Frank Wedekind created Lulu, the central character in the plays that inspired Pandora’s Box.
Wedekind was a German playwright whose Lulu drama is divided between Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The plays portray Lulu as a powerful, sexually independent, and socially disruptive figure whose relationships expose the hypocrisy and repression of the society around her.
G. W. Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box draws primarily on these two plays and stars Louise Brooks as Lulu. The film changes and condenses material from the stage works, so the cinematic Lulu should not be treated as identical in every detail to Wedekind’s original character.
Wedekind’s Lulu works belong to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European theater tradition. They are separate from Hesiod’s myth, although the title Pandora’s Box creates a deliberate association with the older story of dangerous release.