Tag Archives: jekyll and hyde

Walt Disney was a name to conjure with when I was a kid. The movies of the 1960s and 1970s were no classics but there were still rereleases (Snow White left me terrified of the Queen for years), the Wonderful World of Disney TV show, the comic books and the legend Disney had built up over years. Small wonder BABES IN TOMORROWLAND: Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 by Nicholas Sammond intrigued me. Alas, like The CIA Book Club the title is clickbait; unlike that book, the content did not intrigue me and I DNFed.

Sammond’s focus isn’t a bad topic: with 20th century urbanization and the new medium of moving pictures, bringing up kids suddenly seemed harder than ever before. Would movies expose them to bad influences? Would living in the city make it easier for them to fall into vice and sin? A boom in child-rearing advice followed, and of course, never went away. Walt Disney cannily promoted himself as a safe haven: you could trust him to turn out quality, family-friendly movies that would be safe for kids. However Disney is little more than a subplot and Sammond draws unconvincing conclusions — did you know the subtext of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Fantasia is that if you leave your kids unsupervised, they’ll screw everything up? The child-rearing stuff wasn’t interesting to me without that.

REACTION! Chemistry in the Movies by Mark Griepp and Marjorie Mikasen seemed full of promise when I started reading and they discussed Jekyll and Hyde topics such as the recurrent use of mirrors in the film adaptations (a point I wish I’d included in Watching Jekyll and Hyde) and speculate about the makeup of Jekyll’s formula. However the movie is also wrong on one point and as it moves on to Invisible Man, The Absent-Minded Professor and more it makes many curious choices. How do you write about cocaine’s history as an anesthetic and not mention the film Edge of Sanity? Why include Back to the Future — yes, plutonium is a chemical, but needing it to power the DeLorean hardly makes this a movie about chemistry? Ultimately the creator seem more interested in real-world chemistry than the movies and I needed more of the latter.

As Paul in Let No Man Put Asunder has the ability to see Kirlian auras I thought an interlibrary loan of PICTURING AURA: A Visual Biography by Jeremy Stolow might be useful. It was, but it was also a slog to read through. Stolow’s history of efforts by mystics, Russian Senmo Kirlian and multiple other parapsychologists to visualize, photograph and explain the human aura is way too credulous about the psychics he profiles and suffused with academic jargon. Among the interesting stuff was the career of screenwriter/parapsychologist Thelma Moss, an arguments that Russians weren’t as big on psi-research as legend tells (Soviet scientists found it incompatible with Marxist ma terialism). Among the weaknesses are that Stolow identifes the paranormal nonfiction magazine Fate as science fiction, making me wonder, as with Reaction!, what errors I’m not catching.

The winner of the week was Samantha Cole’s HOW SEX CHANGED THE INTERNET AND HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED SEX: An Unexpected History. Cole shows how sex goes back to the earliest days of the Internet: a bulletin board providing AIDS information, a Playboy centerfold that became the first digitally transmitted image, sex workers discovering the Internet offered safer ways to conduct their business. Standing against all this were censors, squeamish social networks and nervous hosting companies who flinched from useful sexual information as much as they did hardcore porn. This was a good history with some interesting points (people focus on the damage deepfakes could do in politics rather than their primary use, humiliating women); there’s surprisingly little about child porn which may reflect Cole’s frustration with Protect The Children rationales from anti-sex crusaders.

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Discovering a nonfiction book is not what I expected doesn’t mean the book is bad. The CIA Book Club has little to do with the title topic; it’s still an excellent book. Similarly, ONE FINE DAY: Britain’s Empire on the Brink, Sept. 29 1923 by Matthew Parker has very little to do with that date, when Britain gaining control of Palestine meant the Empire ruled one quarter of the world (not counting oceans); Parker’s panoramic survey of the British Empire doesn’t even bring up Palestine or how the British came to take it over.

Nevertheless, the book is a fascinating look at Britain in the first quarter of the 20th century, when the Empire was at its peak — and already starting to slide off it. In India, Nehru and Gandhi are challenging British rule. In Africa, American Marcus Garvey has become an icon inspiring Africans all over to assert themselves as equals to the white man. Australia and other “dominions” are chafing at being subordinate partners, supporting the Empire for very little gain. The hypocrisy of the supposed “white man’s burden” of governing the lesser races wisely was becoming increasingly obvious. And the financial burdens of being a world power were starting to show. It was game over for the Empire, even if that wouldn’t be obvious for a while.

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN HORROR FILMS: A History of Mad Professors, Student Bodies, and Final Exams by Andrew L Grunzke sounded right up my alley — indeed, I half-wondered if the chapter on Jekyll and Hyde would make me kick myself for not reading it sooner. Again, this book was not what I expected, but not in a good way. It spends half its text talking about Frankenstein, Jekyll and Van Helsing, none of whom are known primarily as educators (only a couple of films paint Jekyll as such). When he does get to high-school horror I wasn’t that impressed, and the sloppy errors he makes like asserting Paul Massie in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is the first clean-shaven Hyde) make me doubt everything he says about movies I haven’t seen. Plus even though it’s a movie-centric book, I think discussing Buffy with its High School Is Hell themes would have been worthwhile. I’m glad I interlibrary-loaned this rather than buying it.

You may have noticed my movie blog posts occasionally wondering what someone in their twenties would make of this or that movie. I thought Simone Elias’ OLD FILMS, YOUNG EYES: A Teenage Take on Hollywood’s Golden Age might provide an answer. While Elias — who writes a damn sight better than I did at her age — looks at rom-coms, beach party films, film noir and pre-code films, the book is less about her reactions than explaining to people her age why old movies are worth watching, the cultural context they took place in and how much of modern film has its roots in classic Hollywood. I’m obviously not the target audience for a book like that, though (also obviously) that’s not a fault in the book, just a mismatch between book and reader.

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