Scientists have an image problem in the movies. They are variously portrayed as evil, mad, deluded or naïve. By meddling with nature they unleash forces which threaten us all. The archetypal mad scientist can be traced from his (rarely her until the 1990s) mythical and literary roots, through the history of cinema, to the present day. The movie mad scientist has always provided a focus for anxieties about the scientific and technological advances of the day. Today's mad scientists splice genes.
A brief history of the mad scientist
The mad scientist's origins lie in mythology and literature. The shaman, witch-doctor, or secular priest bearing secret knowledge, is an archetype found in mythologies from around the world; while Faust can be regarded as the prototypical mad scientist from literature. The story of the medieval scientist/magician, who sold his soul to the devil in return for forbidden knowledge, was the subject of Christopher Marlowe's influential drama Dr. Faustus, first published in 1604. Marlowe himself drew upon previously published German versions of the legend. Goethe completed his drama Faust in 1832, in which he greatly elaborated upon the basic story. The theme of madness, arising from an obsession with gaining knowledge at any cost, re-surfaced in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), H.G. Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and several other novels that helped shape the portrayal of the mad scientist in the movies.
George Méliès used the idea of X-rays, discovered in 1895 by Professor Röntgen, in his film Les Rayons Röntgen (1897). In this film a struggle between a patient and a doctor causes a dodgy X-ray machine to explode. This has been identified as the first film in which a scientist is destroyed by his own creation. This would become a recurring theme in mad scientist movies. (1)
The first cinema film based on the novel Frankenstein dates from 1910, although it had been performed as a stage play since 1823 (2). A number of films were influenced by the Frankenstein story between 1910 and 1930. The doctor in Abel Gance's La Folie du Docteur Tube (1914), for example, becomes insane after experimenting with light waves. The doctor's experiments with light-diffusing crystals give him a vision of the world that his brain cannot handle. Meddling with the properties of light could then be regarded as a metaphor for dabbling with forbidden knowledge - or developing a new technology - that had strayed into a realm beyond man's understanding or control. Various technologies have been deemed to belong to God's realm alone during the Century of Cinema, up to and including genetic engineering in the 1990s. (3)
An early German film called Homunculus (aka Homunculus Der Führer, 1916) concerned a mad scientist who creates an artificial man, with a mind that is all pure reason and logic. Lacking both a soul and human emotions, the artificial man becomes evil, acquires power in a large country, proclaims himself a dictator (Der Führer), and plans to rule the world. This lack of a soul, or lack of spirituality and moral conscience, signalled by the absence of empathy or emotions, is common in individuals who are not quite human in the movies. Numerous androids, aliens and other doppelgängers, who lack human souls, will be encountered in this book.
Another important literary precursor of the movie mad scientist is the story of the golem. This story was based on the Jewish legend of Rabbi Loew, who animates a clay man in Prague in the 1580s. The story was first filmed as Der Golem in 1914, by Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener; the latter also playing the golem. In this film the golem is the eternal outsider who becomes insane, and eventually dies, due to unrequited love. The same team made the classic 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World). In this film the monster sets out doing evil deeds, but changes his character on meeting a kind little girl - a story development later used by James Whale in Frankenstein (1931). (4)
In an analysis of 990 horror films released in Britain between 1931 and 1984, Andrew Tudor identified science as the source of disruption central to the narrative in around 25 per cent of cases. Tudor's analysis involved locating these films in relation to three sets of oppositions: i) secular/supernatural, ii) external/internal and iii) dependent/autonomous. Films involving mad scientists and their creations were located in the secular, external and dependent category. That is, they have their primary threat in the everyday or natural world, as opposed to the supernatural world of vampires, zombies, witchcraft or possession; their threat is external to the human body, as opposed to psychosis, possession or other attacks from within; and the threatening force is dependent on the actions of mankind, in opposition to invaders from space or natural threats, such as volcanoes or tornadoes, that humans are not responsible for creating. (5)
Although the mad scientist scenario has been a dominant feature of the horror movie, its prevalence has varied over time. The most important period was the Classic Period (1931-1936), as defined by Tudor, with 55 per cent of films in the "external threat that is dependent on human activity" category. All the secular films in this category revolved around mad scientist scenarios, the basic elements of which were consolidated during this time. Firstly, a scientist obsessed with his work seeks to master the secret of life, but his creation turns monstrous. His deformed assistant or aged retainer often plays a role in the creature's escape, while children or a young couple are the threatened innocents - the latter also providing the love interest. A laboratory setting is de rigeur, often in an isolated castle or mansion. Authority figures, such as the police or local burghers, frequently come into conflict with the mad scientist. Finally, a population of potential victims may rise en masse against the threat. (6)
Mad scientist themes continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, although invasion from outer space and threats from prehistoric monsters became more popular in the latter period. Science itself was considered by most people to be largely benevolent up until the 1950s, but then more serious misgivings developed. The atom bomb had changed perceptions of atomic energy, while pollution of the environment started to become of greater concern. Radiation pollution started to play a major role in creating monsters in the 1950s with, for example, giant ants in Them! (1954), giant molluscs in The Monster that Challenged the World (1957) and giant locusts in Beginning of the End (1960).
Mad scientist themes declined in popularity during the sixties and seventies, with the rise of internal and secular horror movies (e.g. Psycho, 1960); and then movies with supernatural themes (e.g. The Exorcist, 1973). Where science appeared as a theme, it was usually linked to man-made ecological disaster, arising from radiation and other environmental pollution, or through over-population (e.g. No Blade of Grass, 1970; Silent Running, 1972; Soylent Green, 1973; Logan's Run, 1976). (7)
Mutation due to radioactivity, usually as a result of atomic war, had been a theme during the 1950s, but the notion of genes being deliberately modified by human activities became more explicit from the early 1980s onwards. In Monster (aka Humanoids from the Deep, 1980) an experiment with DNA-treated salmon surprisingly gives rise to an invasion of mutated human-like sea creatures. Meanwhile, in Alligator (1982), animal corpses from experiments using hormones are dumped into sewers, where they are eaten by alligators, which mutate into giant reptiles. No credible genetic mechanisms were proposed in these low-budget films, but in the following decade screenwriters would pepper their scripts with terminology and concepts, borrowed from real-life genetics research, to give movies a whiff of authenticity.
Mad scientists in modern cinema are now rarely portrayed as being purely evil, as they often were in the 1930s, but as people striving to help mankind by exploiting the benefits of scientific discoveries, but who accidentally create a threat. They became seen as the necessary agents of progress, who occasionally get unlucky - rather than being personally responsible for the threat due to evil intent or an obsessive search for knowledge. This change can be traced back to the 1950s, arguably to the sympathetic scientist in The Fly (1958). In this film, the scientist André De Lambre (Al Hedison) accidentally exchanges body parts with a fly during a matter transfer experiment. He destroys his notes and equipment, and crushes his body in an industrial press, to terminate the threat he represents in his mutated state. David Cronenberg remade The Fly in 1986, with Jeff Goldblum playing the scientist, now called Seth Brundle. Cronenberg tried to iron out the scientific inconsistencies of the original, by updating the story in the light of advances in biological knowledge. By the 1980s, the more sympathetic nature of his mad scientist protagonist was not so unusual. Nevertheless, in recent movies in which the creature is part-human or a human clone, it can often be more sympathetic or humane than its creator, even though it presents a threat to humanity. (8)
Mad scientists have therefore evolved into complex modern characters, as we shall see, whose ambiguities represent science's capacity for both good and evil. They are usually seen working within a wider social context, far removed from their isolated predecessors. The technological threat is now just as likely to come from big institutions - multinational corporations, the state or the military - as from individual scientists. During the 1990s, the technological threat has increasingly come from genetic manipulation of some kind. Mad scientist themes have undergone a revival, at a time of growing anxiety about genetic engineering, biotechnology and cloning. However, before we consider the modern picture, we will first backtrack to focus on one of the most famous mad scientists. His act of creation remains a constantly present metaphor whenever scientific advances cause feelings of unease within society.
Frankenstein's monster
Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein Or The Modern Prometheus was written in 1816 at Lord Byron's Villa on Lake Geneva. Shelley considered whether the basic components of a creature could be bought together and endowed with the vital principle of life. She was closely connected to the Romantic Movement, which distrusted science and objected to its rationality and materialism. They considered that science was likely to unleash forces it could not control. Shelley was also influenced by events in her own life, in particular the death of her mother (the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft) shortly after the baby Mary's birth. Other influences that shaped Frankenstein included the legend of the golem; Rousseau's idea of the Noble Savage; the automata developed in Vienna by Kempelen in 1769; the Greek myth of Prometheus; and Benjamin Franklin's work on the nature of electricity and his invention of the lightning conductor. The book also alludes to the dark side of science from Shelley's time; grave-robbing, human dissection, and the electrical stimulation of human corpses in public demonstrations. (9) In Shelley's book, after Frankenstein's monster is bought to life, the moral question is: What responsibility does man have for his creation? This question is open to a number of interpretations, and it is what continues to make the story so resonant in the age of genetic engineering.
The book has three narrators and is structured as a story, within a story, within a story. The book begins and ends with Robert Walton, an explorer, who relates a tale, told him by Victor Frankenstein, who he has recently picked up from the Arctic ice. Walton is the character who is expected to glean the true meaning of the story, as the reader will understand it. Frankenstein tells of his work as a medical student in Ingolstadt, and his enthusiasm for bringing the dead to life in the wake of the premature death of his mother. He succeeds, but then realises he has acted immorally and rejects what he has created. At the centre of Frankenstein's narrative, the monster he created tells his own tale, after confronting Frankenstein high in the Alps. The lonely creature has killed, and threatens to kill again if Frankenstein does not make him a mate. Frankenstein comes close to completing this task, but cannot bring himself to give her the spark of life. The monster takes revenge by killing Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth on the couple's wedding night. Frankenstein pursues the monster to the ends of the Earth and is found crossing the icy wastes by Walton. Both Frankenstein and his monster are left to perish, while Walton gives up his obsessive journey of exploration. (10)
In the book, no mechanism was given for the creation of life apart from the assembly of body parts. The interpretation of the monster's creation has varied in films over the years. The first Frankenstein film, the 1910 Edison Company production, directed by J. Searle Dawley and starring Charles Ogle as a grotesque monster and Auguste Philips as Victor Frankenstein, shied away from showing the monster as stitched together from cadavers. Instead, it presented the monster as a psychological double of Frankenstein, in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, itself the source of many films. (11) Other early silent film versions of Frankenstein, such as the Ocean Film Corporation's Life without Soul (1916) and the Italian production Master of Frankenstein (1920), had monsters made from indistinct patchworks of human body parts. The first explicit portrayal of electricity as providing the spark of life occurred in the 1930s. The classic Universal film Frankenstein (1931) used natural electricity harnessed through lightning. Later settings of the tale also used novel generators and big levers to turn on the electricity. The use of electricity by the mad scientist Rotwang to bring the robot Maria to life in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) was a big influence on Frankenstein films from the 1930s onwards. The films of the 1930s were also responsible for introducing several aspects of what we now consider to be the archetypal mad scientist in Victor Frankenstein. In the book there is no big laboratory scene, no deformed assistant, no mention of body parts being taken from criminals, and no baying mob out to destroy the monster. The framing narrator is usually missing, often the monster's point of view is too, and although Frankenstein and his monster destroy each other in the book, one or the other frequently lives to the end in the movies.
Frankenstein (1931) has come to represent the typical mad scientist scenario. The image of the monster (Boris Karloff) as a giant man with bolts in his neck who walks with a straight-kneed gait dates from this film. The masks worn by today's genetic engineering protestors owe their existence to the imagination of director James Whale and the craftsmanship of Jack Pierce, head of Universal's make-up department in 1931. The scriptwriters introduced the idea of having a criminal brain in the creature's body, an innovation that has been developed further in more recent Frankenstein films. The film emphasises the creature as outcast, who only turns bad when rejected by his master and society in general. Therefore, society (nurture) as much as nature creates this monster. The monster was rescued from certain death in time for the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which James Whale changed the mood to black comedy. This is the first film to give the monster the power of speech, albeit with a limited vocabulary. Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger) takes the mad scientist role, while Frankenstein and his wife (Colin Clive and Valerie Hobson) become the romantic leads. The laboratory setting, with its high ceiling, the creature's raised platform and the lightning conductors, was much imitated in later mad scientist movies. Universal went on to make another six Frankenstein movies, with Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange stepping into Karloff's boots, up until 1945. (12)
The Frankenstein film was revived in the 1950s by the Hammer Films studio, starting with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). (13) The studio was intent on recreating the 1930s films, however, rather than modernising the story and reflecting any contemporary concerns about scientific progress. In The Curse of Frankenstein, the brains and body parts of scientists are assembled in order to make a benign and intelligent creature. However, a struggle in the laboratory leads to the brain being dropped and damaged, ensuring that the creature has murderous instincts even if they were not in its nature.
By 1994, a survey listed around 400 films loosely based on the Frankenstein story. (14) These retellings have retained science as a key part of the plot, articulating a general ambivalence about scientific progress that still hits a nerve today. (15) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh, is the film version that probably stays closest to the original book. Despite its period setting and adherence to the book, however, there are several additions to the screenplay, by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont, that give the tale contemporary resonance. Branagh has said that he wanted Victor Frankenstein to be seen, "not as a mad scientist but as a dangerously sane one", working towards a noble end, like a geneticist working for a cure to AIDS or cancer who might obsessively enter an ethically difficult area of research. (16) The creature, played by Robert De Niro, is a modern incarnation of the original, full of psychological insights and influenced by the post-1960s psycho strand of horror film protagonists. He becomes an articulate adult as in Shelley's book, which is rare in the movies.
In the film, Professor Waldman (John Cleese), who warns Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh) not to proceed with his experiments, is killed by a patient. Frankenstein uses the professor's brain in the creature, while the various organs and limbs come from victims of the cholera epidemic, which is sweeping the city. He also uses parts of Waldman's executed killer. Branagh's device for bringing the creature to life involves a vat of amniotic fluid and acupuncture needles wired to an electricity generator, which recall the physiological experiments of the day that used electricity to animate limbs. The very wet and slippery nature of the creature's emergence from its vat helps to draw strong parallels to the human birthing process, which resonates with Shelley's theme of birth and death, in that responsibility for creating life can refer to all life, and any parent's responsibility for their child. Frankenstein ignores his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) and creates a child by himself, using science and "unnatural processes". This links the Frankenstein story to recent human cloning movies. Frankenstein pulls back from completing the creature's mate because he knows that they might breed to produce an "unnatural race", with echoes of "genetically modified organisms", if left to their own devices in nature.
The original plot device of using Waldham's brain enables the newborn monster to speak, in voice-over, with the dead professor's voice. He berates Frankenstein for making a creature from "bits of thieves, bits of murderers; evil stitched to evil stitched to evil". The make-up of the body is implied as carrying evil. The monster may be newborn, but whatever its environment, the body parts (genes) "inherited" from its "parents" will determine its nature. (17) When Frankenstein later meets the creature in the Alps, Frankenstein insists that the creature was made of components that were just materials and nothing more, but the creature insists Frankenstein is wrong. He can play the recorder and asks,
"In what part of me did this knowledge reside? In these hands? In this mind? In this heart?
And reading and speaking... not things learned so much as things remembered?" (18)
In common with many of the 1990s movies discussed in this book, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein pays close attention to its scientific detail. This is most evident in the research that went into the creature's appearance, using medical textbooks and helped by advances in prosthetics and the new types of latex used in make-up. Over the course of the film, for example, the stitches holding together the various body parts fall away, scar tissue develops, and the creature gradually heals. It's all a long way from the bolts-in-the-neck creature of James Whale's 1931 movie. The equipment seen in Frankenstein's attic is also largely composed of items that would have been available to a medical student of the time, which heightens the period realism. (19)
The grafting of body parts is a common horror movie theme. In The Hands of Orlac (1924), directed by Robert Wiene, a concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) loses his hands in a train crash. He has the hands of an executed murderer surgically grafted onto him, but becomes a murderer himself because he is unable to exert control over the hands. (20) It was noted in 1919, by Sigmund Freud, that disembodied hands, in common with other dismembered limbs, severed heads and isolated brains, are a persistent motif for things that are uncanny - things familiar yet repressed - and for disrupted identity. (21) Disfigured hands are common in mad scientist scenarios, for example, on the arms of Rotwang in Metropolis (1926) and Dr Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963). A number of remakes and variations of the Orlac story have been filmed, including a celebrated 1935 remake by Karl Freud, also called Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. Any future remakes, however, may have to take onboard the real-life case of New Zealander Clint Hallam, who had the arm of a dead Frenchman successfully grafted onto him in September 1998. This represented a major advance in transplant surgery, because a hand transplant requires that skin, muscles, nerves and bone all be grafted at once, compared to previous operations where only single organs or tissues were transplanted. Arm transplants are likely to become commonplace within the next few years. Face transplants are also now a possibility, for those who have suffered severe facial injury. However, the face transplant in the recent movie Face/Off (1997) is scientifically inaccurate, because it is the underlying bone structure, and not the facial skin, which determines appearance. (22)
In Doctor X (1931), the mad Dr. Xavier (Lionel Atwill) oversees a laboratory in which synthetic skin has been discovered. Anyone having a transplant of this skin is transformed into a murderous monster. Again, recent scientific advances make a skin-making laboratory seem just around the corner. In 1998 it was shown that undifferentiated human cells, called embryonic stem cells, could be successfully cultured. These cells can be directed into making sheets of skin for use in transplants, on burn victims for example, or into any other human cell type. Nerve cells were being grown in this way by late 1998, which may one day be used to grow replacement brain tissue to treat victims of Parkinson's disease. (23) The notion that the transplantation of body parts from one person to another (with the possible exception of the brain) could influence personality has no basis in today's scientific reality. However, transplanting genes through genetic engineering is another matter.
Trading body parts for gene sequences: Dr. Moreau
H.G. Wells' 1896 novel The Island of Dr Moreau, filmed as Island of Lost Souls (1932), and more recently under its original title in 1977 and 1996, is a variation on the Frankenstein theme, updated to incorporate nineteenth century advances in the biological sciences. Wells' novel was in essence an evolutionary fantasy, in which a naturalist called Edward Prendick is shipwrecked on an island and becomes a witness to experiments aimed at humanising animals by surgery. The mad doctor is an exiled vivisector who wishes to master life by grafting together men and animals on his operating table. (24) The novel is on one level an anti-religious allegory, which incorporates Darwinian theory and the idea of man playing god by redirecting evolutionary processes. It also includes a number of political themes, including colonialism, while acknowledging the increase in vivisection in the name of science, and the rise of the anti-vivisection movement in Wells' day. (25) Wells firmly believed in progress through science, however, in contrast to the romanticism informing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The modern concerns about the consequences of science in adaptations of The Island of Dr. Moreau, and his other stories, are often additions made by film-makers.
Wells' novel influenced a film in 1922 called A Blind Bargain, directed by Wallace Worsley. In this film Lon Chaney plays Dr. Lamb, a mad scientist who tries to create a new race by grafting monkey glands into humans, but who is ultimately killed by one of his creations. The film included the topical issue of gland grafting, which was causing much debate at the time. (26) The Island of Lost Souls (1932), directed by Erle C. Kenton and starring Richard Arlen as the stranded hero, was the first Hollywood movie directly taken from Wells' novels. In this film, Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) plans to mate his guest with a girl (Kathleen Burke) who he has created from a panther. Moreau's island is populated with man-beasts, created by vivisection and the grafting of body parts in an attempt to speed up the process of evolution. This abuse of surgical procedure aligns the film closely with the Frankenstein films of the 1930s. Laughton is a truly evil Moreau, who dresses all in white and brandishes a whip. He arrogantly rules his "natives" through religious rituals, pain and fear. The man-beasts eventually rebel and drag Moreau to his "House of Pain", where they subject him to a grisly death under the blades of his scalpels. This last scene was a departure from the book, but provided a powerful climax. (27) It served to emphasise the mad scientist element of the story, in line with other movies of the period, with its warning to those who seek to break the rules of nature. Wells disapproved of the film because of its anti-science tone.
In the 1970s film, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), directed by Don Taylor, genetic manipulation begins to supplant the surgical manipulations of the original. Dr. Moreau (Burt Lancaster) explains to the castaway Braddock (Michael York) how he has discovered a "cell particle" that controls the shape of life. He injects his creatures with "Serum containing the distillation of a biological code message, a new set of instructions for modifying nature". However, he then does a series of surgical procedures, in addition to injecting the serum, deemed necessary to turn the beasts into humans. No explicit mention is made of genes or DNA, while the instant effects of the serum in modifying the body show a lack of interest on the film-makers part in scientific authenticity. Moreau is here a more conventional mad scientist than usual, misguided in his attempt to control heredity. He is a white-suited eugenicist at large in the jungle. His motives are not purely evil, in that he recognizes the potential of his work for eradicating disease, but he still rules over his charges with threats of extreme punishment in his House of Pain. In this film, the stranded innocent Braddock is temporarily turned into a beast-human hybrid after a serum injection given to him by Moreau, although he soon reverts on escaping with his love interest Maria (Barbara Carrera), whose animal nature is not developed in this film. An Italian film of the same period, L'Isola degli Uomini Pesce (Island of Mutations) (1979), was also based on Wells' story, but introduced diverse elements such as amphibious creatures and an exploding volcano. (28)
In the 1990s film, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), the application of genetic engineering has completely replaced the use of vivisection and surgical grafting as a means of creating man-beasts. The film, directed by John Frankenheimer, had a turbulent genesis, with its original director Richard Stanley, who initiated the project, being replaced three days into shooting. (29) This version of Dr. Moreau is set in the present day, on an island in the "Java Sea". The fine opening credit sequence is a frantic montage of swarming microscopic life, lightning, close-ups of eyes, blood-cells coursing through veins, medical X-rays and endomicroscopic foetal imagery. This cuts to Edward Douglas (David Thewlis), a U.N. peace negotiator, rather than a naturalist, adrift in a boat after surviving an air crash. Douglas' voice-over describes how his two lifeboat companions had, "fought like beasts not men" over a bottle of water, resulting in them falling overboard to their deaths. Douglas is rescued and taken to the island by Montgomery (Val Kilmer), the scientific assistant of Dr. Moreau. Montgomery, who is present in the book and all the film adaptations (e.g. Bela Lugosi in Island of Lost Souls, 1932, and Nigel Davenport in The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1977), represents a standard, but adaptable, character ever-present in mad scientist scenarios.
On the island, Douglas meets Moreau's daughter Aissa (Fairuza Balk). He also learns that Noble-prize winner Moreau has been on the island for seventeen years, since being barred from conducting his research in the USA by "animal rights activists" (today's anti-vivisectionists). Douglas breaks out of his locked room at night and locates a large building containing a laboratory. Here he finds a variety of caged animals, foetuses in jars, and figures in white coats hunched over an operating table. This is the operating table of previous films, but here it is not used for vivisection/surgery, but as the table upon which the man-beasts give birth. Douglas is chased into the jungle by a group of surprised man-beasts, where he again runs into Aissa. She takes him to a man-beast village, depicted with connotations of Third World poverty and of Vietnam, with downed fighter planes converted into dwellings. The religious theme is introduced, in the form of the Sayer (Ron Perlman) who preaches of the hard ways of being a man, using "The Sayings of the Law". These are taken from Wells' novel, where they formed a post-Darwinian parody of the Ten Commandments.
We first meet Moreau (Marlon Brando) when he enters this village, sitting in a throne on top of a truck. In the tradition of the story he is a colonialist, dressed totally in white, but here his exposed skin is even covered in white sunblock (a modern touch invoking pollution and ozone destruction). Instead of a whip he uses modern electronics to administer pain to the "natives", who are fitted with implants, via a console around his neck. This is a particularly eccentric and mad reading of the character. Later at the main house, Moreau's manservant, the dwarf Majai (Nelson De la Rosa: "the world's smallest man"), wipes off Moreau's sunblock. After learning that the man-beasts are "animals that have been fused with human genes", Douglas accuses Moreau of conducting satanic experiments. Moreau responds with biblical quotes, dismissing the devil as "no more than a tiresome collection of genes". He claims to have metaphorically driven out the devil, by "cutting him to pieces under the microscope". Here, Moreau is able to master life using genetic engineering, because evil and other fundamental aspects of humanity reside in the genes.
Later in the film, it transpires that Montgomery must administer regular injections ("endorphins and hormones") to the man-beasts to stop them regressing into animals. Douglas learns that Aissa is also a man-beast (she has a panther within), despite her human appearance. She is in the first stages of regressing. Meanwhile, a man-beast called Hyena has rebelled and ripped out his implant, rendering him beyond human control. He meets his maker Moreau and demands answers to life's big questions, such as "Who am I?". Moreau cannot alter the essential nature of what the man-beats are, however, and they kill him. Meanwhile, Montgomery descends into drugged madness; a disillusioned man who arrived on Moreau's island as a brilliant neurosurgeon, but who was reduced to the role of zoo keeper due to the new technology of "fusing genes".
Douglas returns to the laboratory and sees his name printed on vials of serum - samples taken during a drugged sleep. He realises that his DNA is being used to stop Aissa regressing into an animal state. The laboratory mise-en-scène is at its most realistic here, with the microscopes that Moreau had earlier used to view cells, bathed in a red light, stainless steel sinks and cupboards, and glass-fronted cabinets full of neatly labelled glassware. Douglas finds a file giving details about the molecular content of his blood, with sub-headings for DNA, enzymes and suchlike, typed out in scientific jargon. Aissa finds Douglas in the laboratory, but during a fight she is killed. All the serum, along with the buildings, are destroyed. Douglas survives and leaves the island alone in a boat. The voice-over tells how he made a record of what he saw, "as a warning to all who would follow in Moreau's footsteps". However, back in the wider world Douglas is constantly tormented by memories of the man-beats when he sees his fellow man committing violent acts, "as if the animal is surging up in them".
The film promises an intelligent remake of the story for the genetics age, but falls well short of this promise. Genetic themes, involving genes and identity, are touched upon, but left unexplored, depriving the film of the depth and resonance it might have achieved. The genetic terms in the film are used in generally vague or inaccurate ways. DNA and blood serum, for instance, are confusingly used to refer to the same thing. Blood serum is blood with its cells and clotting agents removed, therefore it is not a rich source of DNA. The script is confusing this liquid with supernatant, the liquid left after blood cells have been broken up and centrifuged and which does contain the DNA of white blood cells. Meanwhile, scientific jargon (e.g. "endorphins and hormones") peppers the script, without care for scientific veracity. This confusion over terms is unfortunately common in horror and science fiction films that use genetic plot devices. DNA, for instance, has frequently been used interchangeably with enzyme, a protein produced when the genetic code on DNA is expressed; while gene, RNA, chromosome, cell, protein, hormone and serum are often used incorrectly or interchangeably. However, the plot weaknesses in The Island of Dr. Moreau are particularly disappointing, because it is a key text with respect to the representation of biological science in popular culture.
A scientist wanting to build a composite creature in the 1990s would not worry about stitching body parts together - she would use genetically engineering. In the 1980s, crude genetic engineering techniques were used to make composite animals or chimeras. Chimeras are made by blending together two different genomes, which can be from the same or different species. For example, embryo cells from a goat and a sheep were mixed together to create a new creature, which was called a geep. (30) These real-life experiments inspired a BBC TV series of 1988 called First Born, in which genetic engineers produced creatures that were half-ape and half-human. These hybrid animals, needless to say, lacked a soul. (31) Chimeric animals are now common in laboratories around the world, where they are used for medical research. Meanwhile, genetics has continued to advance at a startling rate. Today it is theoretically possible to move a particular gene from one species to any other species. As for chimeras, it was revealed in 1995 that an American biotechnology company had secretly made a cow-human hybrid embryo, by introducing the nucleus of a human cell into a cow egg. It lived for several days. (32)
The basic mad scientist scenario can be observed in many recent movies that include representations of genetics. In Jurassic Park (1993), for example, the entrepreneur John Hammond is the mad scientist figure with the grand vision of creating life. His assistant Dr. Wu, an outstanding molecular geneticist (ethically deformed by his desire for money and fame?), does the technical work involved in creating dinosaurs from ancient DNA, but his complex fail-safe mechanisms go wrong. The dinosaurs are created for the "good of mankind", in this case as part of the entertainment industry. However, they go out of human control and threaten the innocents, including children. The laboratory setting is on a remote island, on which fortifications surround the creatures. The threatened children play a key role in bringing the threat under control, when they reactivate the computer system controlling the restraining fences.
The mad scientist therefore lives on into the age of genetic engineering, but the modern movie scientist is a very different character from the early archetypal mad movie scientist. Movie scientists are today more influenced by real-life scientists. In the recent films discussed in this book they tend to be depicted as real people, with lives and emotions no different from other members of society. They usually work for positive motives, and work to rectify mistakes made by themselves or their colleagues. They are rarely clinically mad or irredeemably evil. They are usually sympathetically portrayed and are often cast in the role of hero, for example, the palaeontologists in Jurassic Park (1993) and the entomologist in Mimic (1997). Real-life scientists, men and women, eminent in particular fields, often provide the models for these fictional scientists. The representation of real-life scientists will be examined further in a later chapter.
However, real-life individuals who have misused genetics during the twentieth century also cast a shadow over the modern movie scientist. The biggest misuse of genetics in modern times has been done in the name of eugenics, the attempt to improve the human race by selective breeding. The Nazi doctors, who took eugenic ideas to extremes, today represent the most evil real-life scientists with respect to popular culture. The figure of Dr. Josef Mengele, the chief doctor at Auschwitz, in particular will be seen to colour many of the representations of genetics discussed in this book. His looming presence will be discussed after our tour of genetic-themed movies.
Therefore, the archetypal mad scientist has become a complex modern character, capable of representing both the good and evil uses to which DNA technology can potentially be put. This powerful technology promises many benefits to mankind, but like all technology it is accompanied by risks, and it is open to abuse. The movie geneticist therefore now reflects the deep ambiguity about DNA technology that exists in society.
Notes
Chapter 2: Dinosaur Resurrection.
References:Complete bibliography of book, including all names on multi-author publications and details of edited books.
Chapter 2: Dinosaur Resurrection.
Chapter 3: Confronting the Clone.
Chapter 4: Cloning the Alien.
Chapter 5: Danger: Genetically Modified Organisms.
Chapter 6: Designer Babies.
Chapter 7: All in the Genes?
Chapter 8: Real-life Science.