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mst3kproject · 5 years

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623: The Amazing Transparent Man

You know, when I think about it, it seems like a ‘transparent man’ should be a different thing from an ‘invisible man’. An invisible man you can’t see… but there are a lot of transparent things that you can see. Glass, water, quartz, or clear plastic are transparent, but you can still tell where they are because they bend the light that passes through them. So shouldn’t a transparent man be more like the cloaked Predator, in that as soon as he moves you notice the distortion? I’m just saying, that would look way cooler.

As the movie begins, some thoughtful person has arranged for bank robber Joey Faust to escape from prison. Upon arriving at a ranch in the middle of what appears to be a nuclear wasteland, Faust learns that his benefactor is retired Major Paul Krenner, who wants to take over the world with an army of invisible soldiers. To that end Krenner has forced his pet Nazi, Dr. Ulof, to build an invisibility ray, which he uses on Faust so the latter can steal tin cans of radioactive macguffin for him. Faust, however, has other plans. His invisible ass has banks to rob… if he doesn’t die of radiation poisoning first.

Like The Thing that Couldn’t Die, The Amazing Transparent Man is a one-trick movie. All it’s got is an invisible man moving things around (and the innards of an invisible guinea pig), but it works a little better here since it never dangles anything else. The effects aren’t nearly as fancy as Griffin’s empty clothes skipping gaily down the lane in The Invisible Man (made nearly thirty years earlier), but they do their job and I quite like how we briefly see the guinea pig’s skeleton and circulatory system. It’s too bad they couldn’t do the same thing with Faust, which I’m guessing was because they didn’t have the money to do it in motion when he reappears in the bank robbery scene.

The minimal nature of the effects suggests that this is a film that’s supposed to be carried by its story, which is great! Unfortunately, the story attempting to carry it is rather confused. For starters here is, yes, another movie in which there’s nobody to root for! With the sole exception of Maria Ulof, who never even speaks a line, every single named character in The Amazing Transparent Man is a villain or at the very least an asshole. The result almost works, though, because they’re assholes working against each other. We have at least a basic idea of what each person wants and how they’re hoping to achieve it, and therefore we understand how and why they’re at odds.

We’ve got Krenner, who is the most explicit bad guy of the movie. He’s bitter about being discharged from the army, so he became a deranged megalomaniac with Nazis in his attic, and he’s going to show them, show them all, with his invisible army (which I have to say is slightly more practical than an army of werewolves or mutant fish-men). He trusts nobody, and therefore bringing this plan to fruition requires keeping his associates under control, and he has things to hold over each of them. For Faust, it’s the threat of turning him in to claim the reward. With Julian the gun-toting thug, it’s the promise of someday getting his son back. With Ulof, it’s the life of his daughter. His Femme Fatale for Hire, Laura Madsen, he simply slaps into submission. He’s a terrible person on every possible level and we’re glad to see him blown up at the end.

Faust isn’t much better, and one of the most important places where the movie fails is that we know less about Faust’s goals than Krenner’s, even though Faust is the point-of-view character. Like Krenner, Faust is a bitter criminal. He cares about nothing but money, to the point where we don’t even know what he plans to do with the money he’s going to steal – he seems to want to rob a bank just because it’s what he does. We do understand his antagonism towards Krenner, at least: having just escaped from jail, what Faust wants most is of course freedom, while what Krenner is offering him is just a different sort of imprisonment. Good riddance to Faust, too.

The character this movie wants us to feel sorry for is Ulof, which is really weird when you think about it because this man is a fucking war criminal. He tells us he tortured prisoners in a concentration camp and only came to regret it when he realized one of them was his wife – whom he apparently never recognized even though her only disguise was a hood. So he doesn’t know her body and build at all? He never heard her voice? She never heard his and tried to find another way to communicate with him? Where did he think his wife was while all this was going on? I find myself entertaining the horrible thought that the daughter he so adores probably wasn’t conceived in the standard way, since she must have been born only shortly before her mother’s death… ew.

The fourth character who does much in the story is Laura, and I really can’t tell what we’re supposed to think of her. The way Krenner and Julian treat her make her seem like a victim but there’s no backstory about how she got into this situation. She’s kind of Faust’s love interest but not really, since she mostly seems to be trying to use him to get away from Krenner – and frankly, Faust doesn’t treat her much better than Krenner does. I get the impression that the movie doesn’t know what to do with her, and she dies at the end mostly to get her out of the way.

So we have these four players plus Julian and they all hate one another. Laura despises Krenner and kind of wants to run off with Faust but can’t let Krenner find out she’s going to do that. Faust’s going to squeeze every possible cent out of Krenner and Krenner resents it. Ulof wants to spring his daughter and go hide out in Argentina with old friends, and hopes Faust can help him do it. These various storylines do start to go places, what with Ulof almost tricking Faust into opening the door, and Faust taking Laura to go rob banks. Just as that starts to look like the plot, though, it gets interrupted by Faust’s radiation poisoning and everything comes to a halt.

This isn’t exactly a bad plot turn, but after the movie took the trouble to set up the relationships and conflicts between the various characters, it’s a bit out of left field to realize that the only resolution we’ll get is the isotopes blowing up as Krenner and Faust try to strangle each other. Faust never even gets a chance to try to deal with his impending mortality before it all goes up in a mushroom cloud. Kind of convenient that the deserts around the ranch already looked barren and lifeless, isn’t it?

Of course if we’re going to talk about the movie, we have to mention two other pieces of fiction that contributed significantly to the inspiration for it. One of these, very obviously, is H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. The main character of that story, Griffin, goes mad with power (and toxic chemicals affecting his brain) and declares himself King Invisible Man the First – he fails in part because he’s also Invisible Man the Only, and I suspect that what if he had a whole invisible army though? was part of the inspiration for The Amazing Transparent Man. It ended up back at only one invisible man because the sweeping horror epic that question inspires was just way too expensive.

The second, equally obviously, is Faust. There are real people whose last name is Faust, but it’s the sort of name that’s so closely associated with a particular piece of fiction that it never occurs in others except as a reference. Having the name just there would be like having a character whose last name is Frankenstein and not doing anything with it. So how does The Amazing Transparent Man draw on Faust?

Faust is the sordid tale of a medieval scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge, magical powers, and of course, sweet, sweet pussy. Goethe ends his play with Faust’s redemption, but the legend he drew on told how Faust’s hubris damned not only himself but everybody around him. The obvious reading of The Amazing Transparent Man is that Krenner is Mephistopheles and Faust is… well, Faust. Actually, I don’t think the references is quite that simplistic. Instead, I would argue that all four of the major characters here are Faust. They have all sold their souls, and in the end the devil claims them… except the Nazi scientist, even Satan didn’t want him.

Krenner wants power and revenge and doesn't care what he has to do in order to achieve that – people are nothing but tools to him, and his plan actually relies on killing some to keep the rest of his future subjects in line. He has taken leave of all humanity. Faust wanted money, and had to sacrifice his own soul, in the form of his relationships with his wife and child, in order to get it – and he learned nothing. Dr. Ulof wanted knowledge and gained it at the expense of human lives, and now that he seeks to escape his past he finds he cannot. It has followed him across the sea and now, with his identity out, it will follow him to his death. Exactly what Laura did is a mystery but her attempts to escape and ultimate death follow the same pattern.

All this suggests that like The Beast of Hollow Mountain, The Amazing Transparent Man started off with somebody having a really good idea and thinking about it very thoroughly, but then budgetary constraints reared their ugly collective head and it all went pear-shaped. The movie that results is bland and confused and never as interesting as it thinks it is, which is a shame. I kind of want to see the movie they started out with.

#mst3k #reviews #the amazing transparent man #60s

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gaiatheorist · 5 years

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Delusions of good-enough.

Last week’s ‘Jagged Little Pill’-is-bad blog didn’t happen, I’d started retrospectively analysing the lyrics that resonated ‘then’, from a perspective of ‘now’. ‘Jagged Little HRT-patch’ if you will, reflecting that the words haven’t changed, we have, in the 20+ years since the album. (For what it’s worth, I think it’s a good album, there’s still a bit of the flailing-stomping-non-mainstream about me.)

@samdylanfinch was re-tweeted into my Twitter timeline, and another piece of the jigsaw-that-is-me almost, but not quite fitted into position. (It’s a million piece jigsaw, it’s all sky, I’m trying to complete it in the dark, during a hurricane, and I’m wearing boxing gloves... I’m on a waiting list for therapy.) I’ve accepted for a very long time that I have a tendency to push people away, and always assumed it was a protective mechanism. The faux-bravado, styling myself as a heartless bitch who just doesn’t ‘need’ friends, or relationships is entrenched. I joke about my reverse-Midas touch being why I don’t engage with very many people. I deliberately distance, I deliberately disturb and disgust, to keep most-people at arms length. I don’t ‘get’ people, a lot of ‘me’ was very atypical even before the brain injuries, always-outsider, never quite ‘fitting’, so I just stopped trying after a while.

I need to watch myself not to go off on the “Am I Frankenstein, or the creature?” slant again, whatever I am, I just ‘am’, potentially some of it can be unpicked and re-learned, some of it I might just have to live with, and work around.

I’m ‘doing it’ now, one of my behaviours, my superiority complex. I read the whole thread, about some damaged-people running from relationships, and I identified heavily with that. Then Little Miss Twist decided to show her hand, and I had a brief, but intense period of “No, I don’t, I’m better than that!” in relation to the ‘pleasing’ element. There is no ‘better’ here, it’s just a shade of different, I don’t approval-seek in the same way as ‘most’ people, and I can be very prickly about the ways some-people do it. That’s unkind, so I try to ‘catch myself’ before I start arguments. You wouldn’t believe how much of my waking hours are spent distracting and deflecting myself from starting arguments about things that happened decades ago. (Seriously, I’ve had one bubbling up for weeks about a family member who didn’t vaccinate her kids against MMR, twenty years ago.) I’m not withholding that argument to avoid upsetting her, I’m sitting on it because there’s no need for it, it would achieve nothing.

The adorable counsellor, who saw me for 16 sessions, when he was only supposed to allocate six, periodically asked me “Are you a bit of a people-pleaser?”, and it made me bristle. I can see his logic now, in light of the Twitter thread, but then, I misconstrued the phrase as ‘door-mat’, and absolutely denied it. I had been a door-mat, for far too long, with the ex, and to some extent with my last job. With the ex, it was path-of-least-resistance, the things he’d tantrum-smash were always mine, it was a preservation-behaviour. With work, I continued to absorb more and more workload, refining systems and processes to make them more effective, thinking I’d matter-more. I was approval-seeking right up until the last minute, making sure everything was as in-order as it could be before I left, because I didn’t want colleagues to think badly of me. That’s my ‘different’ door-mat behaviour I don’t sulk for weeks if nobody notices my new hair-do, and, while I do have intense periods of over-thinking whether I might have upset some-people, I’m not overly-concerned about being ‘liked.’ My people-pleasing is generally trying to help more than I harm, and usually dumping myself at the bottom of the priority-list in the process.

It’s a learned behaviour, some of it is useful, some of it less-so. My Adverse Childhood Experiences led to me developing some entirely understandable hyper-vigilance and risk-mapping analytical behaviours. In the last mental health assessment, I referred to myself as ‘a machine’, ‘a robot’ and ‘a computer’, and I’m snort-laughing at myself for being ridiculous, I’m a human being, it’s just difficult to articulate the tangential-triage processes of my brain. ‘Over-thinking’ doesn’t even touch on it, I don’t feel safe unless I’ve considered every possible outcome (usually some improbable ones, too) to a decision, which is bizarre, given my tendency to make incredibly unwise decisions when I’m less-lucid.

That’s the foundation of it, for me, the disordered thinking is rooted in not being safe, so building in these weird coping strategies, to make me feel ‘safer’, more ‘in control.’ Also to ‘please’ people, with my “I’ve already done it.” and “I’ve made it better.” behaviours. Back to being a show-off, and a try-hard, neither of which are particularly admirable behaviours. I don’t want to be ‘pretty’ or ‘feminine’, those signal-danger for me, so I don’t seek vanity-validation, and I do allow myself to become far too annoyed when I see other people doing it. I don’t want to be perceived as weak, or vulnerable, and I scare the shit out of people ‘proving myself’. (There are two text conversations on my phone, my son very gently telling me that if I wait until he’s home from Uni he’ll help me erect my poly-tunnel, and a jokey one from a friend suggesting I might not have thought to secure the cover, in case of high winds ‘because you’re a woman’. The poly-tunnel is up, very well secured, and I ‘beat’ the average time to build it quoted on the reviews. Show-off.) That’s knowing that I am both weak and vulnerable, entrenched by being conditioned-female, never-quite-enough, and then over-layered with 20+ years of the ex, and Father-in-law telling me what I couldn’t-do. I’m never going to be ‘pretty’ or ‘strong’, so I chose to be ‘intelligent’ instead. Then I had a brain haemorrhage, which has significantly impacted on some of my cognitive functioning.

I have two simultaneous ear-worms, the ‘Daddy never came to my ball games’ at the end of Tim Minchin’s ‘Dark Side’, and snatches of Alanis Morissette’s ‘Perfect.’ My ‘Historical and Complicating Factors’ are rooted in dysfunctional early attachment, over-layered with significant abuse. My parents were profoundly unstable people, both prone to outbursts of violence, there is no ‘safe place’ when you’re never sure which one of them is going to hit you next, but bruises fade in time. The emotional aspects of that, and various other elements of my childhood are more difficult to overcome. There was no trust, ever, the people who were supposed to keep me safe didn’t, and compounded that by continually reminding me that I wasn’t good enough. If I scored 9/10 on a test, Dad would ask me what I’d gotten wrong, rather than congratulate me for trying. Mum would fly into physically abusive rages, and blame-shift that *everything* was my fault. (Yes, I did throw out “I didn’t ASK to be born!” a few times, then I just stopped reacting when she hit me, useless talent number-whatever, both in terms of taking showers of punches without flinching, and being able to split up bar-fights, bruises fade in time.)

It was predictable, coming from that background, that I’d be vulnerable to further abuse-of-power relationships, the boyfriend-before-the-ex was a very damaged creature, who became physically abusive. The first time he hit me, I accepted the apology and reassurances that it would never happen again, the second time, I broke his nose. The ex wasn’t physically abusive, he was coercive, controlling, and of the opinion that the ring on my finger meant he could put his penis wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. I had ‘nowhere to go’, so I went into myself, physically present, but not emotionally, for most of the 20 years we were together, I was living a half-life. (Whoa on the blame-shift, there, I’m down-shifting his behaviours against how ‘unkind’ I was in withdrawing my attention and affection, knowing how needy he was.)

That ‘going into myself’ distancing behaviour is part of the over-arching issue. I ‘know’ that most people don’t intend to harm me, but what’s the point in taking the risk that they might? I don’t engage with people very much, I’m ‘stuck’ as that tiny little girl who wasn’t invited to parties because she wet herself, or that lanky teenager who was too intelligent to be in the gangs of the local kids, and too dirty-poor to be invited to the houses of the kids she was in classes with. Outsider-alien, I never quite grew out of the “I MUST be adopted, I can’t possibly belong here!” phase. It’s probably more than ten years since I realised that it’s not just the ‘not engaging’, I also actively push people away. Not quite as extreme as an abused child deliberately soiling themselves as a distancing tactic, but I can be pretty disgusting at times. It’s a tolerance-test, I say or do some pretty horrendous things to encourage ‘natural attrition’ of people, sometimes I just ‘drop off’, because I don’t have the emotional capacity to respond appropriately.

At the very bottom of this rabbit-hole, I need to unpick the historical messages that I wasn’t good-enough from the fabric of now. I need to accept that what I have now has to be the foundation for whatever comes next, I can’t change the past, I can only shape my future reactions. I need to ease myself out of burrowing-behaviours, to stop running away from my emotions, and potentially engage-more, cut-off less. There are a very small number of people in my life who are very important to me, I need to rid myself of the notion that I’m too-cling, too-demanding, too-’me’, and accept that people who choose to engage with me do it of their own volition. I’m never going to be Ms Popular, and I don’t want to be, I’ll settle for good-enough. I’m damaged, I’m not broken, I’ll never be perfect, but no-one really is. I need to stop the old behaviour of ‘getting the first punch in’, and pushing people to reject me, it isn’t inevitable that they will. Keeping the whole world at arms length is incredibly draining, the bitch-armour is heavy, I need to learn to accept that I’m not ‘stealing’ attention or affection if it is freely given, that I might just deserve it.

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