The Creature’s Image: American Spirituality in The Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist critic and associate of Sergei Eisenstein, gave a pointed and memorable analogy for the problem of adaptation in his 1923 book Literature and Cinematography. “Of course,” Shklovsky wrote, “one can hand someone a trombone and order him to ‘play the Kazan Cathedral,’ but the result is either going to be funny or offensive… If it is impossible to express a novel in words other than those in which it has been written, if it is impossible to change the sounds of a poem without changing its essence, then it is even more impossible to replace words with gray-and-black shadows flashing on the screen.”

A century of failed adaptations have proven Shklovsky right. To this critic’s knowledge, there has not yet been a case of a major writer’s prose style rendered authentically cinematic. Even the transfer of dramatic content from one form to another is a more fraught proposition than is generally acknowledged. But as the best directors have always known, the trick of film adaptation – itself a sub-species of ekphrasis, rather than translation – is not to “replace” words with images but to betray words with images: to remain in relation to a source in language without maintaining any pretense of fidelity to it. This is particularly so for religious cinema, if there can be a religious cinema at all. The Western religious tradition is scriptural, and its concessions to image-making in popular contexts have always contended against a strong aniconic impulse originating in the Mosaic prohibition of idolatry. The agon between the visual-popularizing and aniconic tendencies, though never settled, has resulted both in formal and doctrinal compromises. (Muslim and Jewish artists developed the calligram, for example, while Catholic and Orthodox iconographers insisted on a legitimating difference between veneration and worship.) Truth was, first and last, the domain of the Word: a Word for which the image, where it was tolerated at all, was either an adequate or inadequate visual allegory. Prophecy, both the aesthetic and epistemological core of Western religious practice, was a strictly verbal-literary phenomenon. If, then, there can be a prophetic cinema, which is to say, if there can be a cinema which assumes for itself some of the aesthetic powers of prophetic writing (the Torah, the Gospels, the Quran), such a cinema necessarily will constitute a more-or-less knowing betrayal of its putative sources, even where these sources are double or quadruple.

In 1932, the appearance of The Island of Lost Souls offered one such betrayal. A pre-Hays “creature feature” stuffed with near-bestiality, vivisections, floggings, and a portrait of towering evil in the person of Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau, The Island of Lost Souls is not an immediately obvious candidate for a prophetic style, especially because it never discloses any spiritual ambitions. But, written by Waldemar Young and Burt Wylie – respectively the grandson of Mormon apostle Brigham Young and the child of a Presbyterian minister – Island presents us with a Scene of Creation and Fall for the era of the cinematic image: a Creation not of flesh by eternal Word but of flesh by corruptible flesh. Young and Wylie, though they were probably unaware of it, achieved an appropriately cinematic solution to the problem of picturing the necessarily invisible. Instead of dramatizing the Biblical Creation in the inadequate style of Hollywood melodrama, they found a logic (and an image) of Creation natural to the ontology of the cinema.

The Island of Lost Souls was and remains the most accomplished in a long list of adaptations of H.G. Wells’ 1896 novella The Island of Dr. Moreau. The latter work, a so-called “theological grotesque”[1] that stages the psychodrama of nineteenth-century biology as a parody of the Biblical Eden narrative, appeared in a Victorian England still struggling to reconcile Darwin’s discoveries with Christian theology and ethics. Wells’ novella imagines Dr. Moreau, formerly a respected physician, presiding over a remote island laboratory where animals are transformed into humanoid “Beast Folk” through vivisection. This turns out to have been an ill-advised application of the doctor’s talents: he winds up dead, his creatures revert to their original state, and Wells’ protagonist-witness Edward Prendick withdraws from civilization to escape his new horror at the old bête humaine. Moreau is a failed, small god in a failed, stupid cosmos of his own, one in which the collapse of the distinction between man and divinity has brought about a commensurate collapse in the distinction between man and animal.

Wells was driven by techno-spiritual anxieties that we now struggle to appreciate. In our century of embryo selection, procedurally generated text, and satellite cartography, it’s hard to recover the initial traumatic shock that followed the discovery of natural selection – a discovery which was only the first in a series of disasters for the old, quietly deistic humanism. Not content with performing his own Copernican revolution with On the Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin had gone on, in the 1870s, to publish several works that dealt more explicitly with the animal origins of human beings. In one of these volumes, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he deploys a proto-cinematic technique to demonstrate the essentially “natural” origins of human affect, showing multiple portraits of the same human subject separated by short intervals of time in order to evoke the unconscious motor impulses underlying facial expressions. The technology of the photographic image had made a new relationship between man and nature inevitable, insofar as it made obvious our many repressed resemblances to our animal cousins. For the first time, there existed a technology of image-making that eliminated (or at least appeared to eliminate) the mediating consciousness of the artist.

New relationships between humans and animals, and new awareness of our shared origins, was psychologically shattering for those willing to accept it. Like Marxism, science fiction in English was the product of the European nineteenth century’s religious anxieties, economic transfigurations, and rapid scientific-technological advances. Both Marxism and science fiction assumed responsibility for the naturalization of ethics, striving to establish a new basis for moral and spiritual speculation after the collapse of religious logolatry. But where Marxism was and remains a philosophy of history and therefore belongs to the thinking of linear text, science fiction is a discourse of wonder which transforms history from an unfolding process into a traversable plane. The earliest and most obvious demonstration of this is Wells’ own The Time Machine, in which the distant, unalterable future is only a version of the Victorian present with the key difference that social classes have speciated and thus taken on a character even less mutable than the one they had already.

Science fiction’s new vision of history also entailed a new vision of human personality. In his book Mimesis, the critic Erich Auerbach taught us to recognize the origin of psychological and historical man in the (linear) prose of the Bible rather than in Homer’s (cyclical) verse. But science fiction is interested in man as witness to technology, not the details of psychological character. (In The Time Machine, the protagonist is unnamed. We know him as the Time Traveller: he is a function, not a person. Kafka would later inherit both Wells’ fascination with hybridity and his reduction of character to function.) The people who populate early science-fictional worlds fit Auerbach’s description of Homer’s personalities, because they “wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly.” The depth psychology that runs through the culture of linear text, broadly from the Bible through Shakespeare into Freud, has evaporated here.

The marriage between science fiction and literature as it had developed by the beginning of the last century was, then, always temporary. Science fiction required a post-historical medium, a medium of the technical image[2], in order to realize its ambition of developing an authentically religious style for the period after God’s widely reported death. (It is sometimes forgotten that, already in 1883, Nietzsche makes his Zarathustra surprised that the Bad News of God’s demise is not yet universal. This wasn’t groundbreaking stuff even at the time.) Abel Ferrara notices this in a comment from the recent first issue of The Metrograph magazine (Fall 2024), where he writes that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is “a perfect screenplay disguised as a 19th-century novella.” The imagistic purity and matter-of-fact style of 19th-century science fiction is, like Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, proto-cinematic, plausibly because science fiction was born in flight from linear, historical text, an escape from the universe of Biblical-literary consciousness. 

The early 1930s, perhaps as a consequence of then-lively American debates over evolution and eugenics, saw much of nineteenth-century science fiction and “fantastic writing” transfigured into cinematic art. The best-known examples may be Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931), but The Island of Lost Souls and Rouben Mamoulian’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) — both radical betrayals of their originating texts — are better-made, better-conceived, and more disturbing than their more famous contemporaries. Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which Jorge Luis Borges, offended by its alterations of Stevenson’s plot, called “the perversion by Mamoulian” in an essay collected in Borges In/And/On Film) gave audiences a theory of good and evil as physical substances and a devolving Edward Hyde who resembles the forever deferred “missing link” of evolutionary speculation. Successful as a dramatic work, Mamoulian’s film lacks sophistication with respect to the unique affordances of cinema. Mamoulian still wants, impossibly, to reify ideas expressed in (and essentially of) language, good and evil, into images.

The Island of Lost Souls makes no such attempt. Like later films constructed along voyeuristic lines (Chinatown, Vertigo, Blue Velvet), The Island of Lost Souls gives the viewer the disquieting impression of being drawn through the narrative not by the artifice of dramatic structure but by the animal acts of looking and listening. The movie’s protagonist, who has had his name changed (adapted?) from the book’s Edward Prendick to the more agreeably American-sounding Edward Parker, is a cipher with no detectable personality. He serves as our eyes and ears, and so long as he retains eyes and ears of his own, he’s sufficiently developed for the film’s purposes.

As Island opens, Parker has just been rescued from a shipwreck by a vessel carrying animals to Dr. Moreau’s island for experimentation. From his sickbed, Parker hears dogs barking, but he cannot see them — he will spend the rest of the film trying, in one sense or another, to “see the dogs,” pursuing disturbing sounds to their sources in yet-more disturbing images. At various points in the narrative, we and Parker behold, sometimes in uncannily long cuts, “animal” features on the bodies of Dr. Moreau’s Beast Folk. Parker never comes to understand anything except by looking at it, and even then his understanding seems to belong to a pre- or post-verbal register of consciousness: he is an image in a photographic universe of images, not a name in a Biblical universe of words.

Parker makes himself unwelcome on the rescue ship and is dumped onto Dr. Moreau’s smaller vessel as it departs for the island. Hauntingly matter-of-fact sequences in the doctor’s compound show Charles Laughton’s Moreau whipping and humiliating his experimental, half-human victims, spectacles that never seem to offend Parker: for him, the doctor’s progeny are only “funny-looking Natives,” their destruction sanctioned by the period’s colonial status quo. Bela Lugosi, as the Sayer of the Law, is part Aaron, part Shylock, and part animal. (“Are we not men?” he repeatedly chants to his fellow Beast Folk, call-and-response style, echoing the best-known monologue in The Merchant of Venice.) Karl Struss, the film’s cinematographer, had worked under Murnau; his compositional approach still belongs to German Expressionism. The film’s sound design, which eschews music in favor of silence punctuated by the cries of distressed animals, is as fragmentary as it is disturbing. Images are permitted, for the most part, to speak for themselves.

The Island of Lost Souls gives us visions of a thoroughly human Creation and Law-Giving shaped by the specific powers of the cinema. We see Moreau perform surgery, transfiguring an animal into a man. We see Moreau, playing both Moses and God to Bela Lugosi’s Aaron, bestowing a humanizing Law on his offspring: not to eat meat, not to go on all fours. We understand that we are watching the scene of our own humanization, which is, finally, an ethical and a cultural process performed on the raw material of flesh.

Moreau has manufactured no monsters, we come to understand, but creatures. The distinction is elucidated by the Shakespeare scholar Julia Lupton in a commentary on The Tempest, another shipwreck tale: “Derived from the future-active participle of the Latin verb creare (‘to create’), creature indicates a made or fashioned thing but with the sense of continued or potential process, action, or emergence built into the future thrust of its active verbal form.” The creature, for Lupton, is a still-becoming being that marks the separation between creator and created; The Island of Lost Souls gives us an island populated by creatures, not yet human, no longer animal. In doing so, the film reveals the creaturely element in cinematic man. Never at rest, man on screen is always a creature, always coming-into-being. The failed religious cinema which believes it is dealing with the created object called man, rather than a continually regenerated hybrid organism, is a religious cinema that tries, with Shklovsky’s idiot, to play the Kazan Cathedral. It took the imaginations of Wylie and Young[3], shaped and ordered by specifically American forms of Christianity, to bring this techno-spiritual Scene of Creation into existence, exceeding all the accomplishments of subsequent and preceding “Biblical” filmmaking.

We are now, as everyone knows, in another age of technological advancement and spiritual paralysis. Much of the American public, urged on by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, expects the imminent emergence of a new Machine-God who will offer us either universal redemption or eternal slavery. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of former government officials, including David Grusch and Harald Malmgren, claim to have seen evidence of human contact with the intelligent occupants of flying saucers. In our increasingly post-literate era, as our belief in history deserts us and we desert it, science fiction has for the moment succeeded Marxism as the dominant intellectual discourse of religion and technology. Whatever we make of the Musks, Altmans, and Gruschs, it is clearly science fiction that provides them with their vault of symbols.

But the science-fictional mode of imaginative speculation is presently stunted, in part because its partisans continually repeat Shklovsky’s error and go on seeking analogies for post-historical problems in linear texts. We will have no Singularity, which is to say, no final and nameable Rapture. The world into which we are being pushed is not the world of Creator and Creation, but the world of the Creature. We can no longer say what is and is not human, and even our images lie to (and about) us. The Island of Lost Souls gives us a vision of our own morally befuddled universe of hybrid beings, for whom accepting the Law means accepting its sources: as mortal, creaturely, and incomplete as we are.

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[1] Wells’ retrospective description of the work in an introduction published in 1924.

[2] In Vilem Flusser’s sense. For Flusser, the technical image is the post-historical medium that comes into existence with the photograph and persists with us on television, cinema, phone, and computer screens. Any image produced by an apparatus is a Flusserian technical image.

[3] It may not be insignificant that, unlike other major Western spiritual traditions, Mormonism emerged almost contemporaneously with photography, that new practice of simultaneous writing and image-making. In fact, even the Scene of Revelation for Mormons has a cinematic character: while the Word comes to Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as something spoken, Joseph Smith’s revelation is visual, inscribed for him on plates of gold and read with the assistance of “seeing stones” that function like 3-D specs. Was Waldemar Young writing a work, like Wells, of youthful blasphemy? Or continuing certain elements latent in the tradition co-founded by his grandfather?

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