Metamorphoses
Ovid | narrative poem | first century A.D.
Weird Science
John Hughes (dir.) | film | 1985
©Universal Pictures/Everett
John Hughes’s Weird Science is the story of two dorky teenagers, Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) and Gary (Anthony Michael Hall), who create a beautiful woman, Lisa (Kelly LeBrock). The film echoes themes of Ovid’sMetamorphoses while plumbing the depths of lowbrow adolescent humor. The boys conjure up their ideal woman by feeding porn-magazine pinups into a computer to which a doll is wired. Their craft is several generations removed from that of Pygmalion, who “in sculpture exercis’d his happy skill; and carv’d in iv’ry such a maid, so fair.”
Giving his statue “a burning kiss,” Pygmalion at first sadly discovers that “the cold lips return a kiss unripe.” Weird Science reverses the myth, having Lisa comment, while teaching Wyatt how to kiss, that his lips “feel as if rigor mortis has set in.” Hughes pays tribute to a 20th-century actor in the Pygmalion mold when Wyatt’s grandfather, Henry, tries to break up a party, and Lisa scolds him, “You ought to know better than to walk into somebody’s house and start hitting people with your Rex Harrison hat”—a reference to the woolen trilby Harrison wore as Henry Higgins in the 1964 musical My Fair Lady.
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