Frank Wedekind created Lulu, the character played by Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box.
Lulu originated in works by German playwright Frank Wedekind, especially Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film combined material from these plays and made Lulu internationally famous through Brooks’s performance.
Wedekind’s Lulu dramas examine sexuality, social hypocrisy, power, and the destructive consequences of treating a person as an object of desire. The theatrical Lulu is therefore more complex than the simplified image of a fatal woman sometimes attached to the film.
The film title can suggest a direct connection to the ancient Greek myth, but Wedekind’s plays and Pabst’s adaptation use the phrase metaphorically. Lulu is not Pandora, and the film does not retell the story of the jar in Hesiod.