HYSTERIA (2011/2012)

HYSTERIA. Tanya Wexler, dir. Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer, story and script, from an original story by Howard Gentler. UK et al.: Informant Media et al., 2011. See IMDb for highly complex details of production and distribution [1].

IMDb categorizes the film as "Comedy/Romance" and gives the logline, "The truth of how Mortimer Granville devised the invention of the first vibrator in the name of medical science." More exactly in terms of genre, HYSTERIA is a seriously comical, romantic historical farce, with social commentary, based in a true story. Relevantly here, it can be viewed, perversely, as a relative of Steampunk — a cousin with a sense of humor — and an exercise in literally working through a decontextualized reading of Isaac Asimov's definition of "(Social) science fiction" as "that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings" ("Social Science Fiction," Science Fiction: The Future, 2nd edn. [1983]: 348; beginning § IV, italics removed). HYSTERIA looks at London in 1880, with new technologies reaching at least the privileged, including that most intimate of mediators of "the human/machine interface," the vibrator.

5. DRAMA, RDE, 14/VI/12