MADAME HYDE (2017) is a French film I’d never heard of before I stumbled across it last week: a freak electrical accident renders frustrated science teacher Madame Gequil (Isabelle Huppert) — pronounces JeeKUL — happier and peppier but also turns her into a living lightning bolt after dark, a power she’s happy to exploit dealing with people who piss her off. A dull one, good only for the In Name Only appendix. “You think you can acquire great power by a magic, miracle or accident.”
VICTORIAN DEMONS: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siecle by Andrew Smith argues that by the end of the 19th century, the English upper classes were seriously concerned that the English Male had lost his mojo, becoming too degenerate to stand against such outside threats as syphilis and Dracula’s vampirism. Smith sees Dr. Jekyll and his friends (hence my interest in this book) as degenerates too — wealthy and upper-middle class but without the moral fiber for Jekyll to resist temptation or for his friends to take any real action against Hyde. He also argues the “invisible deformity” that makes people recoil from Hyde is that Hyde presents as a gentleman but the presentation is just enough “off” that it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how much value this hs to my book, but it was an interesting read.
JEKYLL (2007) was a six-episode BBC modern take on Stevenson, and every bit as good as I remembered it. In some ways better as I appreciate the ways it stands out. Irish actor James Nesbitt is a creepy maniacal fiend as Hyde, grinning in sadistic glee whenever he goes wild (I’d have loved to see him as the Joker).
As the series starts, Tom Jackman (Nesbitt) has learned he has a dangerously violent, immoral second personality, which is why he’s separated from his baffled wife Claire (Gina Bellman) and their kids. He’s worked out a rough relationship with his alter ego, communicating back and forth by a pocket recorder: “Hyde” (not named that until later) knows if he kills anyone, Jekyll will turn himself in for the crime; Jekyll knows if he tries to cure himself, Hyde will commit suicide.
That’s bad enough, obviously, but now a mysterious organization has begun hunting the duo. It turns out that Doctor Jekyll was a real person whose experiments triggered a superhuman mutation into Hyde (the series incorrectly states humans haven’t evolved in millennia); his friend Robert Louis Stevenson fictionalized the story, partly to cloud the truth and make it harder for anyone to exploit Jekyll’s research). Tom is his last living relative and therefore the object of the organization’s schemes.
The actors are excellent and Steven Moffat does a great job on the script. I like a number of the details such as Tom suffering from Hyde’s wild nights — Hyde stays up d rinking, Tom gets the hangover and the exhaustion the next day. It does have a few flaws such as several characters insisting Jekyll can’t be Tom’s ancestor — he had no children! The possibility of a bastard child kept from the limelight or a child of Hyde’s doesn’t come up (it’s the latter). Still, this is definitely one of the better modernizations.“The truth is, if I’m being honest, I don’t get a lot of pleasure out of killing children — but I get enough.”
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