In the 1930s it would have been difficult to make a standard drama about a man who keeps a woman in a cage and tries to get her to have sex with a stranger. What distinguishes these early science-fiction films-what perhaps pushes them beyond rote reproductions of genre conventions into what we’re calling “speculative film”-is that rather than avoiding the perversity, they instead use the possibilities of the genre to make the perversity the story. The standard version is of course to feature perfectly-coiffed young ladies who swoon into the arms of the men saving them. It’s hardly news that the Hollywood engine runs on gender stereotypes and sexism. He threatens violence if his demand isn’t satisfied. Frankenstein, already a landmark in literature, translates well to the screen because the monster makes a clear, goal-oriented demand: make a woman for me. Moreau is obsessed with seeing if he can get the “Panther Woman”-whom he keeps in a caged room-to mate with the dashing young man who has involuntarily ended up on the island. In Island of Lost Souls, Charles Laughton’s Dr. Then he gets a better idea: he abducts the young woman being romantically pursued by the male lead, straps her to a table, and uses her face and body as the source of the robot’s physiognomy. To limit immediate examples to the realm of sci-fi, though, when mad scientist Rotwang decides to build a robot in Metropolis, he intends to build it in the image of a girlfriend he lost in his youth.
The moment is perfect, because its content-Want to see what I can do with this technology? Here’s a hot chick-perfectly depicts the overriding obsession of not only science fiction films, but narrative film in general. What image materializes in miniature on the table in front of him? A hot woman. He places the device’s sensors on his temples to demonstrate. Now, because of the intellectual strength he has built, he can use the device to create a holographic image of anything he thinks about. When Morbius discovered a testing device he believes was used to teach Krell children, it was so mentally stimulating that the first time he used it, he fell unconscious for a day. The home also contains a laboratory, where Morbius explains to the astronauts that the Krell were far more intelligent and advanced than humans. He didn’t build the home-it was left from when the planet was inhabited by a race of creatures called the Krell, whom Morbius has learned disappeared thousands of years before his arrival. HALFWAY THROUGH the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, Morbius, a man stranded on a desert planet, takes two astronauts who have come to rescue him on a tour of the home he has been living in.
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