Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 241: Ed Wood's thoughts on science and technology

Isn't pretty much everything "God's domain" when you think about it?

You'd assume that the makers of science-fiction movies would generally be in favor of actual science. I mean, it's right there in the name of the genre. But, after a lifetime of watching these films, it's clear to me that Hollywood views science with extreme skepticism if not outright contempt. From exploring space to trying to eradicate disease or extend life, science almost always leads to disaster in the movies. Perhaps sci-fi helps us deal with our fears about so-called "progress," from the feeling that technology will ultimately rule and/or destroy the human race to the sneaking suspicion that, by learning too much about the world, we are in constant danger of upsetting God. 

As Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) once remarked on The Simpsons: "Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends!"

But do the movies of Edward D. Wood, Jr. reflect the general anti-science bias of popular culture? Well, it depends on the movie. 

Bela Lugosi, scientist.

In Ed's debut feature, Glen or Glenda (1953), Bela Lugosi portrays a mysterious, god-like character identified in the credits merely as Scientist. Very early in the movie, we see that the character has a miniature laboratory in the shadowy, cluttered suite he occupies, complete with test tubes, beakers, and a microscope. We even see him pour some liquid from one vessel to another. You know, like a scientist would do. This was not unusual for Lugosi. Note that, when the actor reprised the role of Count Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), his famed Gothic vampire character had become a mad scientist.

For a movie from 1953—this was Eisenhower's first term, to put things in perspective—Glen or Glenda contains a surprising amount of openminded talk about God, science, and the intersection of both. Much of the plot deals with gender-reassignment surgery, a topic somehow even more controversial in the 1950s than it is now. Although the script does not always align with current values or nomenclature, Glenda is remarkably progressive for a film of its vintage and may just be the most openly pro-science of all Ed Wood's features.

While Lugosi's omniscient Scientist seems to live in an undefined twilight zone between fantasy and reality, Glen or Glenda has another man of medicine who is much more down to earth: the plainspoken and reliable Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell). This character is on hand to calm our fears about cross-dressing and sex changes. Fairly early in the movie, there is a documentary-like passage in which Dr. Alton calmly and confidently responds to a few disgruntled citizens who strongly feel that sex changes are "against the Creator's will." These nattering naysayers are essentially strawmen; one is literally chewing a piece of straw. The doctor suggests that the people who now oppose sex changes as being unnatural would have opposed airplanes and automobiles on the same grounds in an earlier time. He further explains: 

We were not born with wings. We were not born with wheels. But in the modern world of today, it's an accepted fact that we must have them. So we have corrected that which nature has not given us. Strangely enough, nature has given us all these things. We just had to learn how to put nature's elements together for our use, that's all.

So science, at least in this movie, is not a violation of God's will but the application of the same. That makes Glen or Glenda a rare movie indeed.

Just about every character in Glen or Glenda winds up reading the same newspaper story about trans woman Alan/Ann ("Tommy" Haines), who has recently undergone gender reassignment. Glen (Ed Wood) says he's "all for it," but his girlfriend Barbara (Dolores Fuller) has reservations, calling it "a pretty drastic step." Even she must admit, however, that Alan/Ann "never could have been happy if it wasn't for modern medical science." 

Ed Wood's second feature, Jail Bait (1954), is a crime thriller, but its central plot gimmick is so outrageous and implausible that the film verges on being science-fiction. The plot has world-renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson) performing radical cosmetic surgery on gangster Vic Brady (Farrell again), turning the surly criminal into an eerie duplicate of Gregor's own deceased son, Don (Clancy Malone). He does this so that the police will think Brady is Don, who at the time of his death was wanted for murder. The doctor's plan works, and the surgically-transformed gangster Vic Brady dies in a hail of bullets fired from police revolvers. The role of Dr. Gregor was supposed to have been played by Lugosi, and I would say that this character counts as another benign mad scientist in the Wood canon.

Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi.

In Bride of the Monster aka Bride of the Atom (1955), Ed Wood finally gives us a full-tilt, unmistakable mad scientist character with all the tropes of the genre. Lugosi's Dr. Eric Vornoff is an embittered, disgraced scientist from some unnamed Eastern European country who has set up shop in a dilapidated mansion called the Old Willows Place that borders a California swamp. There, he conducts twisted experiments on hapless passersby, subjecting them to high levels of radiation in order to turn them into "atomic supermen." So far, all of his test subjects have died on the operating table, but he keeps trying. Meanwhile, the local paper reports of mysterious disappearances in the area.

In addition to having a laboratory in his home (rarely a good sign in these movies), Vornoff has a hulking manservant named Lobo (Tor Johnson) and a pet octopus that he can sic on his enemies. One such enemy is the duplicitous Professor Strowski (George Becwar), a smarmy secret agent who has followed Vornoff from his homeland. Later, Vornoff imprisons a comely female reporter named Janet Lawton (Loretta King) who comes snooping around his house. When Janet's boyfriend, a plainclothes cop named Lt. Dick Craig (Tony McCoy), comes looking for his ladylove, Vornoff imprisons him, too. Eventually, though, Vornoff's whole existence falls apart. The local cops close in on him, both Lobo and the octopus turn on him, and finally, his entire house goes up in a giant fiery explosion, killing him.

At the very end of the film, having narrowly escaped the Old Willows Place, Janet and Dick watch Vornoff's former home smolder on the horizon. The young lovers are joined by Dick's immediate supervisor, Captain Robbins (Harvey B. Dunn), who utters one of cinema's all-time great pronouncements: "He tampered in God's domain." The end. The famous last line of Bride of the Monster expresses the opposite sentiment of Glen or Glenda. In Glenda, science is the application of what God has given us; in Bride, science is an affront to a jealous and proprietary God. 

For the most part, sci-fi movies have agreed with Bride of the Monster. In fact, the most common complaint that movies have about scientists and inventors is that they are interfering in matters best left to our heavenly father. In James Whale's similarly-named The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), author Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) even says, "My purpose [in creating the novel Frankenstein] was to write a moral lesson—the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God." I think she had to say all that to appease the censors. In my experience, this "God's domain" doctrine applies to movie scientists both good and evil, since even the "good" ones are usually shown to be misguided, unaware of the ruinous effect their work will have. They will typically be warned by friends and colleagues to destroy their invention or burn their notes, but they never listen. Chaos and casualties soon result.

In the case of Dr. Eric Vornoff, all this anti-science propaganda is justified. In the end, Vornoff is a cruel, sadistic, and perverse man whose dream of "a race of atomic superman that will conquer the world" can only be considered profoundly evil. He's selfish, too, telling Strowski, "My plans are for myself alone!" We may sympathize with the character a little. He's old and fragile, and he was wrongly separated from his wife and family years ago by a totalitarian government. But none of this justifies his terrible plan.

Dudley Manlove in Plan 9.

Ed Wood's fourth full-length directorial effort, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), again embodies our deep ambivalence toward science and technology. Americans were understandably on edge in the 1950s as tensions rose between the United States and the Soviet Union. These two titans were competing to see which nation could reach outer space first and which could blow up Planet Earth the most times over. Citizens didn't know where this was all leading or how the conflict would resolve itself. Appropriately, then, Plan 9 is a deeply paranoid film that builds on our formless anxieties about the escalating arms race and space race. Is it mere coincidence that one of the film's monsters, the shambling zombie Inspector Clay (Tor Johnson), looks so much like Nikita Khrushchev? 

The conflict in Plan 9 is not between nations but between planets. The members of an unnamed alien civilization have been watching Earth and have decided that we humans are altogether too close to developing a weapon called "solaronite" that will ultimately destroy the universe. They've tried to warn our political leaders, including those in Washington D.C., via audio messages, but we have thus far refused to heed them. And so, they have tried to get our attention in other ways, including attacking a small town and turning some recently deceased individuals (including Clay, who proves as malleable as his name) into zombies. They've also flown their ships over major highways and urban areas. The human race's response to all this? Fire our "big guns" at the spaceships and officially deny the existence of the aliens to the press.

It all leads to a climactic, violent confrontation between the humans and the aliens aboard a spaceship that is parked in a California cemetery. The humans are represented by a small posse: airline pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott), policeman Lt. Harper (Duke Moore), and military man Col. Tom Edwards (Tom Keene). The aliens are represented by the arrogant, elitist Eros (Dudley Manlove) and his more even-tempered associate, Tanna (Joanna Lee). Eros tries to explain to the humans exactly why solaronite would be so dangerous. Eventually, the conversation turns to the subject of God.

EROS:  Even now, your scientists are working on a way to harness the sun's rays. The rays of sunlight are minute particles. Is it so far from your imagination they cannot do as I have suggested? 

EDWARDS: Why a particle of sunlight can't even be seen or measured. 

EROS: Can you see or measure an atom? Yet you can explode one. A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms. 

JEFF: So what if we do develop this solaronite bomb? We'd be even a stronger nation than now. 

EROS: Stronger. You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid! 

JEFF: That's all I'm taking from you! 

(Jeff punches Eros, knocking him backwards into a table.) 

HARPER: Get back here, you jerk! 

EDWARDS: Let him finish. 

EROS: (staggering to his feet) It's because of men like you that all must be destroyed. Headstrong, violent! No use of the mind God gave you. 

JEFF: You talk of God? 

EROS: You also think it impossible that we, too, might think of God? (He addresses Col. Edwards.) You, who wear the uniform of your country. You see, I wear the uniform of my country. Yes, we've had to use drastic means to get to you, but you left us no alternative. When you have the solaronite, you have nothing. Nor does the universe.

This scene gives us a lot to think about. In his book Cult Movies (1981), critic Danny Peary makes an astute observation about Eros: "Only the fact that he has a diabolical laugh and a lot of conceit covers up that what he says to them makes sense." How interesting that Eros, the alien, is the one who's deeply concerned about what our overeager scientists are doing. He also expresses a faith in God, so the movie doesn't entirely dismiss him as evil. Meanwhile, our "hero" Jeff acts in a headstrong, violent way that proves Eros' point.

In Plan 9 from Outer Space, Jeff, Edwards, and Harper stand in for the typical pitchfork-wielding mob from other sci-fi and horror films. I suppose Ed Wood's budget only allowed for three rioters instead of the dozens of angry villagers you'd get in a 1930s Universal movie. Nevertheless, our three hotheads storm the spaceship like it's the castle of Dr. Frankenstein. The term "mob justice" is nearly always used in a pejorative sense, indicating that society has yielded to hysteria at the expense of reason and due process. 

But, I ask, aren't the vigilante mobs always kind of right in these movies? I mean, Eros and Tanna are planning to destroy our planet and everyone on it. People have died because of them, and more would have died if they hadn't been stopped. One could argue that the aliens in Plan 9 from Outer Space were justified in their actions because they were attempting to save the entire universe, yet we could also say that they were committing (or at least attempting) genocide.

James Craig in his lab.

Before we leave this discussion of Ed Wood and mad science, we really must address Wood's last major sci-fi screenplay produced during his lifetime: the film now known as The Revenge of Dr. X. and originally released sometime between 1967 and 1970 under the title Venus Flytrap or Body of the Prey. Along the way, this movie may have also been called The Double Garden, The Devil Garden, or even Frankenplant. The film's pedigree is murky, to put it mildly, and the only existing transfer contains the credits for another movie entirely! And it's possible that writer-director Norman Earl Thomson heavily rewrote Ed Wood's screenplay.

Nevertheless, The Revenge of Dr. X exists and is quite relevant to the topic currently at hand. It is certainly Wood's purest mad scientist movie since Bride of the Monster. The plot follows James Craig as Dr. Bragan, a burned-out, stressed-out, and frankly unhinged NASA scientist who decides to take a much-needed sabbatical in Japan. On his way to the airport, he finds a strange carnivorous plant growing behind a gas station and, being a former botanist, decides to take a cutting with him on the plane. Why he's allowed to do this, I have no idea. You'd think there would be rules against it.

Once he's in Japan, instead of relaxing, Bragan immediately begins conducting ill-advised experiments involving the plant. He moves into a remote, abandoned hotel in the mountains where his nearest neighbor is an active volcano. There, he is assisted in his work by the lovely Noriko Hanamura (Atsuko Rome), the cousin of one of Bragan's NASA coworkers, as well as a hunchbacked manservant. Bragan's goal is to crossbreed the Venus flytrap he found in America with a rare sea plant called the Venus Vesiculosa that he harvests from the ocean floor in Japan. The result of his labors is a staggering, Frankenstein-like monster who (predictably) goes on a deadly rampage until a vigilante mob (predictably) intervenes.

The major mystery that emerges from The Revenge of Dr. X is why Bragan does any of this. He's supposed to be unwinding from his job at NASA, but his foray into mad science makes him more irritable and volatile as ever. And what is the point of this work anyway? What is Bragan attempting to prove? He gives us a little glimpse into his motivations when he first shows the Venus flytrap to Noriko. He explains to her that Charles Darwin was also obsessed with this plant because of the eerie, humanlike intelligence it displays in deciding which insects to eat and which to ignore. "This plant can think and reason," says Bragan, "then why can't it be human?" He also says that crossing a land plant with a sea plant has tremendous "potential." But potential for what?

It's tempting to compare Dr. Bragan with Dr. Eric Vornoff. Their careers follow similar paths, their work yields similar results, and their lives end in similar ways. Both men work in creepy, remote houses and have odd, inarticulate henchmen. But Vornoff has been deeply hurt by the world and is lashing out through his work. Bragan has no such problems. On the contrary, just about everyone he encounters in the first half of the film is friendly and helpful. The corrupting influence in Bragan's life seems to be science itself. He is driven to continue his horrible experiments simply because of his desire to understand the mystery of life.

I hate to say it, but... he tampers in God's domain. How better to put it?

POSTSCRIPT: This article has focused exclusively on Ed's filmmaking career and has bypassed his literary career entirely. There's a reason for that. Very little of Ed Wood's prose can be classified as science-fiction, apart from occasional short stories like "The Exterminator" and "Time, Space and the Ship" (both from 1972). However, in his showbiz manifesto Hollywood Rat Race (written circa 1965; published 1998), Ed expresses enormous gratitude to the inventors of the atomic bomb. He enthuses: "Many people of many trades, skilled people of long apprenticeship and longer study were commissioned for such a magnificent undertaking." So, uh... hooray for science?