When I was 13 I wrote an essay for English class. The teacher was an incredibly hot hippie chick, mid 30s, with the most languorous eyes, and very appreciative of my attentions. So I worked hard on my paper, maybe for the first time, in hopes that she might one day allow me to lick her.

The title of my paper was —

DAMN!

and the subtitle was —

Damn the Prendicks and the Kemps: a defense of Moreau and Griffin

And all of this was written on top of a piece of abstract art that took up all 93.5 square inches of the paper.

She loved it.

Wells vs the forbidden knowledge moralizers

My thesis, which I just made up and for which I had zero evidence and did no research, was that H. G. Wells wasn’t really moralizing against Griffin’s will to power and meddling with biochemistry; neither was he against Moreau’s barbaric practice of vivisecting to increase animals’ intelligence and evolutionary “level.” In reality, Wells felt that suffering that is truly necessary for penetrating Nature’s secrets is redeemed by that penetration, that the cost of suffering is worth the increase in knowledge and power.

Wells vs the anti-machine socialists

Remember that Wells also defended “the machines” against Fritz Lang’s slanderous depiction of them as warders. So he really had a Futurist … No, he was a supply-side liberationist: if you enhance the labor-saving machinery—the robots, the medical advances, and the cornucopia of astounding and exotic use values (many with incredible instrumental depth that is admirable and beautiful in its own right, such as Alexa, or playing a FPS on an iPhone)—then humanity will have more of something. More freedom to play, really. What’s the point of labor-saving and life-extending if not fun? So while Lang saw machines (with Chaplain) as time-tyrants and body-breakers, Wells saw machines as providing slow but steady productive infrastructure that would liberate humanity from forced labor, spiritual alienation, and improve the quality of life in every way. For Wells, machines meant freedom from drudgery and the “enrichment of the spirit” that comes along naturally when humans have leisure time and means of self-edification.

Whale sounds like Wells

Anyway, this little passage—which by the way was not in the original shooting script, so it must have had special importance to Whale—reminds me of Wells and his Futurism-like defense of deep but morally horrific adventures.

Young boys especially are keen on embracing danger and executing a heroic (or merely daring) deed, for praise and fame. Griffin is just the Id-amped Ego of every teenage boy, ever. But in the age of science and self-hacking, what macroscopic deed is really great? Human-sized deeds are OK. But today’s Tom Sawyer rewrites his neural DNA in order to apprehend a different universe. This is why Griffin should really be acknowledged as a hero. He’s a today’s hero, for today’s world … Today.

But I would inflict physical violence on Moreau for not using anesthesia. The pain of the trapped torture victim is the worst pain. And the person who feels bright joy as he pulls-off limbs (or hammers sterile needles under fingernails) is the worst person.