Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A criminal you can spot at a glance… who is the doctor himself.
Born criminal / AtavismIn the novel Hyde is young and brutal, and gives everyone who sees him a sense of deformity that nobody can pin down; when he attacks, the text likens his fury to an ape’s. He is the literary embodiment of the born criminal Lombroso had described ten years earlier: the offender as an evolutionary throwback, recognisable at a glance. But the novel also dismantles the idea, because Hyde is the respectable Dr Jekyll with the brakes off. The monster is not another species; he is the same man.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
John S. Robertson · John Barrymore
The fall begins with a mentor who teaches him to give in.
Differential associationThe silent film adds Sir George Carew, father of Jekyll’s sweetheart, who mocks his virtue, lectures him that the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, and arranges an encounter with the dancer Gina. It is Sutherland’s differential association: crime is learned through contact with others, who teach the techniques and, above all, the reasons. Barrymore played the start of the first transformation without make-up, contorting his own face and body: the monster comes out of the gentleman, not from outside.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Rouben Mamoulian · Fredric March
What Victorian morality forces him to hide comes out at night.
Criminological psychoanalysisMamoulian turns the story into a drama of repressed desire: Jekyll wants to marry Muriel at once, but her father makes him wait, and Hyde takes it out on Ivy Pierson, whom he dominates and abuses. Made before the Production Code was fully enforced, it is strikingly frank about sex. Freud would read it as the id breaking free of the superego. March’s simian make-up, in the performance that won him the Oscar, keeps the old idea of atavism, but the engine of this version is already psychological.
The 1886 novel talks to Lombroso; the 1920 film to the idea that evil is learned from others; the 1931 film to Freud. The explanation moves from the body to relationships and to the mind, even though cinema still needed a monstrous face so that audiences could see the evil.
The archive reads them with Born criminal / Atavism · Read the case file →
Sources: es.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki · en.wikipedia.org/wiki. All the villains with versions.