Transforming Aloysius

The strange transformation that Aloysius manages to work upon himself with his wire machine might have any number of precedents.

The fact that he’s pierced by a lot of wires from his machine is evocative, perhaps, of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a subject that found great favor with religious artists and is certainly not without homoerotic interest.

Andrea Mantegna (1431 - 1506), _St. Sebastian_ c. 1506

And in another way Aloysius’s self-induced experience might also be thought a version of the BDSM-related practice of needle play.

Closer to home, perhaps, what Aloysius does to himself is live out a pretty common geek fantasy — go from science nerd to Greek god through a miraculous technological (or just miraculous) intervention.

Searching my own memory for antecedents to this scene the one that leaps to mind most readily is the “Den” sequence from Heavy Metal (1981), in which a nerdy teenager is transformed through the Loc-Nar (a glowing green sphere that represents super-evil, or something) with lightening, (in the best Frankenstein tradition), and then transported to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world far away.

(Heavy Metal definitely deserves to be on any thaumatophile‘s preferred viewing list, since not only does it have this transformation sequence going on, but it also has — at least impliedly — woman on funny little robot sex.)

But perhaps most centrally of all to this scene is that Aloysius has decided to jump in with both feet and adopt, with his “death or glory, here I come” remark the operative philosophy that drove both Moira in Apsinthion Protocol and Iris in Study Abroad.

Must be something in the Pleasant Prairie water supply, I guess.

Fair trade?

And of course, young Willie manages to step in it again when a (possibly ill-advised) experiment with his work-study supervisor, Professor Rebecca Waite, runs off the rails.

I know that there are people who write stories about the possibility of erotic body swapping (examples here), and as a fetish this definitely shows up on Franklin Veaux’s sex map as part of the “Islands of the Imaginary,” just east of tentacle sex.

I wish I could point to some of this erotica as a precedent for the Willie/Waite experience, but I actually suspect that I was more influenced here by two other body-swap stories, both non-erotic in their content. One is Mary Rodgers‘s story Freaky Friday, age-appropriate children’s novel about a one-day body-swap between a mother and her teenage daughter. I read this and was fascinated by it when I was about eleven. The other is the explicitly anti-erotic story by H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” which I first read and was equally fascinated by at age fifteen and which I attempt to honor in the name, “Rebecca Waite.”

A good part of the fun of writing scenes like the one herein discussed is not only do you get to play with an intrinsically titillating idea like swapping bodies with someone else, but you can indulge also the fantasy of crossing into a different gender, as both Waite and Willie do. If you could “try on” being a different gender I would try it in a heartbeat, and I suspect most of you readers would as well. Swapping bodies is a fine mad science theme as well because the imagined means by which it might be accomplished — brain transplants, for example — are something that a mad scientist would be eager to try.

Plus I got to indulge one other little trope that makes me squee, which is the nerd who is really a hottie but who covers it up because she (it’s usually a she, in these cases) realizes that as a hottie she wont be taken seriously for the right things.

Victoria Vetri in _Invasion of the Bee Girls_ (1973), looking about as nerdy as it is possible for her look.

“You try being taken seriously as a scientist when all your male students and colleagues are staring at your chest.”

Looking good enough to eat

I realize of course that there is no small squick involved in core scene about the adventures of Iris in the Club Cuisine, but that, too, was a scene that boiled up out of some corner of my mind that I saw myself as having no right to ignore. And I realize that the squick seems likely to continue to pertain, even though Iris comes through hale and sound (or does she?).

That all this should have boiled up is perhaps no accident as well: cannibalism has a long history of being both a marker of transgression and punishment. In the long cycle of misdeeds the culminates in the Oresteia, Atreus kills and cooks the sons of Thyestes. Who can forget the ghastly feast of Ugolino in Canto XXXII of Dante‘s Inferno? Or a certain notorious scene in Shakespeare‘s, Titus Andronicus?

Where there is horror, someone is bound to exploit for purposes of eros. It is no accident, surely, that one of the most successful movies of the last few decades features a cannibal who is no primitive, but a scholar so polished and formidable that he cannot but be magnetic, indeed, sexy.

How often have we described someone who looks sexually desirable as “yummy” or “delicious?” And how often have we really thought about the metaphor that underlies what we have said? Do perhaps our guts not move within as our eyes move without?

The phenomenon of cannibalism as kink goes back far. A little recent digging on my part turned up a sonnet, attributed to François de Malherbe (1555 – 1628), discussed in a academic paper here. I won’t attempt a full translation, since my attempts even at nineteenth-century French prose turn out to be a bit too disappointing to merit my trying my hand at sixteeenth-century French verse, but I’ll give the gist. The poet invites a woman, in the midst of the meal, to undress and become “dessert,” perhaps not in an entirely figurative sense. (His compannion is, needless to say, somewhat shocked.)

Là, là! Pour le dessert, troussez-moy cette cotte,
Viste, chemise et tout, qu’il n’y demeure rien
Qui me puisse empescher de recoignoistre bien
Du plus haut de nombril jusqu’au bas de la motte.
Là, sans vous renfroigner, venez que je vous frotte,
Et me laissez à part tout ce grave maintien
Suis-je pas vostre cœur? estes vous pas le mien?
C’est bien avecque moy qu’il faut faire la sotte!
–Mon cœur, il est bien vray, mais vous en faites trop:
Remettez vous au pas et quitte ce galop.
–Ma belle, baissez moy, c’est à vous de vous taire.
–Ma foy, cela vous gaste au milieu de repas…
–Belle, vous dites vray, mais se pourroit-il faire
De voir un si beau C[on] et ne le [fou]tre pas?

No wonder certain things brew up from deep in the dark parts of my mind.

“A total hate-fuck…”

Jill’s accidentally-on-purpose finishing off of the Generalissimo might seem over-the-top, but it too belongs to a long tradition of women who kill men through sex.

The human imagination…the male human imagination, surely? — has long created female monsters who kill men through sex, either draining them of their energy or otherwise. It is this fear that doubtless underlies the myth of the succubus and perhaps a large part of that of the vampire as well.

Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944), "The Vampire" (1893-4)

And of course, it’s a theme that plays a lot in popular culture as well. I know of at least one rather obsessive internet compilation called “out with a bang” the lists appropriate scenes. And a thaumatophile line? Well, there are doubtless many, but we could begin with a personal touchstone, the plot of Invasion of the Bee Girls, which pushes the “kill men through sex” line so thoroughly that we even get a Bee Girl point-of-view at the fatal moment.

And there are doubtless many others — ponder for a moment, and by all means comment if you come up with any.

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…

“The use of excessive violence…has been approved.”

It might seem a bit excessive to have the Omega’s harmless little initiation brought to a close by the noisy appearance of an FBI tactical team. – amusing mock violence of a fraternity replaced with the terrifying real violence of the state. But I guess that’s a reflection of the Gnosis College world. I mean, after all, I grew up during the Cold War and am now living through something called the War on Terror, and what is more I grew up reading the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller, so I suppose that paranoid melodrama would almost of necessity be my most natural literary mode. You might be seeing a lot of it in Gnosis College tales to come…

Gravity’s Rainbow probably should have been in my manifesto, as it happens. I read it for the first time at seventeen and I must say it likely made a lot of difference in the evolution of my cheerfully warped mentality. Not only is it a touchstone of paranoid melodrama, to say nothing of my sense that history is a vehicle driven by technological progress and steered by bureaucratic incompetence, but it’s a splendid touchstone for the aspiring thaumatophile. There are any number of mad scientists, beginning with the behaviorist Dr. Laszlo Jampf, a central character whose orgasms are somehow connected with the strikes of V-2 rockets on London, and of course, a long series of dirty limericks about men who have sex with various rocket parts. A rare example of a work of fiction that deserves its high reputation.

But is my writing here just paranoia? As journalist Radley Balko would doubtless be eager to point out at this juncture, there does seem to be rather a lot of abusiv e use of police tactical teams on no-knock raids these days. So maybe I’m being a little bit more realistic than I know.

Best (and worst) initiation ever

Now one might reasonably wonder why, in a site devoted to erotic mad science, why I would bother writing a scene like the Omega initiation. There’s not that much θαῦμα here, no wonder technology of the sort that Joseph Corwin trades in. You could stage the scene yourself with about twenty dollars’ worth of supplies from your local Walmart, assuming of course that you have a circle of actor friends who are, uh, very serious about the craft.

But of course, initiations of almost any kind are of great social science interest. It is a puzzle why anyone would willingly subject themselves to something difficult, painful, and possibly publicly humiliating (like getting naked and being beaten up by a girl in front of all your potential fraternity brothers), until you realize that groups like fraternities provide indivisible goods for their members, and are thus vulnerable to free-riding. Would-be members thus need a way of signaling that they will not free-ride. Just saying “I won’t” isn’t good enough, because anyone can say that. But being willing to put up with something costly — such as showing oneself willing to endure pain or ridicule by actually doing so, is a costly signal and therefore a credible one. Fraternity initiations are like this, and therefore can be analyzed using an economic framework similar to that which Laurence Iannaccone uses to analyze the various “strange” behaviors used by members of New Religious Movements (pejoratively, “cults”) — you can hear Professor Iannaccone’s explanation done very lucidly in his EconTalk interview with Russell Roberts.

If you have an understanding of signaling, economics, especially the economics of non-market behavior, will become a much richer and deeper subject. This point is stressed perhaps best of all by Robin Hanson (you can hear an EconTalk interview with Hanson on signaling as well), who makes it a a key theme in his blog Overcoming Bias. Hanson has, in addition to an interest in signaling, a keen interest in speculative technologies. So perhaps there is a mad science angle here, or at least a mad social science angle, and…

Aw heck, who am I trying to fool? The fact is, I had a whole damn third act to write with very little sex until Nanetta and Moira’s shades-of-Tosca dénouement, and since you can only go so far on police-procedural hijinks I had to come up with something, so why not appeal to a long and venerable pornographic tradition?

Jean Veber (1868 - 1928), "Women Wrestling in Devonshire" (ca. 1898)

Emmanuel Croisé (b. 1859), "The Girls of Sparta" (ca. 1903)

Now perhaps the something wasn’t the most creative, even if it does provide a rivet for holding different parts of the plot of Apsinthion Protocol together. Naked combat has been picked up and gone a long way in popular culture. We see this, for example, in the one scene that made the movie for me in what was otherwise a pretender to the role of supreme campus hijinks movie:

A K-Y jelly wrestling match. Great idea, guys! And certainly a good plot inspiration for me, although perhaps somewhat disappointingly it results in only one death.

If you want to go more sanguinary in the naked-girl fight thing, check out a scene just about twelve minutes into a 1973 movie called 不良姐御伝猪の鹿お蝶, Furyō anego den: Inoshika o-Chō (in English, Sex and Fury) in which the heroine, played by Reiko Ike, gets roused out of her bath for a naked swordfight in which she manages to finish off quite a few assailants.

Sublime.

Now I don’t quite know of any popular culture scenes that quite parallel what Laura submits to (or connives at, perhaps?) in the Omega initiation, even if perhaps the thought of it forms the subtext of things like the Old School KY fight. The idea does come up in gay porn. There is a site, called NakedKombat.com, about which Bacchus at ErosBlog wrote about a year ago, where the combaants really are aiming to see who comes out on top, so to speak. Like I wrote, many precedents.