State Home

A twisted institution like the State Home for Wayward Girls has obvious cinematic precedents in the women in prison film and, more grimly, in movies like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, but it also comes out of a certain dark place with deep roots in my imagination, for I have always had a fear of something that might be described as “the confining institution in which no one gives a fuck about you.” So while the scenes that take place in the State Home might be a twisted form of erotica, they might also be a product of long-standing fears. (Perhaps that’s what makes twisted erotica possible.)

As a child, I remember as soon as I acquired the concept of “orphanage” I remember being afraid, really afraid, that if I didn’t behave myself, I might find myself consigned to one. (I was good. Believe me, I was good.) As soon as I understood what a “prison” was I was afraid of it. Not just of finding myself in one, but of being sent to one and forgotten, so that that I would never be let out. Don’t even get me started on how repulsive it was to have to register for what the U.S. government euphemistically calls “Selective Service.”

But perhaps, even though the State Home is technically more of a reformatory or juvenile detention center, the institution after which it is most modeled is the insane asylum. In part, it’s because they are such total institutions where scary things go on. I own a coffee-table book of photographs by Christopher Payne called Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, which consists exclusively of pictures taken at, or of, abandoned insane asylums. The photographs are all beautifully executed. Some of them haunt me. Some of them downright scare me.

And there’s something particularly mad science about the insane asylum that a prison or the even the Army doesn’t have. Because while weirdos like me might fantasize mad science, it seems as if twentieth century psychiatry has been busy figuring out ways to practice it, and on many of society’s most marginal and vulnerable individuals at that. Mad as I am, I’ve never come up with the idea of shooting high voltages through people’s skulls, or lifting up their eyeballs and chopping up parts of their brains with an icepick, or insinuating “memories” of Satanic ritual abuse into the minds of unhappy people, in the name of therapy.

Small wonder that I find a mad science connection to madness.

Inane asylums also figure importantly in the sort of fantastic literature that was the matrix in which my early strangeness was nourished.

Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain’t welcome around Innsmouth. I’ve heard personally of more’n one business or government man that’s disappeared there, and there’s loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.

–H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931)

It was with a strange mixture of fear and pleasure that I discovered that “Danvers” was a real and not a fictional place: the Danvers State Insane Asylum in Massachusetts. And it was plenty creepy-looking:

So it was an obvious model for the “old building” at the State Home site in which Strangeways conducts his terrible experiments.

Danvers would become the setting for one of my favorite minor horror movies, Session 9, about a crew of workmen hired to remove the asbestos from the abandoned asylum. Things go very wrong, predictably.

And thus it’s perhaps just as predictable that things will go wrong with Strangeways.

Up against it

There’s a certain special pleasure in being able to write parallel scenes involving some of American society’s most privileged offspring and some of its least privileged that converge on a single erotic image, in this case that of a naked woman squashed up against glass.

I’ve covered some of this material before in a post I wrote at ErosBlog over a year ago, which was prompted by my discovery of this image of actress Yukari Sakurada, up against the glass in some interesting showertime activities. I’ll re-run the images for the benefit of the new audience. They’re bigger this time.

The images are bigger, I mean.

Naturally this brought to mind a scene that stuck firm and fast in my mind since I first saw it as a teenager:

The awe-inspiring Uschi Digard putting her natural endowments to good use in the “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble” sequence in Kentucky Fried Movie (1977). A real two-fer, and no I don’t mean in the obvious sense: I mean in that it served both as a prime inspiration for the parallel scenes in Invisible Girl, Heroine and for the whole concept of Mary Magdalene College.

Well, since we’re into mad science here it means that the research goes on and on, and I’m pleased to note that we can add another image to the collection of inspiration for the scene, this one from Good Luck Chuck (2007).

I’m afraid that even Jessica Alba couldn’t save this film from making Kentucky Fried Movie look urbane by comparison, but we’ll always take what we can get.

IMDB seems to indicate that the actress playing the woman in the shower is named Susan McClellan, but I fear I haven’t more to add.

A brief introduction to Gnosis College

Here is a bit of background on Gnosis College, the fictional setting in which The Apsinthion Protocol and its successor stories are set.

Gnosis College isn’t modeled after any particular place, but it is modeled after a type of institution that occupies a small but important place in American higher education: the liberal arts college and in particular the midwestern liberal arts college in a small city or large town. Institutions of this type typically have between a thousand and two thousand enrolled students at a time. There are no graduate students and therefore almost all the teaching is done by actual faculty, mostly in small classes. Colleges of this kind attract bright, highly-motivated students who would generally find the Ivy or major state university experience alienating. The courses of study at schools like these genuinely are one of liberal learning: you can major in something like philosophy or chemistry or comparative literature, but few if any courses of study are there to prepare you directly for a practical career.

(A parenthetical note, which I can’t resist. To some readers, all this will standing out in The Apsinthion Protocol’s script right away. A friend of mine who once taught at an institution like this, which we’ll call Alpha College here, read the script and a few of its companions and immediately commented: “I enjoyed reading about the febrile antics of Gnosis’s students. Just like Alpha, if H.P. Lovecraft wrote the curriculum and Russ Meyer were in charge of the admissions office.” There are moments when one is happy to be an author.)

Gnosis in particular I imagine as an institution of about 1800 students, founded originally in the nineteenth century like so many of its real-world analogs to train ministers of religion for the country as it expanded westward, but long since turned secular and worldly in its orientation. Like some of its analogs, Gnosis is fairly elite: you would find students there who might have gone to Princeton or Stanford had they been so inclined. Unlike most of its real-world counterparts (but like a few) Gnosis has a lot of money, having had alumni who made fortunes in various technological endeavors, including money made off patents for “conceptives,” of which more discussion in a later post.

Gnosis is also rich in peculiar resources. For reasons no one can quite adequately explain, Gnosis has over the years produced an unusual number of explorers and collectors of antiquities, who have donated generously to both a college museum and to the college library. Gnosis’s library has an unusually large set of special reserved stacks.

Gnosis is located in a small city called Pleasant Prairie, population a few tens of thousands. It is a quiet and unassuming place, the sort of place where, if some prominent civic organization were to name it “America’s Most Ordinary Town,” the locals would display the award proudly in City Hall. Pleasant Prairie knew a measure of industrial prosperity in the past, having been a center of manufacturing and railroading. Gracious downtown buildings and a few elm-lined streets of elegant Victorian houses – as well as a fair number of now-derelict industrial structures – testify to this past. As manufacturing receded as a source of employment, the fortunes of Pleasant Prairie waned somewhat, although the wealth of the college helps keep the town afloat.

The Gnosis campus is bordered by another institution of higher education, St. Mary Magdalene College, a Catholic women’s college jokingly referred to as the Virgin Vault by some Gnosis people. SMMC is run by an order of nuns who keep alive the otherwise moribund tradition of colleges functioning in loco parentis toward their students. It is thus a much-favored school for families with traditional values and problematical daughters. The gates are locked tightly every night at nine. SMMC doesn’t appear in The Apsinthion Protocol, but will in a forthcoming script, Progress in Research.

On the outskirts of Pleasant Prairie we find another institution, a juvenile detention facility called the State Home for Wayward Girls, which is pretty much what it sounds like. (The state has given it another, nicer, name which no one can readily recall.) This place to will appear in a future script, most prominently in Invisible Girl, Heroine.

This is the beginning of the background. More will follow.