Latest / The Difference Engine Podcast / Mad Doctors of the Movies: Jekyll and Moreau

Transcript

Mad Doctors of the Movies: Jekyll and Moreau · The Difference Engine Podcast

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: And our two candidates for this particular podcast are Welles' Dr Moreau from
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: the 1896 science fiction novel and Stevenson's Jekyll, Dr Jekyll.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: And his alter ego, Mr Hyde.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps we should start, Mark, by just giving a brief synopsis of both of the stories.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll kick off with Moreau, which is set on an island.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's a found story.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's recounted by the nephew of the person who lands on the island
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: and discovers there the famous scientist Moreau.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Who's been experimenting on animals on the island to try to change them from
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: an animal state into human.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: And over the course of the book what actually happens is of course the animals
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: that have been vivisected by Moreau and changed
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: to their human form eventually go wild and kill Moreau.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: The hero manages to escape from the island by the skin of his teeth.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: He's left floating in the middle of the ocean to be discovered by
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: a passing training vessel who then attribute the entire story
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: to his fevered imagination from having been floating in the middle of the ocean for
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: so many days.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: That contrasts with Jekyll and Hyde,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: which isn't set on a remote island, but of course set in the middle of a city.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in terms of placing it within the canon of H.G.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wells, that story, Dr. Moreau,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: sits between The Time Machine,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: which was written in 1895, and War of the Worlds, which was written in 1898.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ten years before Wells wrote The Island of Dr. Moreau,
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Robert Louis Stevenson,
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: the Scottish author,
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wrote The Strange Case of Dr.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is about to be in some modern and contemporary form.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's about to be repeated soon on BBC One.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Starring James Nesbitt from Cold Feet fame.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's first written in 1886.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about a London lawyer.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Again,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: in many of the dozens of major stage and film adaptations that have run throughout
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: the 20th century,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: there is a A prominent character in the story,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: and that is a prominent London lawyer who investigates the occurrences
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: between his old friend Dr. Jekyll and the misanthropic Edward Hyde.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this kind of mystery between the two of them.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not obvious from the point of view of the book.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And of course it's known,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: it has tremendous similarities,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: doesn't it,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: with Dr. Moreau,
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: but the work is known for the vivid portrayal of this kind of psychopathology.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Between the two characters,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: and in mainstream culture,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: ever since it's been associated with kind of wild or bipolar behavior.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and of course that features in Moreau as well,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: where Moreau has taken these animals and tried to Instill basic human behaviour
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: in them,
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: and all the time they keep having to repeat the laws that remind them to act
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: as humans.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Not to go on all fours, that is the law, are we not men?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Not to suck up drink, that is the law, are we not men?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Not to eat fish or flesh, that is the law, are we not men?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Not to claw the bark of trees, that is the law, are we not men?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Not to chase other men, that is the law, are we not men?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And yet in the end,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: their brutal animalistic nature finds its way out and they start
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: to pillage their way across the island.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Very much as what happens with Jekyll and Hyde,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: the animal within is released to prey upon the environment around.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: But when we think about the two scientists themselves,
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: the two mad doctors themselves,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: There are similarities because they both have a public persona and
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: a private persona.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: There have been three film adaptations of Moreau.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very difficult story to actually put on the stage and even in the cinema
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: because of the effects that are needed with all of the animals.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: But in each of those film adaptations,
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: you have this very urbane Moreau,
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: the classic scientist who is only revealed later on to be this degenerate
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: who is vivisecting these animals.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or in the case of the most modern adaptation,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: actually using DNA recombinants to fundamentally change and alter their status.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting from the point of view of what we were talking about last week.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: we talked about that public perception of science and how the
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: image of Frankenstein,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: the kind of Frankenstein-esque activity of science,
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: and that image of science is still a very pervasive image throughout
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: the 20th century.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, the commonality of these two...
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Pictures of the scientist in Moreau and Jekyll are kind of also similar.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's a similar argument going on.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: The idea of the urbane,
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: respectable scientist on the one hand,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: but also that other subterranean rumblings,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: as if the Morlocks are coming up the cellar steps,
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: which again is to do with the mistrust perhaps.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a portrayal of the mistrust that many people have for what may be going on
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: behind closed doors.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean,
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Moreau actually flees London and the London Sea and establishes himself on
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: the island because of a piece of undercover reporting.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: A pamphlet is published called The Moreau Horrors,
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: which reveals to the public that he's been vivisecting all of these animals
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: and conducting these experiments.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a bit like a news of the world expose on what scientists are doing,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Today, it almost reads as a direct allegory.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one of the reasons why I think the book retains its status
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: in today's society and the image of Moreau as the atypical mad scientist.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, later on,
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: we're going to talk about Dr.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: No from the James Bond film, who, again,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: This urbane scientist who is out on an island conducting all sorts of experiments
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: that could lead to the downfall of the human race.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Moreau is almost a prototype for that sort of isolationist scientist who believes
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: that he knows better and that he can go it alone.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And as you said,
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: there are tremendous similarities with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: The novel has become known within Western culture for this kind of inner conflict.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting about The Strange Case of Dr.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Jekyll and Mr.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hyde is that it broadens the argument more than just a question of the scientist,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: and it talks more about This idea in Western culture about the conflict between good
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: and evil,
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: which is perhaps in us all,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: in humanity in general,
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: which then would come through in the science,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: so it kind of broadens the picture more.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Stevenson is very careful in the written text not to say what Hyde is guilty on,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: what behaviour it is.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know whether it's underage prostitutes or rent boys or opium dens or whatever.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: He leaves that up to the imagination of the reader.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what that has allowed subsequent cinematic explorations
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: to do is pick their own worst evil for the time and project that onto Hyde.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So the actual text itself offers a wide variety of opportunities to adapt the text
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: into its own particular cultural context.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it's going to be interesting.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: To watch the BBC on Saturday night and see what they've chosen
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: as Hyde's predilections for today.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: What they feel are the thing that we are most worried and also hypocritical about.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good point,
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: actually,
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: because in some senses,
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll is one of the best Victorian guidebooks to
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: the social hypocrisy of the era,
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know, the base, inward, lustful tendencies and the veneer of respectability.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: At the time,
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: it's worth remembering,
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: late 19th century,
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: that scientists in the closing Closing years of the decades of the 19th century,
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: with a post-Darwinian perspective,
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: we're looking at ways of explaining biological influences
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: on things like human morality and drug and alcohol addiction or homosexuality
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: or sexual addiction,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: including things like multiple personality disorder and regressive animality,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: which also has a link with Dr Moreau.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the context around which the original texts were written is very important,
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: because even though it's ten years later,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: that sort of post-Starwinian context is still around for Moreau.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And also, there were profound debates in public about vivisection at the time, and the...
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection was actually formed two years
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: after Moreau was written,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: and they directly cited the text as one of the key documents in the debate,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: which started off the whole British Union.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Wells' Moreau and the cinematic explorations that follow that deal with society
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: and community because that's what Moreau has established on the island.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: He's tried to create this perfect society by establishing his own rules.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: But of course the other thing that he did was instill worship of himself.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: By the animals.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the idealization of Moreau is as a scientist and as a creator.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: He is this benevolent figure who does what he does,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: not out of self-aggrandizement,
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: but because he himself is governed by a series of rules, that of science.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: All that's rather ironic when you think about H. G.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wells himself,
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: because he had these terrible tendencies later in the 20th century of being in favor
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: of a kind of democracy.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, he was a little bit of, you know, the truth be told, he was a little bit of a fascist.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because he didn't think that ordinary people were worthy of the vote.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because he didn't think that they were worthy of making an intelligent decision
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: on what he regarded as very complex issues in a democracy.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So Wells was a believer in the idea of a meritocracy.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he believed that the vote should only go to scientists,
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: engineers, planners, and politicians, and no doubtedly Wells himself.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: the kind of people we think should be in charge because they have the merit to be
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: in charge.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And yet you've got,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: it's almost as if he's contradicting himself in Moreau
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: because he's portraying somebody who's in that position and yet is screwing up
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: in it.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: We know that his later work has visions of a utopic future in
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: which everything is perfect because all the decisions have been taken
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: by enlightened scientists and that's the difference between Moreau,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think, and the scientists that are portrayed in his later work.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: These later scientists are very much the square-jawed heroes
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: who have sacrificed everything,
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: relationships and love and the pursuit of money,
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: in order to create this meritocratic future.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas Moreau has succumbed to his most base and venal desires.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly Wells puts a lot of himself into this text.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: But in the same way, so does Stevenson.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because remember,
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: the Stevenson spent his entire life suffering from a series
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: of debilitating conditions.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a very fragile man who liked to seek out.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And form relationships with very strong and manly men who could do the sorts
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: of activities that he couldn't do.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted to live vicariously through them.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's more than a little bit of that.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: In the texts of Jekyll and Hyde itself.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've mentioned before that there have been dozens of major stage
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: and film adaptations of Dr Jekyll.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Starting in 1887, there was a stage play open in Boston, which ran for 20 years.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: That stage play came a year before Jack the Ripper.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: In fact,
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: in London society,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: which in my mind, Dr. Jekyll and Jack the Ripper are kind of knocking around there.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there have been many other movie adaptations,
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: especially in America, one in 1912, 1920, 1931, 1941, The Nutty Professor.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not speaking personally,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: but I think maybe it would be also instructive, given what we were talking about.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: When we talked about Faustus and Frankenstein last week,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about what Shelley and Marlowe were doing in a kind
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: of proto-science-fictional way with those stories.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Using storytelling,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: they tell a story about science, about what science did and so on and so forth.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think it would be useful to talk about the monster because what Dr.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Jekyll and Dr.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Moreau have in common Is this science fictional motif,
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: what we might call the monster.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want to introduce today,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: that we would use in future podcasts,
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: is this idea that science fiction,
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: all of science fiction, could be considered to be about one of four things.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Space, time, machine, or monster.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's Mark Rose's classic analysis from Anatomy of Science Fiction.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Mark Rose came up with this marvellous,
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: kind of bite-size way of getting your teeth into science fiction.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: It may seem that science fiction...
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: It presents an infinity of nightmares and visions,
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: kind of spaceships,
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: time machines, cyborgs, utopies and dystopias, androids and alternative histories.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at it from a point of view on a more thoughtful level,
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: you can look at these four categories of space, time, machine and monster.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we mentioned last week that all of science fiction is about the way
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: that humans deal with the non-human, the non-human world as revealed by science.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And each one of those, then,
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of space,
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: time, machine, and monster, is a way of us thinking about the non-human.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: We can talk about space,
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: time, and machine, and maybe they're obvious, actually, to a certain extent.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: We can talk about them in future weeks.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: But from the point of view of the monster this week,
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: we're talking about stories within science fiction that feature the non-human in
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: the form of a mutant or a monster,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: which is actually situated within humanity itself.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's different to the rest of the categories, space,
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: time, and machine, normally about something which is situated outside of humanity.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: But with these two cases,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: we're talking about the strange case of Dr.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Jekyll and the equally strange case of Dr. Moreau.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's the monster within humanity which changes us into some kind of,
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: well, maybe you could say that it's a more human form.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's arguable whether the evil is innate.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that Golding talks about also in Lord of the Flies,
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: that The Wellesian thing about good and evil.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: A classic example of the way that Jekyll and Hyde and that motif has been reiterated
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: in science fiction in the monster motif would be Darth Vader from Star Wars who now
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: that the first trilogy has come out starts off as this Young boy who is a hero,
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: as it were,
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: but gradually the monster within starts to become more and more dominant.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now, we are actually introduced to him as Darth Vader,
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: as the monster that was going around trying to crush the rebellion.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: But now the backstory has been established.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: We know that he's Anakin Skywalker who tried so very hard to resist the temptations
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: of darkness and then falls and wholly embraces the dark nature of his character.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Only at the very end of Return of the Jedi,
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: the last of the films sequentially,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: the third of the films to actually be made, to be redeemed again and to find...
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Some way of communicating that all is not lost,
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: that there was still in his heart, this tiny bit inside.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Darth Vader is a great example,
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: in fact, because he, as well as being monster, he's also partly machine, isn't he?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's being kind of enhanced, isn't he?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's being augmented in some kind of way.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: You have this idea of him being a kind of dark machine,
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: and that's another motif which runs through science fiction.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Dr. Noe is another example.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think he has some kind of bionic hands because he'd been engaged in some kind
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: of atomic buffoonery, hadn't he?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And he had his hands blown off, which he's always got the black gloves.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: The black gloves of Dr.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Strangelove,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: the hand he can't control, which he seems slightly kind of machine-like as well.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: The latest iteration of that, of course, was a couple of years ago with Spider-Man 2.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: You've got Doc Ock, Dr.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Octavius,
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: who did have those four hands,
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: the four prehensile tentacles, which in the film version Actually controlled him.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end,
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: he's fighting with Spider-Man,
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Parker, and his machine is going to blow up and destroy the entire planet.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: He physically has to have this battle of wills with these tentacles that are trying
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: to force him to let the planet be ripped asunder.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: The bizarre thing I read recently about Doc Ock was that he's based on Roy Orbison.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because he's short, stocky and myopic.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: He does wear sunglasses.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: He's also got that,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: in the original comics,
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: that pudding bowl haircut, which Orbison had in an early version.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: This bizarre idea of him with all these mechanical tentacles singing Pretty Woman,
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: though it doesn't quite work for me.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a strange kind of idea.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: One of the other ways that...
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: Monster intersects with machine,
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think, in both of these books is with the social machine as well.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about the structure of society and you get this idea
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: of there being each one of these men,
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Moreau and Jekyll,
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: being a cog within that social machine which throws everything out when it starts
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: to malfunction in that way.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think you can make a lot of with Moreau.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately,
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: the film versions of Moreau have portrayed him as this cackling,
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: slightly ludicrous mad scientist, as it were, in the most reductionist manner.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: In fact,
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: the last one,
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: the 1996 version, was just Marlon Brando's famously last screen appearance.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Eating all the pies, didn't he?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: He was huge.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was absolutely massive.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a good version with Charles Lawton, isn't there?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: There is a good version, the 1933 version.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not just Charles Lawton, but Bela Lugosi as well.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's the little-known 1977 version with Burt Lancaster and Michael York.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds really bad.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: It is, trust me.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: You can find clips on YouTube,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: but whether you'd want to is something,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: my favourite,
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say,
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: in the same way that you've got a slightly off-beam pornographic version of Jekyll
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: and I.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's all mine.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not responsible for it.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: You're responsible, but it's your favourite version.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: My favourite version of The Island of Dr Moreau is actually the Simpsons episode
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: from Treehouse of Horror 13,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: The Island of Dr Hibbert,
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: in which the laughing,
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: jovial Dr Hibbert imprisons a lot of the Simpsons characters on an island
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: and actually reverses Darwinian evolution.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: So Homer de-evolves into a large monkey.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't take...
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean,
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: the fact that The Simpsons are able to name check that without any explanation
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: or any references shows just how much this story
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: and these stories have permeated popular culture and popular consciousness as well.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think in tying this up,
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: we've mentioned the fact that we've dealt today with science fiction stories about
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: the monster, the monster within.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about the fact that we could look at all of science fiction from
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: the point of view of space, time, machine and monster.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: The space theme, I guess, which would be obvious to most people, is space.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Which presents the non-human that we have to deal with,
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: that is uncovered by science as some facet of the natural world,
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: vast interstellar spaces.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: The alien would come into this.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than the alien being a monster, the alien would be an animated form of nature.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Time is obvious,
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: it's some kind of flux in the human condition,
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: like an evolutionary fable, perhaps, like Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned the machine.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it's obvious the man-machine motif has been in science fiction for
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: a long time,
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: probably since the 1870s,
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: and it includes robots and computers and artificial intelligences.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: But you mentioned that also in the man-machine motif is the idea of the social machine, like...
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or Orwell's 1984 and Brave New World.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Brave New World,
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: which is just about to be serialised on BBC Radio 7,
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: 10-part serialisation of Brave New World.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: So dealing with the social machine,
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: and of course a classic cinematic text which combines all
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: of those is Fritz Lang's Metropolis,
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: where you have the social machine,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: the workers, but you also have Metal Maria as well, which seems to sum that up.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: We also have Dr Rotwang, of course.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Who we are going to be dealing with in a later podcast.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think in rounding this up today,
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: at times science fiction does this thing about looks at the relationship between
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: the human and the non-human.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of what it does.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: It tries to put a human stamp on the new universe.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the nature and the non-human are pitched against.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to fight against nature like in Armageddon on Deep Impact where you get
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: the penetration of the human sphere in a very rude kind of manner with
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: a rogue asteroid or a rogue comet.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: The day after tomorrow with the big tsunami and the weather turning upon us would
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: a modern example.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: But another example is human and nature is pitched against something
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: which is non-human, like,
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: I guess,
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: like at the end of War of the Worlds,
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: where you get the aliens represent,
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: Wells' Martians, they're agents of the void, they're agents of nature in a way.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: But in the end,
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: it's actually earthly nature,
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: the bugs of earthly nature, that kind of knocks them on the head.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: From our point of view today, we've been talking about...
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: A different kind of scenario within science fiction where the non-human is in
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: a sense the human within us,
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: the monster within us, which sometimes we have to deal with for good or for bad.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're right and I think that that tension will always be with us
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: and authors and filmmakers will Always find new and interesting variations because
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: when it comes down to it,
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: as we mentioned before,
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Stevenson left Hyde as somewhat of a blank slate and we can always reinvent
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: the monster within.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: We can always catch that lurking presence in the corner of our eye.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: One of our later explanations, we're going to be touching upon the...
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Protagonist of Red Dragon and the Silence of the Lambs,
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Dr Hannibal Lecter,
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: who in a very real way is like Jekyll and Hyde, Urbane and then the monster within.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for joining us for the second of these podcasts.