Of course, you could say the same thing about Hamlet…
Wow. I guess all that drinking really took its toll on his looks.
I don’t know, Martine Beswick could give her a run for her money.
In the book, Hyde’s description is maddeningly vague – he gives the impression of deformity, without actually being deformed, his visage is ugly, leering, and evil, without actually having any features that one could identify as ugly, leering or evil. He’s a nondescript little guy with hairy hands, and he’s somewhat younger than Jekyll, and people tend to dislike him on sight.
…and, yes, in Vol. II of Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hyde pretty much permanently takes over the show, refusing to change back because he thinks Jekyll would get him killed.
As time goes by, it’s described that Hyde has taken over much of Jekyll’s personality. At the end, Jekyll is a small, pale, frightened little man without much will of his own at all, whereas Hyde is the Incredible Hulk, but much cleverer.
The monologue mentioned above is where Hyde speaks about how Jekyll has probably “doomed us both.” When Captain Nemo asks how this is so, Hyde responds by explaining that by separating the two of them, he has also separated the parts that made each side whole. “Without me, he has no drives… and without him, I have no restraints.”
Now, every movie I’ve seen has Hyde as a sexual predator & w/o having read LOEG, I still know what Hyde’s main MO is there. Is there any basis in the book? It’s been years since I’ve read it & I may have missed it (I think I was in fifth grade, around 1972 & wouldn’t have picked up on whatever Victorian euphemisms Stevenson would have used.)
That’d be Loren D. Estleman’s book. I’d put it above mediocre, myself – I’ve read Holmes pastiches that were far worse. Estleman had previously given us Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count. a quick read. I started and finished it while waiting in line to go up in the CN tower.
Quite true, but there’s more than just the twist. None of the adaptations really does as well with the rest of the story, either. And nowadays, everybody has to inject something new into the story as well.
Well, I happened to have picked up the original Stephenson novel a couple of weeks ago, along with some annotations and commentary at the end.
In the book, Jeckyll concocts the potion because he had already been living a secret life (with vague mentions of “dark deeds”), and the guilt from these activities had been seeping into his “normal” life. By separating his moral and amoral sides, he could indulge in these activites without the guilt, since it would be “Mr Hyde” performing them, not Dr. Jeckyll.
The actual details these dark deeds, either done by Jeckyll or by Hyde, were never mentioned, probably deliberately. But the commentary states that given the Victorian setting (and the period it was written) that they were most likely sexual. By not giving any clues, Stephenson let’s the reader supply their own list of perversions.
The only “evil” acts of Hyde actually described in the book are knocking over a small girl (possibly with some beating by a cane, I can’t remember off-hand, but she was definitely injured), and beating an old man to death.
Unspeakable, but in a way, horribly fitting.
The greatness was that both he and the invisible man reverted to, in essence, what they really were: Monsters. The difference is that Hyde redeemed himself in the end.
(Oh, and the ‘surprise’ that Hyde pulled on the invisible man? I’d been jonesing for it to happen since the first series, when it was set up. When it happened, I almost cheered, despite the ‘unspeakable’-ness of it.)