Auto eroticism

                                                                                                                 

                                                                                     

Behold! His Mighty Hand. Or something. I feel as if I'm in one of those Cecil B. DeMille epics where Moses discovers the burning bush and takes off his sandals and falls on his face.

For this is The Ultimate Car. 

YES.

The 1939 Bentley Embiricos.

What is a Bentley Embiricos, you may ask? Hell if I know, except that of all the gorgeous, bulbous old cars I've ever looked at, this one is the most flagrantly, lavishly erotic.

Erotic, because why? Because its bulbousness, femaleness, shyly covered rear wheels implying an intimate boudoir or bridal chamber, contrast startlingly with slyly tapered, fiercely-pointed fenders, an even more fierce point at the tail, and squatty primeval-looking predatory "legs" that throw the whole machine into a kind of snarly crouch.

This is less a car than something alive. Something with animus, with soul.

I don't know who Embiricos was, and I don't care much (except I feel a bit guilty and negligent not researching him for this post). Some race car driver, or someone who could afford to have a whole car designed after him - like Edsel, except this one was GOOD. The Embiricos appears to have been manufactured for several years, from about 1936 to 1939, but I can't see much difference in it from year to year. It just goes from exotically gorgeous to exotically gorgeous.

It's funny, because to me it has more of the look of a '40s car, with all those pregnant-looking bulges. But at the same time there is the pointiness, even angularity, and a raciness that implies gazelle-like speed. You could take this thing out on the track back in 1939 and beat the hell out of all those pathetic Bugattis and whatever-else-was-around.

I think it's obvious by now that I know nothing whatsoever about vintage cars. But I know what I like. I have the most embarrassing reaction to them. I want to sit on the roof of this thing, facing its rear bumper, and just sli-i-i-i-i-i-de on down.

(and omigodlookatthoserearwindowstheymakemewanttoediieeeEEEEEE)

There is a name for this fetish-y thing I'm talking about. Can't remember it, but there was a whole TV series about it, My Amazing Whackadoodle Addiction or Compulsion or something. A woman was going to marry the Eiffel Tower, for example, but I guess he said no. Another woman wanted to marry a carnival ride (which didn't work, by the way - I didn't get that one at all, for if a ride doesn't work, how would you get off?)

I don't really want to marry cars like this one. I want to have lustiferous affairs with them, ride around inside them to the creak of leather and the woah-woah-woah-woah-woah hummy sound of an old-fashioned car engine. I've heard that riding in these things is sort of like being in a Sherman tank (not that I've ever been in one of THOSE either), in that they seem simply huge inside and out. 

Every year, Bill and I go to a local car show which is made up of about 85% vintage: cars older than 40 years. The oldest of these, a Ford predating the Model T, had a crank. The one I first had a real Jones for was a little red Corvette (do they come in any other colour?) that I wanted to slip into my pocket. But in the last few years, the '40s models, wide and swaggering, chugging along like mighty seagoing vessels, have done it for me. 

And yet, look at this one! It predates them all. And from every angle, it looks like a different car. It even looks downright modern from the side. This front view looks very race-car-ish - as a matter of fact, it's downright futuristic, like the Batmobile or Supercar. It looks as if it could easily take off and fly, its rear jets blazing.

But the sleekness from the side. . . oh God. Gulp. I want to lick it, to swallow it. It's just that kind of car. You could put it on a stick in the summer and consume it. 

I'd sing to it. Wrap it up in a blanket at night (one-o-those tarp thingies).

I'd wish upon it, instead of a star.

I'd knock on it, instead of wood.

"BEHOLD, HIS MIGHTY HAND!"

Happy Birthday, Harold

The things you remember to forget

Can I piece this together, or should I just leave it in its natural pieces?

Years ago, when the internet was still somewhat Jurassic and YouTube was all new to me, I kept trying to find something, anything, about an episode of a sci-fi TV show I saw in the '60s. Wasn't sure if it was Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or (my personal favorite, the one that scared the bejeezus out of me) One Step Beyond. 

I don't think I even saw the show, in fact. My much-older sister was reading a description of it out of TV Guide. "A woman doctor awakens to discover that she has become extremely obese." My sister said, "Oh, that sounds like me." I didn't even know it at the time, but she was pregnant and hiding it from the world, including me.

But that wisp of memory is ALL, I swear, that I had to go on.

I did find this on a message board, and thought: I think, I think she's talking about the same thing:

Does anybody remember an episode of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits about a Queen Bee? It isn't the one with the sexy queen bee trying to breed with a human male. This was about a woman who wakes up and discovers she is enormously fat because she is a queen bee and she is never allowed to do anything but breed and be fed. Program, episode and names of actors would be appreciated.

Update: Zzzzzzzz is the one about the sexy queen bee. I'm looking for the one about the morbidly obese queen bee.

Answers

Best Answer: Outer Limits: Zzzzzz

Season 1 Episode 18

Actors: Vic Perrin, Bob Johnson, Ben Wright, Robert Culp, Robert Duvall

It wasn't the Outer Limits, and I believe it was in black and white. I can see the actress, but I can't think of her name. She did a lot of stuff in the 60's and 70's. Sorry to be of no help. Good luck.

It wasn't Zzzzzz, I checked on YouTube. It wasn't even Twilight Zone or Outer Limits or any of those, I obsessively checked the synopsis on every single episode and watched the ones that were available, and no obese doctor. So I gave up. Every so often, every few years I mean, I'd take another half-hearted stab at it. THEN!

Then, just tonight, I found this - this description on IMDB, and bingo-bango.

The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (TV Series)

Consider Her Ways (1964)

Plot Summary

Dr. Jane Waterleigh wakes to find herself in an obese body, having just given birth to her fourth baby, and is called "Mother Orchis" and "Mother 417" by an all-female medical staff. The other Mothers, all of whom are corpulent and much larger than their helpers, the Servitors, tell Jane that there are no men, their only responsibility is to give birth, and Mothers neither read nor write.

Jane, however, remembers her past life as a physician and wife, so two policewomen try to arrest her for "reactionism." The Doctors refuse to surrender her, and send her to sick bay, then to Laura, the historian. Laura explains that all of the men died decades ago, when a Dr. Perrigan developed a virus to control the rat population, but the strain mutated, killing all male humans, but sparing females, who were immune.

Now only women survive, and they are sorted at birth into four classes--Doctors, Mothers, Servitors, and Workers--and raised in learning centers. When Laura tells Jane that she will now receive an hypnotic treatment, a drug-induced amnesia to remove all of her memory, she becomes hysterical, and returns to her earlier world. 

She is in the office of Dr. Hellyer, her boss and the Chief of Staff at her hospital, who reminds her that she volunteered to test a new narcotic, Sonadrin, which apparently took her to the fantastic matriarchal world from which she just escaped. She discovers that Dr. Perrigan is a real biologist, who is working on a myxomatosis strain to exterminate brown rats.

She meets Perrigan and tries to convince him to discontinue his project, but he refuses, so she shoots him, lights a fire using all of Perrigan's research notes, and burns down his laboratory. She is tried for murder, but refuses to plead insanity, and insists that her sacrifice is worthwhile, since she is saving humanity from a terrible future. 

Then her attorney, Max Wilding, tells her that Perrigan has a son, another Dr. Perrigan, who promises to complete his father's work.

OK THEN! Great episode, based on a short story by John Wyndham (which I now have to find!). I decided to post the entire (detailed) synopsis because it's so fascinatingly bizarre. It DOES have termite queen aspects to it (and dear GOD do not get me going on termite queens, those seething bags of - ). I do not have the video, and the only photos are these godawful grainy things I scrounged and blew up. There is a mere snippet from the ending on YouTube, from which I have made a few not-very-good gifs.

But it's gratifying to realize that from that tiny wisp of memory, I have been able to retrieve something this tangible. Hell of a good story, too - too bad I didn't watch it.

BADDA-BOOM: There's got to be a rim shot to this. The actress in this episode was catching my mind at first - boy, she looked familiar (one of those!), until one of my Google image searches just sort of stuck her name in my face.

I remember her from Barney Miller! And many other things, of course - she had one of those long careers character actresses used to have.  And now that I think of it, my older sister - the pregnant one - (the termite queen, I mean) - used to watch The Alfred Hitchcock Hour all the time, and wouldn't be caught dead watching One Step Beyond. That sort of show was for the common rabble. Hitchcock was Art.

So I should've remembered. Eh?

POSTLY POST: So the next day, like ripping a bandaid off something barely healed, I began to look for some more. Can't leave it alone, it seems.

Enthralling as that story outline seemed, there were holes in it, and parts of it that didn't make much sense. This was the only other detailed synopsis I could find, from Wikipedia:

The story is mostly a first-person narrative. It begins with a woman (Jane Waterleigh) who has no memory of her past waking up and discovering that she is a mother of some description, in a bloated body that is not her own. After some confusing experiences Jane's memory gradually returns and she recalls that she was part of an experiment using a drug (chuinjuatin) to see if it enabled people to have out-of-body experiences. It seems that the drug has worked far better than anyone could have anticipated: Jane has been cast into the future. She also realises that she is in a society consisting entirely of women, organised into a strict system of castes, and that she is now a member of the mother caste. Jane's initial contacts have never even heard of men, and believe her to be delusional.

When it becomes clear to doctors who attend Jane that something strange has happened (since she can read and write, while the mother caste are illiterate) they arrange for her to be taken to meet an aged historian named Laura. It seems that Jane is in a society somewhat more than a century after her own time. Laura relates that not long after Jane's own time a Dr Perrigan carried out scientific experiments that unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women. After a very difficult period of famine and breakdown, a small number of educated women, found mainly in the medical profession, took control and embarked on an urgent programme of research to enable women to reproduce without males. The women also decided to follow some advice from the Bible ("Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways") and created a caste-based society in which Jane has become a member of the Mother caste.

Laura does understand what Jane means when she talks of men. However, she is certain that they were oppressors of women and that the world is far better without them. Jane disagrees and feels the demise of men to be a terrible blow.

Distressed at the prospect of spending her life as a bloated producer of babies, expected to be unable to read, write or reason, Jane requests that she be administered a dose of chuinjuatin in the hope that she might return to her own time. It works, and once transported, Jane decides to stop Dr Perrigan at all costs. The story has an ambiguous ending, which may suggest that it is the narrator's own actions that will lead to the catastrophe she hopes to prevent, an example of the predestination paradox.

This is actually the synopsis of the original John Wyndham short story, though the Wiki entry says the Hitchcock adaptation was "fairly faithful" (though transplanted to the U. S. Note the word "programme" in the synopsis - even we Canadians don't use terms that antiquated and bulky).

But here's one more snippet: a review posted on a Hitchcock fan site. Gives a little more insight into this strange and twisted thing. This just makes me want to see it all the more, but I'd have to order it on DVD or something, along with 576 other episodes.

This was a weirdly disturbing episode...but NOT for the reasons presented. In the future, men are dead and the surviving woman have become a single-gender society, with classes and levels organized along the same lines as the Ants. A woman wakes with no memory of who she is...and finds she's a hugely obese, barely mobile woman named "Mother Orchis" who (as a mother) is genetically designed to have babies...and nothing else. She gradually remembers she has a husband (nobody even knows what a 'man' is), can read and write (something Mother Orchis can't do) and was in fact a doctor. The story's pretty facinating (involving mental projection and time travel) but the the whole "No woman is complete without her man!" message has an ugly ring to it. Still, I'm charmed by the effectiveness of the primitive fat-suits and the sight of those huge woman, reclining on couches and eating...being massaged by servants (drones) and existing in this strange society that survived the loss of the other gender and adapted.

(I have just one question. Wouldn't they still have male babies? Did they kill them all off, or what? Unless perhaps they cloned themselves, but that part of it is never explained.) 

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

"WHALES, Mr. Melville?" - part 976

   

I have to agree. When I saw it in '74, I thought: nobody will ever want to see this show again.

Harold, you sweet thing

NOTE. Though I make 95% of my gifs (mostly from YouTube or private videos), I did not make these, and I wish I knew who did. I saw them on someone else's site who ALSO did not know who made them. The only identifying label is Tumblr, with five thousand letters and numbers after it. Pretty hard to track down.

I've seen my stuff on other people's blogs, and so long as they don't try to say they wrote it, fine. If they say my name, even better. But it all belongs to the world, doesn't it?

Actually, no, it doesn't. These are sweet and clever and have combined animation with still photos from Lloyd's actual pictures, with nice pastel colours added. 

I've seen a couple more of these:

If the artist would step forward and proclaim, "I did these, take them down", I will. I'd prefer they say who they are first. I am NOT trying to take credit for them. But they're adorable, aren't they? And in a split-second, they say so much more about Harold than I ever could in all my blatherings.

POST-BLOG: Though I've probably posted these before, it's time to see them again. They're snippets of cartoons featuring Harold. He's in and out of them pretty quickly, which is why I was able to make them into gifs.

Multiple choice quiz. No, figure them out yourself. Who they all are, I mean. If you can't, what are you doing on my blog? This is a silent movie blog, for God's sake! What are you trying to do - learn something? It won't happen here.

Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. by Owen Land

Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc.

by Owen Land

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16mm film, USA, 1965-1966
5 minutes Colour, Silent
Available formats: 16mm

This film takes the view that certain defining characteristics of the medium, such as those mentioned in the title, are visually "worthy". For this reason it is especially recommended. - G.L.

"The richest frame I have seen in any film when you take into consideration all movements lines the beautiful whites, and reds and blacks... The kinetic and visual experienced produced by Landow's film is even more difficult to describe... There is humour in it (the blink); there is clear Mozart -(Mondrian)- like sense of form..." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice, July 1975.

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From Wikipedia 

Film in Which There Appear... is a six-minute loop of the double-printed image of a blinking woman; her image is off-centre, making visible the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the film. According to Land, there is some slight variation in the image onscreen, but "no development in the dramatic or musical sense." Land's intention was to focus attention on the components that film viewers are not supposed to, and do not usually, notice, such as scratches, dirt particles, edge lettering, and sprocket holes. For this reason, Land often scheduled the film first in screenings of his work.

Production

Land created the film to mock the idea of watching a film that doesn't change.The film began life as a 16 mm loop film of "china girl" test leader of a woman blinking, originally used by the Kodak company to test colour reproduction. The loop was intended to be played continuously for 11 minutes, and then, following a commercial break, for another 11 minutes. However, its initial screening was stopped short by a hostile audience reaction. Land printed the loop optically to create Film in Which There Appear.... He has confessed to feeling "very silly" about passively watching the film in a dark cinema, and occasionally stands up to point out details to the film's audience. Land later created a 20-minute split-screen expansion of the same loop, which he claims "looks better because it's more of a horizontal film than a vertical film; you look across it, not into it."

Reception

Film in Which There Appear... is considered an important work in the structural film movement. Fred Camper described Film in Which There Appear... as "a kind of Duchampian found object, a looped test film that focuses attention on the medium and the viewer." J. Hoberman called the film "blandly presented." Juan A. Suárez noted the film's unique element of "indeterminacy and open-endedness," remarking that the more the film is projected, the more scratches and dust it will collect.

BLOGGER'S BLAH: This is, of course, a piece of shit. Or, at least. completely nonsensical. Some of the critics seemed to be on to this guy. Sitting through six minutes of "this" (and you will note, of course, that there are minute differences in the thing from one minute to the next - I giffed representative samples from Minute One, Three and Five) must have been an agony of boredom, and then - to have to say something intelligent about it! As with the Emporer's New Clothes, no one wanted to admit that the thing is useless and completely naked of meaning. Oh, no - it's Mozartian, even Mondrian (but this from a critic who spelled the filmmaker's name wrong!). Then again, it's also Duchampian (and I won't even try to guess what that means, nor will I waste time looking it up on Wikipedia), and a "found object". But that's just it, it ISN'T "found", it was MADE by someone who had nothing better to do. I only posted this because it's an interesting example of the phenomenon of the China Girl, rendered (I am sure) much more scratchy than she originally was. It looks like it's raining, for God's sake. The rest of it is - shall I say, Warholian? - except that if it were a Warhol film, it would last six HOURS rather than six minutes. And I've only subjected you to roughly thirty seconds (a sort of highlight reel). Aren't you glad I furthered your film education in only thirty seconds?

No?