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forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Whereas Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter for the crime of killing Artemis’ deer, Steven sacrifices his son (A) for the apparent crime of killing a patient while performing surgery under the influence of alcohol (S). Ostensibly, the film would seem to be about Steven’s overriding sense of guilt which results in him killing his son. Nevertheless, there is a further reading of this film which
treat Mr Houseman, who arrives with toothache just as the surgery is about to close. The dentist recognises Houseman as the man who seduced and assaulted his wife, so he ties him into the chair and takes a drill in order to ‘drill a little hole to let out some of “lover boy”...’ The ‘humour’ lies in the sense of ‘sweet revenge’: the wronged husband strapping the
replica of another woman – it is probably more accurate to think of it as a rather perverse romantic melodrama. Both films offer scenarios in which men seek to duplicate and/or create women, in Four Sided Triangle via a replication machine and in Stolen Face by surgery. Such a theme crops up in a number of SF/horror texts, notably Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein , Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s 1886 novel The Future Eve
emptiness of consumerism, the absurdities of technology, narcissism and what Gilliam terms the ‘California disease’ of cosmetic surgery, the manipulation of language, the violence underpinning orthodoxy, the institutional crushing of imagination, and the compensations and dangers of escapism. Ironically, many of these forces would play a part in the fraught tussles that engulfed the film after the
King (1971–72), which opens in Geneva, where a woman is undergoing plastic surgery. Next, in London, a man is released from prison. He jets to Switzerland to witness her unveiling: she now resembles the woman whose picture he carries. The title sequence follows. Jason King, the dandy crime-writer cum reluctant crime-fighter from Department S (1969–70), pounds away at his typewriter, while shots of him in action and posed with various ‘dolly-birds’ are inset in the upper right corner of the screen. Cut to New York, and then to King, played with absolute relish by
, Dracula – Prince of Darkness’s sternest critic, has described the scene thus: ‘What it shows in fact is figures in the garb of sanctity performing an obscene parody of a gang-rape that ends with murder.’ 17 Nina Auerbach discusses the scene in a similar way: ‘The sequence is closer to gang rape, or to gynecological (sic) surgery, or to any of the collective violations women were and are prone to, than to the sacred marriage
, from Desmond, who tries revive her stardom, to Gillis and his other love interest, Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), who, despite plastic surgery, does not have the right look for an actress and so aspires to make it as a screenwriter. The film is heavy-handed about the ways in which Hollywood builds up egos and tears them down: as Cecil B. De Mille (playing himself) complains, in response to the remark that Desmond