Are We Human Beings?: "Island of Lost Souls"
We have recently moved a puppy into our apartment, which put me in mind of Island of Lost Souls. The dog is young (not quite four months) and rambunctious; the movie is old and still-shocking. Both are entertaining, both are thought-provoking, and both make me wonder what it is that defines humanity all the way down to its core.
Based on H. G. Wells' 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, the film was released in 1932 and directed by Erle C. Kenton. It opens with a freighter in the South Seas discovering a traumatized survivor of a shipwreck named Edward Parker (Richard Arlen). Parker recovers slowly under the care of a doctor on board, named Mr. Montgomery (Arthur Hohl), and discovers that the freighter is carrying a shipment of animals to an uncharted island owned by one Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton). After he punches the drunken captain in an argument over the treatment of one of Montgomery's helpers – a man named M'ling (Tetsu Komai), who has odd features and hairy ears – Parker finds himself dumped onto Moreau's ship along with the cargo of animals, and then stranded on Moreau's island.
There, strange things are afoot. Moreau and Montgomery are performing mysterious experiments, and the "natives" on the island share with M'ling what appear to be odd, almost half-animal features and bodies. These folks live in an encampment and are terrified of Moreau, who rules through psychological intimidation enforced with a bullwhip. He has also taught them a "code" which they recite when they gather in front of him, led by one of their number named The Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi).
"What is the law?" intones Moreau. "Not to eat meat," they cry. "That is the law. Are we not men?"
"What is the law?" he asks again. "Not to go on all fours," comes the answer. "That is the law. Are we not men?"
"What is the law?" he asks for the final time. "Not to spill blood. That is the law. Are we not men?"
Moreau introduces Parker to one of these natives, an alluring young woman (the only one on the island) named Lota (Kathleen Burke). They begin to fall in love – even though Parker has a fiancée – and she tells him that the place Moreau and Montgomery conduct their experiments is called the House of Pain.
Soon enough Parker realizes what's really going on. Moreau has been conducting monstrous experiments in the acceleration of evolution, in which he subjects animals to torturous surgical procedures with the aim of turning them into humans. The "natives," including Lota – who was once a panther – are the results of these experiments in the House of Pain.
The film ends in a tragic key. Parker's fiancée Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams) discovers where he is and charters a boat to come and rescue him; at the same time, the residents of the island revolt against Moreau's rule. They chase him into the House of Pain, and the last shot of the infamous doctor shows him surrounded by his creations, who have thrown him onto a surgical table and are brandishing scalpels and bone saws as they descend onto him. Lota dies helping Parker and Thomas escape; the island is by now on fire, and we are made to understand that these flames will leave nothing behind.
Like many of the films from the time in Hollywood known as "pre-code" – before the Hays' Code began regulating content in mid-1934 – the film is awash in provocative layers of sexuality and violence.
It is, in its way, far more challenging along these lines than the similar fare of today (one thinks of something like Alex Garland's Ex Machina from 2014, which is clearly indebted to this film) because of the nakedness with which it confronts its issues. Evolution was, in 1932, still a violently divisive topic (the Scopes Trial had taken place only seven years before) and audiences would clearly have read the kiss between Parker and Lota as partaking in the same racial over- and under-tones as does the entire film, this during the heart of the Jim Crow era.
Put differently, Parker's reuniting with his fiancée and his escape from the "savagery" of the island provide not so much a happy ending as a kind of furious reinforcement of what the film has just shown us about cruelty, the truth of sexual desire, and issues of human existence. The chaste civilization to which we assume our heroes will be returning is a pale shadow of the dark world in which they (and we) have been immersed; Parker's flight from Dr. Moreau's island is thus an insistence that the things of that island are always present and thus always need to be fled from.
There's far more to be said about the film – particularly its politics of race and sexuality – than I have space for; but I would note here that beneath a good deal of these politics lie the questions it raises about the animal and the human.
One place to start with this is the film's understanding, or misunderstanding, of evolution. Dr. Moreau's conception, which he has begun to prove through his terrible experiments, is that humans are the highest form of life. He is, as he says, "accelerating" evolution; what nature would accomplish in thousands of generations, he is accomplishing on the surgical table.
This is, of course, not at all how evolution works, although it does reflect a common misapprehension. Evolution is a random process that occurs through genetic mis-replication: a gene copies itself inexactly, introducing a new trait, and if that trait proves beneficial in some way, it spreads through the gene pool by being passed on from one generation to the next. (I'm here putting to the side the thorny questions surrounding things like the idea of species selection, which are mainly about the level on which evolution occurs, rather than the nature of the mechanism.)
According to science, in other words, evolution has no goal. It is not headed anywhere. It operates through arbitrary genetic events; some of these create beneficial traits which are passed on, while others create traits that are not beneficial and end up dying out. This sounds acceptable and straightforward, but its philosophical implications are immense; furthermore, they seem to be flatly unacceptable to great numbers of people. This is perhaps why they, like Moreau, misunderstand evolution.
Humans and dogs, according to scientific reality (which may indeed be one of several different realities out there), do not occupy different evolutionary levels; we are not more "evolved" than dogs, or bats, or blowfish. Rather, we are all products of the same process, which has ended up driving us in far different directions. This is not to say that we don't have different capacities than dogs or sharks or lemurs do, and the other way around; it is to say that when we claim to be more "advanced" or "evolved" or, yes, "important" than they are, we have moved away from the realm of science and into the realm of judgement, away from the realm of facts and into the realm of values.
In the terms of the topic at hand, it is not the case that we are the "most" evolved animal in existence. It is not the case that we are the end point of evolution, or that in a hundred thousand years dogs or kangaroos will have evolved into humans. But in the world of The Island of Lost Souls, all of this is exactly the case.
In the film, Dr. Moreau has posited, and proved, that evolution is teleological, meaning that it has a purpose or goal. That goal is human beings. The madness of his experiments is thus simply a madness of timeframe. He has played the role of a greater being – "Do you know what it means to feel like God?" he asks at one point – not by making a new evolution, but simply by devising the ability to rush the existing process forward, using it to evolve his animal subjects into human beings.
The result is excruciating. When the Sayer of the Law leads these proto-humans in their recitation, ending again and again with "Are we not men?" the answer is a terrifying dichotomy.
One side of this answer is an unqualified positive: indeed they are men, and not simply because they are capable of ratiocination. They are also men because, in the film, all animals are potential humans. Their bestial qualities are simply vestigial, like the vestigial femurs that whales still carry beneath the surface of their skin, held over from the time when they were land-walking mammals.
And yet the other side of the answer to this question is a horrifying negative. They are not men at all, both because of the way they look and, crucially, because of the way they are treated. Their appearances are (in some sense at least) hideous (it is, after all, a horror film), monstrous, misshapen. As with James Whale's Frankenstein, which had appeared the previous year and carries a similar level of subversion, being human is less about innate qualities than it is about having a non-fearsome appearance. Frankenstein's monster and the denizens of Dr. Moreau's island are terrifying because they look different that humans, and because they look different they are treated as less than.
When Dr. Moreau stands in front of his creations with his whip and they cry out "Are we not men?" the irony is thick enough to spread on toast. They are because they are; they are not because they look scary, and because Dr. Moreau refuses to let them be. He whips them, he experiments on them, he forces them to worship him as a superior – and so they become inhuman, exactly through the things that others do to them.
The implications of this reach out across time and topic in a glittering web. As my fiancée noted, there's a direct nod here to Shylock's famous speech from the third act of The Merchant of Venice, in which he poses the question of the very nature of humanity, as persecuted Jew to persecuting Gentile: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
This, in turn, if we are so predisposed, takes us to Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film To Be or Not To Be (which I've written about previously), in which Shylock's speech becomes a thematic pivot-point in the attempt to prevent fascism from taking over the world. The question of the nature of humanity, in other words, has geopolitical consequences.
To return to my living room, filled with a not-for-long sleeping puppy and numerous well-chewed toys, the implications of Island of Lost Souls also stretch out to encompass our relationship with the other denizens of our planet. The assumption of the vast majority of the human beings on this earth is, put simply, that animals are simply not as important as we are. They are to be raised for the purpose of being eaten; they are to be turned into shoes and belts; they are to be killed for entertainment; they are to be eradicated for new housing developments or because we would like to eat almonds year-round; they are to be squashed or poisoned or executed by laying out glue traps that lock them in place until they starve to death because we don't like they way they look or what they do in the world.
And the biting irony Island of Lost Souls brings to this situation is that it points out the way that, like Dr. Moreau, many people try to justify this comportment through a mistaken appeal to some notion of what they term science, or the way they wrongly believe logic to operate. Rather than own up to the truth that they treat animals as they do because of expediency, or for pleasure, or out of sloth, they fall back on arguments that inanely attempt to cloak personal preference in terms of fact. Humans are the most "advanced," or the most "important," or the most "evolved" they claim, when it is exactly that most terrifying and least noble quality – cruelty – that separates them from the beings they lord over.
Perhaps, that is, there is a better way to understand the question lying at the heart of the film. Instead of "Are we not men?" maybe we should be asking "What is it, exactly, that's so valuable about humanity?"
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