As part of my proposal to McFarland for a Jekyll and Hyde movie book, I’m giving them a sample chapter looking at the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As I wrote last year, the part of the film where Hyde (Fredric March) abuses and gaslights Ivy (Miriam Hopkins) is not only horrifying to watch but makes Jekyll much less sympathetic.
Hyde, after all, is Jekyll’s way of acting out his more sinful desires without getting caught. He’s sexually frustrated not being able to sleep with his fiancee Muriel (Rose Hobart) but he doesn’t want to risk the scandal of taking a lover. By becoming Hyde he’s free, but he also free other impulses too. Hyde like hurting people with little provocation; he’s Jekyll’s lizard brain, his id, completely stripped off inhibitions. As the film progresses, Hyde’s apish form becomes more bestial; so it seems is his conduct.
This is in keeping with the Victorian view that criminal, violent behavior represented a lower level of evolution than the middle and upper class Victorian white men; a career criminal was an evolutionary throwback to the level of an African savage (blacks are not, of course, a lower evolutionary level, nor are they more brutal or criminal than white people). In mutated form, the idea that our rationality is at war with our more animalistic side is still around. The point in the film is not that Jekyll’s a monster but that we’ve all got the capacity for evil and inhumanity; when Hyde is Jekyll those impulses are in check. Rose is not at risk.
Rewatching the film, I don’t think that absolves Jekyll. The film wants us to have sympathy for him: Mamoulian cut one scene from the script, showing Jekyll paying off the father of a girl Hyde trampled on, because it makes him look bad. Maybe he wouldn’t ever do that as himself but he’s not too troubled by having done it as Hyde. The same is true of the abuse: he’s willing to keep turning into Hyde so he can have sex with Ivy, even though he knows what Hyde’s doing to her. 
The movie avoids making Jekyll look like a villain because we don’t see him from his first seduction of Ivy through the moment Muriel, absent with her father, returns to town. When Ivy come to him shortly afterwards, he’s troubled by her suffering but he obviously wasn’t troubled enough to stop as long as he needed a sexual outlet. I wondered if maybe he’d stayed Hyde but Poole (Edgar Norton), his butler, references seeing his master occasionally so Jekyll did change back and forth.
I don’t think there’s any way not to see Jekyll as a villain rather than a tragic figure, though even if unintended, thgat fits with the shallow hypocrite of Stevenson’s novel.
The movie’s critique of Victorian stuffiness and hypocrisy is also off. Jekyll’s friend Lanyon (Holmes Herbert) is a stuffy conformist who doesn’t approve of Jekyll spending so much time on charity work and doesn’t see any need for science to advance the human condition. At the end, he comes off as the voice of reason: Jekyll’s non-conformity, his pushing back against the era’s mores, his reluctance to rein in his passions, are flaws; there’s no distinction between the good side (his impassioned desire for Rose) and the evil side that manifests in Hyde. Like so many other mad scientists, Jekyll’s positive aspects (by today’s standards) are tinged with folly because they led to him, as he says at one point, trespassing in God’s domain.
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Most of it was Plush Dog. The glaucoma the vet diagnosed last week requires a lot of eyedrops and they have to be put in with gaps between them. This expands dog care to take in an extra half-hour in the morning. And at lunch. And in the evening. Plus she was concerned he was hurting which led to us going to the eye vet yesterday, using up a chunk of time. Though it was the right call: the Plush One had a small scratch on his eye, nothing disastrous but it requires added drops so it doesn’t hurt him.
Both covers are by Neal Adams.
I got a couple of articles done for The Local Reporter. One on a local woman who 
That the plane wasn’t anywhere near the gate was a clear sign we’d been denied, yet again. And the airport has a piss-poor selection of places to eat and no Starbucks — not that I drink coffee but at least they have decent tea. This place? The best I could find was Constant Comment.
Similarly I had a good writing week but didn’t get anything up at Atomic Junk Shop and only had one story at The Local Reporter, about Carrboro planning 
I worked on Savage Adventures, editing my analysis of the old Doc Savage pulps through 1940 (which ends with the ingenious lost race story, 
If she has any flaw it’s that she can be very stoic when she’s in pain and sometimes we miss it. Plushie’s a cry-baby when he’s hurt but that makes it easier to know there’s a problem.
Work this week went well. At Atomic Junk Shop, I look back at the moment Roy Thomas began indulging his two obsessions, the 
At The Local Reporter I wrote about 
The dogs weren’t as distracting as taking the car in to get some preventive maintenance done yesterday. I brought work but after three hours (I could have gone home to wait but the drive would have wasted more time) my mind simply ran out of steam. I didn’t regain steam when I finally got home so my day was largely shot. Frustrating.
Still, I got a fair amount of work done. I wrote a profile of Chapel Hill’s 
Over at Atomic Junk Shop I wrote a post how the seemingly 
Sleep helped a lot too. I had some really bad nights but it got to the point my body decided to sleep late — that’s rare — and I felt much better for it (who’d have guessed?). With TYG keeping the dogs occupied much of the week, it was also easier for me to find time to exercise.
Over at Atomic Junk Shop I discussed encountering old tropes 
Oh, and the Durham Writers MeetUp Group — my specfic writing group is under their umbrella — is in need of a new admin, so I volunteered. It doesn’t sound like too much work; I’m waiting for the current administrator to get back to me about what I need to do to take over. Wish me luck.
February, however, has started off pretty well. I was determined to get some creative work done this week so I focused on rereading my first draft of Let No Man Put Asunder. It’s pretty good for one of my first drafts, with character arcs and story arc moving along well. I got about 30,000 words in; if I’m write, it’s after this chapter that things run a lot less smoothly. Still, I’m satisfied I haven’t been wasting my time. I also reread the feedback from my writing group and noted where I agreed with their criticisms, which I usually do. Fortunately there’s nothing they said that isn’t fixable, like a sense in one chapter the stakes aren’t high enough.
Plushie’s still in his cage all of next week but I’m determined to get things done. Wish me luck, and have a great weekend.
I don’t blame him for barking his head off when we leave him alone in there, but even with a husband pillow for support, the back strain from sitting in there does not make my mind sharp. Nor does having even less privacy in the early morning than when Wisp accompanies me downstairs. As I 
Over at Atomic Junk Shop I looked at a warden who does a 
The Trapster’s paste is strong enough to hold the Thing. Nail polish is not going to remove it but apparently artist Gene Colan didn’t know that.
