The Perils of Pauline

Nickolodeon

A while back, I was casting about for story ideas. One of them was that old trope of the woman tied to a railroad track by a dastardly villain. (Dressed in greatcoat and top hat, twirling his mustache as required by the Congress of Vienna in 1848.) A passenger train is bearing down on her. Our hero, who sounds suspiciously like Dudley Do-Right (even in silent film) swoops in to save her at the last minute. Our damsel in distress clutches her hands to her chest, bats her eyelashes, and coos, "My hero!"

The last woman I saw do that was Arlene Sorkin, trading voices with Dave Coulier on America's Funniest People, or some knock-off thereof. For reference, Sorkin is not only the original voice of Batman villainess Harley Quinn, the 1990s writers of Batman based Harley on her. So... Parody?

But I thought about this. I've seen cartoons as a kid referencing this trope and the odd silent movie. But with independent stations airing westerns ad nauseum, I never actually saw a movie where the dastardly villain tied anyone to the railroad track. According to Atlas Obscura, there aren't any real-life cases.

What if there was? Thus came an as-yet untitled short story set in the Celloverse, my name for the fictitious setting for the Holland Bay novels. A train-obsessed suburban cop catches a break on his Saturday night (really, Sunday morning) shift and parks next to the tracks near the town square. He wants to watch the Lakeshore Limited blow by on its way from Cleveland to Chicago. As he settles in with a cup of cheap gas station coffee, he sees something on the tracks. We've all seen that. Limbs blown down by high winds. A dead animal, with deer a real derailment hazard. Trains do not stop suddenly. Even the really short ones way thousands of tons and have too much momentum. I've witnessed one panicked stop where the wheels on every car locked up and the train skidded to a stop. The train still moved several hundred yards, and it's a wonder it didn't derail.

But our intrepid hero, being an on-duty officer of the law and self-confessed train nerd, jumps out of his car, jogs around the fence, and goes to move what he thinks is a dead deer. It's a woman, zip-tied to the track. The explanation involves roofies and a man who can't take no for an answer.

That's a plausible scenario, but where did it actually come from?

Despite what our Saturday morning cartoons suggested, the woman tied to a railroad track did not appear all that often in silent films. In reality, the person who ended up on the tracks was almost always the dashing male hero. In comedies, the damsel in distress might end up tied to the tracks, but this was parody. The hero, a detective or a cowboy, would often be knocked out, landing on the tracks, only to be rescued by...

The heroine. So that's not a Marvel or scifi trope. That's an available character rescuing our disabled hero. It's not surprising the hero falling onto the tracks occurred so often to amp up tension. Trains during the silent and early talkie era were not just the primary means of public transportation, but cars were still not that common until the Depression. And planes? Why that sounds dangerous. Or did until World War II, when Clipper planes and huge bombers became commonplace. Helicopters did not even become common until 1945.

And the dastardly, mustache-twirling villain? The earliest example I saw came from a couple of episodes of The Little Rascals, where the gang put on a show with one of them (usually Spanky) playing the top-hatted villain. And that was a play-within-a-play, deliberately cheesy. 

So where did the trope come from? The earliest example came from an 1876 play called Under the Gaslight. In it, our hero is actually tied to the railroad tracks and saved by the heroine.

Credit for the modern woman-on-the-tracks trope stems from the serial The Perils of Pauline, wherein Pauline would get herself into all sorts of over-the-top peril (Hence the title. Clever!) with weekly precursors to the stock Bond villain. It should be noted none of these wannabe Blofelds ever tied Pauline to the tracks. However, comedies poking fun at poor Pauline, did put the woman on the tracks at the hands of a mustachioed, top-hatted villain cackling like Palpatine 50 years later in the Star Wars movies.

And since the 1970s, the trope hasn't played well outside of cartoons. And even then, it died off in Disney and Warner Brothers shorts by the 90s. Ellen Ripley, she of the Alien franchise, found herself not tied to a railroad track but stuck in a lifepod with the most frightening alien monster ever created. (Sorry, Galactus.) But instead of waiting for Tom Skerritt to save her (and anyway, the xenomorph already ate him), she grabs her cat, a pressure suit, and a proceeds to fight the monster in her underwear. As I teen, I naturally found this titillating. As a middle-aged man, I completely identify with this as if you wake me up in my boxers while doing mischief in my house at 3 AM, you will become very familiar with my Lousville Slugger. (Ripley weaponized the airlock, but there ain't a lot of baseball bats in space. Rifles, maybe, but not baseball bats.)

So I had fun writing this story and making it believable. It's still in revision, but it's coming along.

Besides, I'm a train nerd, among other things. I mean, how many more jazz buffs will crimefic readers tolerate?