroticMadScience if we didn’t dwell on that a little, at least below the fold.

Continue reading →

One sharp young woman

When John Samson makes a crude (and racially loaded) pass at Michiko after his own dream experience, Michiko retorts with a reference to someone named “Abe Sada.” And who was Sada?

A real person, it turns out, whose activities were in fact significant enough for her to have a movie made about her, just as Michiko says. (The historical Sada is depicted in the picture to the left, after her arrest in 1936.) The movie is indeed called In the Realm of the Senses, made in 1976 by Nagisa Oshima. Sada is a former prostitute who starts a torrid affair with her boss, an inn-owner in 1930s Japan. In the movie she’s played by Eiko Matsuda.

Sada conducted a torrid affair with her employer, an inn owner named Kichizo Ishida (played in the movie by Tatsuya Fuji). Things apparently got pretty kinky and erotic asphixia got into the game.

…and eventually strangled him to death. (You have been warned that these practices are dangerous.)

Sada probably wouldn’t have enjoyed that much celebrity had it not been for what she did after asphixiating her lover.

She carried it with her for three days.

So implicitly, Michiko is responding to Samson’s crude overture with a suggestion that he be castrated. (Don’t mess with Michiko!) Sadly, Samson has been spending his life learning how to kill people and listening to talk radio, so he doesn’t get this rather subtle cultural reference.

I’m pleased, by the way, to be able to tell you that In the Realm of the Senses is now available in fine new editions from the Criterion Collection, so by all means give it a look in.

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.

Ashley’s little obsesssion, and mine

I’ve blogged before over at ErosBlog about how magnificent I find the figure of Irma Vep from Louis Feuillade‘s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires. She’s one of the first great cinematic bad girls, a character as daring as they come.

And Ashley Madder, perhaps frustrated with a world that sees her as a kind of Sarah Palin in training, seems to find her magnificent, too. The poster of kohl-eyed Irma Vep which The Apsinthion Protocol’s script locates on the wall of her dormitory room is taken right from the silent serial:

(I have never actually seen an attempt at reproducing this poster in the real world, but would buy one in a minute for the right price if one were available. Hint, hint.)

In passing, I should note that Les Vampires is not just great for having a great bad girl at its center, but fine source material for thaumatophiles as well, because the Vampires, the criminal gang of which Irma Vep is a part, are among the most dedicated users of science (or pseudoscience) that I can think of in the early cinema. Poisons, paralytics, trick weapons, hypnotic mind control, and any number of clever technological tricks play key roles in the serial. We even get a laboratory scene or two, such as this one, in which heavily masked Irma Vep assists Vénénos, a chemist and criminal mastermind, who is then head of the Vampires.

Ashely will emulate her screen idol even to the extent of emulating the slinky maillot de soie in which Irma Vep commits some of her criminal acts. Also in this case, Ashley might perhaps more be emulating Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, playing the part of Irma Vep in a movie about an ill-starred attempt to re-make Les Vampires.

More maillot de cuir than maillot de soie, perhaps, but works for me either way.

Welcome

Welcome to all and sundry. I am your host; kindly call me Dr. Faustus.

Do cheesy science fiction movies do something for you? Would you go (or have you ever gone) to see a midnight performance of Invasion of the Bee Girls? Have you ever shared the monster’s point of view in Creature from the Black Lagoon? Did you find it at least mildly titillating Virginia Bruce was (theoretically) running around without any clothes on in the 1940 film The Invisible Woman? Have you ever thought perhaps that H.P. Lovecraft might even cooler if he weren’t so damn sex-negative? Do you infer a line of artistic influence from Katsushika Hokusai to Toshio Maeda? Do you think it would be sexier to be Victor Frankenstein than Elvis?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then perhaps this site is for you.

This is the formal opening post at EroticMadScience.com, a site which I am intially opening as an experiment in the self-publication of some of my own fiction and my musings on a peculiar topic, to wit the topos of “mad science” or the “Mad Scientist”

as a source of kink.

If you want a detailed account of what this is and why I am doing it, I invite you to look at The Thaumatophile Manifesto, which I lay all this out in detail. And if you just want to jump in and see the kink in action, take a look at The Apsinthion Protocol, which is the first of seven long stories in my “Gnosis College” mad science series. It is written as a screenplay, because that’s the way things play out in my head.

More things will be coming here in the future: I’ll try to explain the various literary (?) antecedents of my fiction as well as provide people who find the erotic mad science thing appealing suggestions for future reading and viewing. In the future, I hope to offer a forum for people interested in what is going on here.

I feel great excitement at starting this site. As I was planning it, an aphorism of Nietzsche‘s from Beyond Good and Evil came to mind.

Die grossen Epochen unsres Lebens liegen dort, wo wir den Muthgewinnen, unser Böses als unser Bestes umzutaufen.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, #116

The great epochs in our lives come when we find the courage to rebaptize our our evil (this being Nietzsche, perhaps that should be implicitly read as our “evil”) as what is best in us. I guess today is just one of those days.

Comments on this an other posts will be welcome, subject of course to moderation (see the Manifesto for more detail on what might or might not be appropriate here).

So perhaps I shouldn’t say just welcome to all and sundry. Instead, welcome friends.