by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

I’m back from hiatus to bring you the next installment of Artificial Bodies, Artificial Lives! Although I left off in my last column in the ‘50s with our dear friend Robbie the Robot, this month, I’m going to introduce a new kind of cyborg with the long-awaited discussion of The Island of Lost Souls (dir. Erle C Kenton, 1932). 

In my previous article on James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), I defined the concept of cyborg within its original context as the augmentation of humans via technology in order to become more than human, to expand human potential through the guided evolution of human bodies. Although the cyborg as a concept did not become fully realized until the 20th century with the advent of computers and space travel, the idea of humanity guiding their own evolution was already fully formed within the pseudoscience of eugenics. In fact, eugenics–a word coming from the Greek prefix eu-, meaning “good,” and the word genesis, meaning “to create or produce”–is almost as old as the science of evolution itself: the man who coined the word, Francis Galton, was Charles Darwin’s cousin. Galton believed that “What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.” The goal of eugenics was always to improve the human race through genetic understanding and manipulation, both through the encouragement of the breeding and reproduction of “desirable traits” (traditionally read as white, cis, abled, etc) and the sterilization and purging of those individuals with “undesirable traits” (non-white, queer, disabled, etc).

We often think of eugenics within the context of the Holocaust of the 1940s, but the truth is that eugenics is still very alive and well among us. After all, the Guardian just published an article about two of the leaders of the pronatalist movement who use genomic prediction to select which embryos to implant based on IQ, health, etc, “trying to ensure there will be enough of them to have a real impact on the trajectory of human evolution within several generations.” Instead of using the concentration camps of the Nazis or the forced sterilization of the US, many eugenists now (I should note that many like to called themselves “polygenesists” or “newgeneists” for, I don’t know, optical reasons) prioritize the use of technology in their intervention into human evolution. But it is the same idea: humans can be reduced down to their biological components (usually genes), and those components can be manipulated over time in order to produce “better humans,” the same way we breed plants or animals.

All of this comes to play in The Island of Lost Souls. This adaptation of H.G. Well’s 1876 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau is a pre-Code horror film, which led to it being banned in many countries when it was released and to be censored in later showings and TV releases. In fact, the reason for my delay in reviewing is that, at the time of writing this, only Criterion has a release of the complete, uncensored film (both on their streaming service and a Blu Ray release). At the time, the objections to the material had to mainly do with the character of Dr. Moreau, played by the mesmerizing Charles Laughton, a man who sets his sights on becoming like God by creating a new species of being, much like Dr. Frankenstein before him. The film is fairly straightforward in its set up: shipwrecked traveler Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) finds himself on a mysterious island run by Dr. Moreau and his assistant Mr. Montgomery. Moreau conspires to throw Parker and a mysterious Polynesian woman Lota (Kathleen Burke) together, sabotaging Parker’s attempts to leave the island. Soon, Parker discovers Moreau’s experiments: hybrid beast-humans who live in squalor and serve Moreau both scientifically and domestically.

Science fiction–particularly sci-fi horror–has been fascinated by the idea of hybridization, of combining different species via technology. This is purely fictional: although some natural animal hybrids like mules, zonkeys, pizzly bears (look these up; they are only going to become more common as climate change accelerates), they are all the result of inbreeding between close species members. The hybrids that most sci-fi dream of are far, far stranger than anything we’ve seen in nature or animal captivity, usually relying on advanced bioengineering technology to achieve. This hybridization again brings famed cyborg feminist Donna Haraways’ “boundary breakdown” into play: “The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.” This transgression often invokes body horror within the sci-fi story, intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or animal body.

Wells’ original novel has deeply horrific themes about cruelty, trauma, and human intervention into nature, and I must warn anyone that intends to watch this adaptation or the other film I will discuss later in this article that there are deeply disturbing moments of animal torture, both explicit and implicit. After the success of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Paramount believed adapting The Island of Doctor Moreau onto the big screen would allow them to capitalize on the newfound craze for exploitative horror. 

Dr. Moreau is a deeply cruel character. He justifies his cruelty by pitching his endeavor as purely scientific, all means justified by the ends. He tells Parker that he started his experimentation with plants, trying to accelerate their evolution, to skip hundreds of years of natural selection to bring them to the pinnacle of their evolutionary trajectory. Sound familiar? He soon moved onto animals, trying to induce the same evolutionary acceleration by changing genetic markers to make them more human, a species that he sees as the current peak of the evolutionary hierarchy.

His methods are brutal. He mutilates and surgically alters the hybrids in his laboratory, what they call The House of Pain. He does this without anesthetic, telling an alarmed Parker who bursts into the House of Pain because of the humanlike screams of one of the subjects that because they are animals, they cannot feel true pain. He is not alone in thinking this way; he is actually citing René Descartes–someone who will eventually become a sort of bogeyman of this column–in his circular logic of “I think, therefore I am.” For Descartes and Moreau, humans are exceptional because they are conscious; anything that isn't human can't be conscious

The way Moreau treats the hybrids, even leaving out the torturous way they come into being, reveals his utter viciousness. He carries a whip, which he often uses to drive them away even when they are being harmless: he’s even proud of his skills, boasting to Parker that he won whip competitions when he was a boy (side note: is this a thing? Were the only other entrants Indiana Jones and Trevor Belmont?). He makes several of the hybrids serve him domestically, and the others he neglects in the jungle until he has use of them. 

In order to control the hybrids, he has given them a crude religious framework called “The Law,” which consists of three maxims:

1. Not to run on all fours

2. Not to eat meat

3. Not to spill blood

These rules are designed to keep the hybrids under Moreau’s control, but he is also using it to further his own designs. He is forcing them to deny their animal instincts, an integral part of what they are, in order to force them into being more human. One hybrid, the Lawgiver (an almost unrecognizable Bela Lugosi), emphasizes the religious nature of The Law in his intoned recitation of Moreau’s position in the island hierarchy: “His is the hand that makes, his is the hand that heals, his is the House Pain.” Moreau is god to these hybrids, their creator, and their tormentor. More importantly, this religion makes the hybrids Moreau’s creation. While the Lawgiver recites the Law, Moreau smiles beatifically down on them from a nearby cliff.

However, the other hybrids are not the cyborg of focus in this piece: Lota is. Parker discovers her true nature when he makes out with her, her sexual awakening causing claws to slide out and scratch him. He realizes that she is a panther-woman hybrid (the film bills the role as The Panther-Woman). Burke’s performance as Lota is remarkable in the ways in which she is able to emote such genuine human emotion while also incorporating the recognizable behaviors as a cat. She stalks Parker like prey through the house, and, in one brilliant moment, she leans back into his hand when he scritches her, closing her eyes and almost purring like a cat. Understandably, she is terrified of Moreau and the House of Pain, but in these moments with Parker, she feels safe enough to let out the animal side that Moreau is desperate to eliminate.

As a note, as a white woman, Burke is not qualified to play what Moreau describes as a Polynesian woman, but it is interesting that Moreau reaches for non-white signifiers to describe her otherness and strangeness to Parker, indicating his disdain for non-white humans as well as for animals. In fact, many colonizers have justified their colonization by comparing people of color to animals. While more traditional race science type eugenics rely more on the elimination of “inferior races” from the gene pool, Moreau’s obsession with correcting so called “animal” behavior through The Law and through genetic and surgical alterations can metaphorically be read as a metaphor for the ways in which white colonizers historically have tried to make the colonized peoples “more white.” His methods–like those of the colonizers before him–are brutal. When Lota demonstrates human emotion by crying over Parker’s rejection, Moreau sees her behavior as a sign of progress and vows to redouble his efforts to “burn the animal out of her!”

Because monsters were not allowed to exist past the end of these kinds of movies, even pre-Code, Lota dies saving Parker and his fiance Ruth from another hybrid who is chasing them. Like a panther, she climbs a tree and drops down on him, killing him by ripping out his throat before she succumbs to her own injuries. Although she dies, it is fascinating that it is her animal instincts that she embraces at the end to save them, not her human ones.

To pair with Island, I decided to reach for a more contemporary film that looks at the same dynamic between creator and creature: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023). The third film in this playfully weird adaptation of the original comics by James Gunn focuses on the character of Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper and played via motion capture by Sean Gunn), a raccoon who has been genetically and surgically altered to be superintelligent, bipedal, and articulate. Rocket’s disturbing origins had been hinted at before in the previous two films (there is one particularly poignant scene in the first film where a drunken Rocket screams at fellow Guardian Drax (Dave Bautista), “I didn’t ask to be torn apart and put back together over and over and over again and turned into some…some little monster”), but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 shows us how Rocket came to be through a series of flashbacks as present day Rocket struggles to reconcile how he was created with who he is now.

In the flashbacks, we are introduced to the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a geneticist who sees what he calls “lower life-forms” as raw material in his pursuit of creating a perfect species and a perfect society. In other words, the High Evolutionary is Dr. Moreau with a much bigger budget. We discover that the High Evolutionary is, in fact, responsible for creating many species, including the Sovereign who were introduced in the last film. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) even says that “corners of the universe consider him God,” echoing the claim to deity that so often accompanies these mad scientist types. While Moreau’s motivations seem rather petty–he seems to mainly want fame and recognition for his brilliance–the High Evolutionary’s are utopian in nature. He wants to “create the perfect species and the perfect society,” seeing his genetic experiments and creations as completely justified by his goals and his own incredible intelligence. The drive toward perfection exists even in the smallest gestures of this character: he is constantly correcting child Rocket’s grammar as well as his math.

As with The Island of Lost Souls, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 doesn’t show us Rocket’s torturous transformation explicitly, but what is shown is still brutal and the implications are horrific. At one point, the rest of the Guardians watch a recording of one of the surgeries–hearing Rocket scream without anesthetic–and even the usually impassive Nebula (a cyborg for another article) must look away, saying “this is worse than what Thanos did to me,” referencing her own torturous recreation. It’s good to know that René “Douche-bag” Descartes’s ideas have reached out into space, apparently. The High Evolutionary doesn’t see any other being as real, and like Moreau, he sees all of his creations as his intellectual property, even creating a corporation, Orgo Corp, to protect his assets.

He becomes preoccupied with Rocket after Rocket shows “a moment of true invention” in correcting one of his formulas. None of his other creations can do this: they can only memorize and duplicate the programming he provides them. However, instead of embracing Rocket as a truly unique individual worthy of respect, the High Evolutionary plans to dissect Rocket’s brain in order to pass on that trait to a creature that can be part of his perfect species, pointing out that Rocket cannot live in the utopia he is creating because of his cyborg appearance. He mocks Rocket’s desire to live in the new world he is creating, “Look at you. As if you were cobbled together by fat-fingered children.”

Both Cooper and Gunn’s performances as Rocket are incredible. Rocket is filled with self-loathing, stealing Guardian leader Peter Quill’s (Chris Pratt) Zune (remember Zunes?) to listen to Radiohead’s song “Creep” while thinking about his past:

I don't care if it hurts
I wanna have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul

Despite his escape from The High Evolutionary, Rocket still embraces the way that his creator sees him, “a medley of mistakes we could learn from and apply to the creatures that truly mattered.” He has internalized the message that he is imperfect, telling a near-death hallucination of another hybrid Lylla (Linda Cardellini) that “they made us for nothing.” He hates the High Evolutionary, but, like Frankenstein’s Monster, he is the High Evolutionary’s unwanted heir, both metaphorically and by virtue of his intelligence and creativity. He can’t help but be haunted by his creator’s rejection.

Throughout the entire trilogy, Rocket has hated when other characters called him a raccoon. In the other films, it seemed like this was because he didn’t see himself as an animal, wanting to separate himself as a distinct species (“ain’t no thing like me, ‘cept me”). But in the third film, it is revealed that Rocket just doesn’t know what a raccoon is, not having grown up on Earth or been around other raccoons since he was a kit. When he and the other Guardians attack the High Evolutionary’s ship to take revenge and free the remaining hybrids, he comes across a room full of caged animals, including a crate full of raccoon kits. He sees the label “Raccoon,” and tears fill his eyes as he opens the cage and scoops up the dozen or so kits, letting them cling to his fur. When the High Evolutionary tells him he is nothing, he finally uses the name that comic book fans are most familiar with: “I’m Rocket Raccoon.” He fully embraces all of his component parts, even the “lower” ones,  as part of a unified whole that allows him to truly become himself, the cyborg. He insists that Quill and the other Guardians save the animals, the “lower life forms,” as well as the “higher ones,” because he has accepted that they are worth saving just as he himself is worth saving.

More importantly, Rocket is able to say to the High Evolutionary what Lota can’t say to Moreau: “you didn’t want to make things perfect. You just hated things the way they are.” I earlier called eugenics a pseudoscience because the truth is that the idea of creating “better people” or a “perfect society” is not and cannot be based completely in the hard sciences because “better” and “perfect” are subjective terms, and humans cannot be reduced down to their biological components. You can’t program utopia (as Peter Quill tells the High Evolutionary), and if we ever stand a chance of rooting eugenics out of our society, it would be a good start to take a look at what it is exactly that we hate.

Next month (I promise), we will be back in the 1950s with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)!