The Doll (1919)

[Dave Monroe]

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Doll (1919)
>
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010600/
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doll_%281919_film%29

Victor Janson ... Hilarius

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010600/fullcredits#cast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doll_%281919_film%29#Cast

Dr. Hilarius – Oedipa's psychiatrist, who prescribes LSD, which she
does not take, to Oedipa as well as other housewives. He goes crazy
toward the end of the story, admitting to being a former Nazi doctor
at Buchenwald, where he worked in a program focused on
experimentally-induced insanity to render Jews permanently catatonic.
He claims to use facial expressions as a weapon, and boasts of a face
he made once that drove a subject insane. He holes up in his office,
but is taken away peacefully by the police after Oedipa disarms him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49#Characters

>From Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to
Early Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001), "Appendix: Clowns,
Spies, and Automatons in Lang and Lubitsch" (pp. 217-26):

"Hilarius makes lifesize mechanical dolls, and his daughter is posing
for a new model, playfully contorting her face into ugly grimces when
he's not looking.  " (p. 218)

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=708

http://books.google.com/books?id=_FpLENBMIq4C&pg=PA219#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Hilarius only made a face at her, one he'd made before. He was full
of these delightful lapses from orthodoxy. His theory being that a
face is symmetrical like a Rorschach blot, tells a story like a TAT
picture, excites a response like a suggested word, so why not. He
claimed to have once cured a case of hysterical blindness with his
number 37, the "Fu-Manchu" (many of the faces having like German
symphonies both a number and nickname), which involved slanting the
eyes up with the index fingers, enlarging the nostrils with the middle
fingers, pulling the mouth wide with the pinkies and protruding the
tongue. On Hilarius it was truly alarming."

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/pynchon/lot1.htm

Also ...

"When he leaves the room, his apprentice dances with the new doll,
whose arm unfortunately breaks off (as in French comedies, the theme
of corporeal dismemberment accompanies mechanical movement)." (Gordon,
p. 218)

Bad Priest

306; lives in an old villa past Sliema in Malta; children "assigned
the Bad Priest no opposite number" 339; disassembly, 341-44; "girls he
advised to become nuns [...] boys he told to find strength in — and be
like — the rock of their island" 340; glass eye in the shape of a
clock, 388; See also V.

http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=B