Everybody knows that! Everybody’s wrong

Earlier this summer I signed a contract with McFarland for my sixth film-reference book, Jekyll and Hyde on Screen (the title’s a placeholder until I think of a better one). That got me thinking about the facts “everybody knows” about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Facts that are completely wrong.

As blogger Fred Clark says, what we “know” about stories (or history, or religion) is often closer to fan canon, fashioned out of movies, TV shows and stuff that floats around in our culture. Sherlock Holmes is a classic example. In the original Doyle stories Holmes is a drug abuser, not an addict. Since The Seven Percent Solution, everyone “knows” Holmes is a self-destructive addict. It’s a major element of the modern-day Holmes’ personality in Elementary and a family trait in the novel Elementary Dear Charlotte.

Even people who’ve never encountered Holmes may “know” this because the idea is out there, floating in our collective unconscious, detached from any specific source. The same with Jekyll and Hyde. Writer Dan Chaon says, for example, that his nine-year-old son has a clear image of Mr. Hyde (brute wearing a top hat and a Victorian suit) even though he’s never read the book or seen any of the movies.

What “everyone knows” is that Jekyll is as saintly and kindly as Hyde is evil and brutal. In the Bugs Bunny cartoon Hyde and Hare, for instance, Jekyll is a wonderful old man who takes Bugs into his home. He’s completely different from his brutal, bunny-killing other self, even though he triggers the transformation by drinking one of his potions.

My memory of the novel was that Jekyll only became Hyde through a screw-up. He let his mind fill with selfish, corrupt thoughts before drinking his drug; if he’d filled his mind with “pious aspirations” instead, he’d have become an angel. Like so many later mad scientists, a moment’s lack of judgment brought on doom.

Guess what? This is a load of bollocks.

Hyde vs. Jekyll isn’t evil vs. good, it’s Evil vs. Mixed Good and Evil (as all of us are). Creating Hyde wasn’t a tragic error or an accident. It was intentional. Everything that Hyde does is something Jekyll’s capable of.

A wild man in his youth (Alan Moore’s description of Jekyll as an uptight Victorian freaking out over trivial moral failures doesn’t wash), Jekyll’s now a respected fifty-year-old philanthropist. We never learn the details of his sins but we do learn the urge to commit them is still strong. Jekyll, however, is a hypocrite. He doesn’t want to tarnish his reputation as a noble soul — and by becoming Hyde, he doesn’t have to. With a different face and body he’s free to do anything he wants without any scandal attaching to the Jekyll name.

Unfortunately for Jekyll, with his higher self completely suppressed, he has no filters, no restraints. Along with committing sins he likes, he can’t restrain himself from committing much worse, unwanted wrongs. In the first chapter, an eight year old girl runs into Hyde and falls down in front of him. Jekyll would have helped her up, or at least stepped around her. Hyde “tramples calmly” on her simply because she’s lying where he wants to walk.

Jekyll doesn’t want Hyde doing things like that but he’s not willing to give up his other life to prevent them. That’s not a morally upstanding choice — hell, it’s not even marginally ethical. Like an addict, Jekyll won’t stop even though he knows his choices have bad consequences. He’s every bit as much a villain as Hyde (a major plotpoint in my steampunk novel, Questionable Minds).
For another example of “what everybody knows is wrong,” consider The Stepford Wives.

“Everyone knows” what the Ira Levin book and the 1975 movie are about (for the purpose of this post I’ll ignore the three TV-movie sequels and the godawful Nicole Kidman remake): the suburbs. One column some years back about suburban horror argued that the suburbs’ perfect facade both appeals and horrified: “their quest for perfection becomes a quest for conformity—and conformity breeds corruption, in all its forms.” Hence Stepford, where independent women are replaced by robots to maintain the facade of perfect suburban tranquility.

That view couldn’t be more wrong. It’s true the movie starts out with Joanna (Katharine Ross) and her family relocating from New York to the bucolic bedroom community of Stepford. The problem isn’t Stepford, however. Joanna’s husband moved there because the men in town will help him replace Joanna with an obedient, big-breasted sexbot. Not because of a desire for suburban perfection. It’s because some men (as one says at the climax) would sooner have an obedient, eternally beautiful sex doll for a wife than a real woman who ages and sometimes disagrees with them.

I think the Suburbs Eat Your Brain view has such staying power because it plays better with attitudes already out in pop culture. America has a long history of distrusting the suburbs: conformist, soulless, lacking the community of small towns or the excitement and color of big cities. Without the restraining hand of community, suburban residents are constantly getting up to mischief, jumping into each others’ beds, spouse-swapping and committing other sexual shenanigans.It’s much more comfortable to think of Stepford in that context than contemplate the ugly misogyny the movie is really about.

#SFWApro. Comics cover by Jack Kirby; my cover by Samantha Collins