Peira sphalere

The scene voices with rare candour one of the commonplaces of the post-romantic romantic (i.e. gothic, decadent) imagination (but also of Lacan): perfection is equated with death, though not of the woman, but of the man. And what death here means is the death of desire. Translated into the terms of Experiment Perilous, the film tells not so much the story of the seduction of Dr Hunt Bailey by the beautiful Allida via her portrait, but of Hunt's seduction by Nick Bedereau, the older man seducing the younger in the hope of rekindling, through the desire of another, his own desire, which is ultimately not for his wife, but for his own death: the glacial world of the film's New York winter is as frozen as Allida is in her portrait. The portrait appears as merely the ruse, or rather the Medusa's head, which mesmerizes Hunt and makes him an easy prey not for a femme fatale but for an homme fatale, for Nick's diabolical plans and monstrously skillful designs. As "Hunt" says to Clag when he suggests a visit to the Bedereaus: "I'm game".

-- Thomas Elsaesser, Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous