I'm going to start with everything I liked about this movie.
I respect the gumption to have changed so much about the novel. The idea that Frankenstein (of the novel) was an unreliable narrator when he claimed that his creature was the one who had killed Elizabeth is a potentially interesting one.
The concept that Frankenstein was an abusive father rather than one who immediately abandoned the creature also had the potential to be interesting. That was a sequence that really engaged me.
There was the occasional shot taken from within a dark interior with a very bright exterior, and I thought that pattern of playing with stark contrast & bringing attention to the 'framing' capabilities of architecture was interesting.
Victor's father disliking his wife and Victor for their darker colouring and favouring William for his light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair could have been interesting if it had gone anywhere.
Victor's ivory figurine and Elizabeth's coral necklace are also potentially very interesting if we think about the material history of these objects. Victor's father says "ivory doesn't bleed"âbut the elephant killed for its tusks certainly did. Elizabeth represents "life" to Victor (also could have been interesting had it been... problematised at all...), and coral was beloved of Victorians for its 'lifelike,' natural shapeâbut you can only admire that shape if you kill it. Which is a nice parallel to Elizabeth's fascination with entomology. (If only this aspect of her character had gone anywhere.)
Victor's endeavours being funded with arms sale money also could have been interesting.
Okay, fun time's over. Here are the rest of my thoughts:
This didn't feel like a movie that had a lot to say. There were no multiple valences to understand things on, no multiple threads to pull, nothing to unpick or to chew on, nothing complex or contradictory. This was a movie with one thing that it wanted to say, and it hammered on it again and again. I said "I get it" out loud multiple times.
I started out taking notes about the visual symbolism to use in this post, but honestly, it's so repetitive and so exaggerated that it doesn't feel like I've pulled anything out or noticed anythingâit feels very surface-level, and just tedious to recount. There's red blood on the white ice. Victor's father feeds his mother a bite of white food with red blood on it. Victor is dressed in a white shirt that gets covered with red blood. Victor looks at a white ivory figure of a pregnant woman. "Ivory does not bleed, Victorâflesh does." His mother's white tomb effigy becomes red in his nightmare. After his mother's death he dresses in red and black. His father's tomb effigy is black.
Victor's gloves are red because he has blood on his hands. Elizabeth comes over and they eat white pudding covered in something red. Victor's cadavers are all super white like ivory. The lab has a white female figure on the wall, calling back to his mother's funeral effigy. Elizabeth is always in green and teal and has green gloves because she represents life (we know this because the voiceover very helpfully tells us this explicitly, just in case we could somehow miss it). Except when she has touches of red because she's interested in what Victor is doing. She goes over to show him a trapped butterfly and talks about how it has white blood and she has bits of red on her dress but puts on her green outerwear as she's leaving. Victor makes sure to pull out and look at the pregnant ivory figurine and then look at the white-fleshed creature just in case we could somehow have missed where that was going. I already got it but thanks.
At the demonstration of his 'prototype' at university, Victor says "birth is not in our hands, is it?" The response from the audience is "No." Victor then says, "That's in God's hands"âright where I was expecting him to say that it was in women's hands. The blank space figured by women in this scene (even as Victor says that he can best God and pursue Nature to her hiding place) is very loud. Then he shows the grotesque prototype and says "hair-thin scarsâno coarse stitchery needed with my own technique." If we read this as Victor commenting on medicine / surgery, including army medicine, there could be something there. If we read "stitchery" as another nod towards women and how disrespected and invisible feminised work is, there could be something there.
But it's just overlaid with this tone of unpleasant smarminess. The smarminess of something that feels that it's very, very clever, while never really showing you anything very clever. Because of course this line is primarily (solely?) a commentary on the visual imagery of other adaptations of Frankenstein.
The prototype is extremely white by the way, and so is the white and red anatomy figurine that's in Herr Hollander's study that's almost identical to it. The camera frames it and then doesn't move for several seconds just in case you could miss it. Herr Hollander has mercury in the ivory handle of his cane.
Herr Hollander explains the symptoms of syphilis, presumably for the audience's benefit. But we don't really get a lot of the medical or cultural ideas surrounding syphilis in the Victorian era (or gonorrhea, at the time there was no difference), what was understood about it, anything that would connect it to Victor's father's earlier quizzing, where for some reason he asks him about humourism (already a very outdated concept at the time this is set, even though he's then presented as a rationalist?). This is a film very uninterested in Victorian medical discourses, and yet GDT chose to take a novel largely about medicine and set it in the Victorian era...? There are so many opportunities for the film to have something to say where it just doesn't.
The one message that it does seem to have is just a phenomenally misogynist one. Frankenstein is partly motivated by a desire to "play God," but also to efface or replace the role of women in reproduction. This is, like, baby's first Frankenstein take. It's not a bad take, and it could have gone somewhere. But instead the film is just like: Elizabeth represents Life and Womanhood and the Value of Motherhood, she has a speech about the Evils of War and how those Men were Somebody's Sons and a female Woman Mother birthed and nurtured them, but if the Men don't understand that they should run off and play with their little cigars (this is all stated directly in the dialogue helpfully, just in case we could have missed it). This is very contrary to Victor, who is a Man and Not Nurturing and taking money from War because of his obsession with Death. Victor doesn't know how to nurture or teach the baby-creature to speak or treat it like his child because he's a Man with a Dead Mother, but this comes easily to Woman Elizabeth.
Elizabeth seems to belong to the Steven Moffat 'feminism is when women have cool epic speeches and are cool and mysterious and sexy and, most importantly, largely metaphorical' school of writing women.
I'm having difficulty articulating what I mean here. It could have worked for Elizabeth to have seen something that the men in this situation didn't see, because she's a woman. It could have worked for Elizabeth to have a perspective related to her experience of gender that the men don't have. That's not what I feel is misogynistic here. But it didn't feel like a well-rounded character with a backstory and experiences (which experiences include facing misogyny) having thoughts and opinions and performing actions based on those experiences. It felt more simplistic than that, like all of her words and actions were arising naturally from the wellspring of her gender, rather than from her experience with being gendered.
This is where cutting out the "she had been basically engaged to Victor from birth" thing really hamstrings this film. By being engaged to Victor's brother, Elizabeth's "life-ness" is tied to the lighter, whiter, innocenter sibling (and this is never troubled!!). She's forbidden and mysterious and cool and Victor only meets her later in his life. She doesn't grow up knowing that she's expected to take a certain feminised role (i.e. "wife," "childbearer," "childrearer") to this man. Victor doesn't take her for granted in the same way. This is where her experiences with misogyny could have come from! This is what should make her empathise with the creature, not Natural Female Woman Mother Instinct! I'm not against changes being made, it's just that if the change makes you lose something, you should replace it with something that works at least as well. But instead Elizabeth is just River Song-ified.
Elizabeth's uncle tells Victor that, if he puts him in the "perfect new body," Victor can have "anything you wantâeven Elizabeth!" So Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's body, the legal right to have sex with Elizabeth no matter what, Elizabeth's presumed childbearing ability, are being used as a bargaining chip. That's great! Do more with that!! Has Elizabeth been privy to this attitude in her uncle before? What does she think of it? Give me something here!
The creature when he's 'brought to life' hangs on the cross like Jesus for quite a while (just in case you could miss it) and then Victor shows him the sun but just says that single word, "sun," such that it could also be "son." They both stand in the light for a moment. So now I'm thinking, Victor is playing God, so the creature is his son, Jesus... Jesus is 'the light of the world'... So Victor is Prometheus (like in the novel's subtitle), bringing light to the world... and then later Victor tries to kill, i.e. sacrifice, the creature, like Jesus was sacrificed? I can feel there's something that's supposed to be working here and I just feel like it's not, it's kind of an abortive parallel. Victor doesn't try to sacrifice his creature in order to benefit the world, he does so because he gave up trying to benefit the world with this technology. Is that it? It's an inversion? Like Dark Jesus? It just feels like a weird little pocket of the movie that wasn't continued anywhere else. But maybe I'm not up on my Christian iconography.
When William tells Victor "You're the monster" he should have been looking directly at the camera.
The plot made no fucking sense. Nobody's motivations made any sense. The first thing we see of Frankenstein's creature is a big murder spree where he kills a bunch of innocent sailors, because he wants Victor. But then we learn... that he didn't kill William. And he didn't kill Elizabeth. This is the first time he's killed anybody. So why is he suddenly so inclined to murder like eight guys in this total bloodbath? And then, over the course of one conversation (for us, it's the whole movie, but for them, it's maybe 20 minutes of time, in contrast with the months and months that he's been repeatedly tracking Victor down), he's suddenly not murder-y anymore?
I'm not denying that characters motivations can change, but there's just nothing that should have made the creature zig-zag back and forth like this. I think the real reason is that GDT wanted the movie to start out scary and then have a wholesome ending. The fact that this makes the creature incomprehensible was not a consideration. Idk.
Similarly, Victor throws corpses around like it's nothing, he's really disregardful of them in a scene that was very intriguing, even though it kind of read like if Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd had been unrelentingly serious. Then he doesn't run away immediately disgusted by the creature (which makes sense, it would have been very odd to see him so deep in gore and throwing around chunks of flesh and kicking them, and then being like oh ugh ew a flesh creature, and running away). But later Victor gets angry because he doesn't think the creature is capable of speech or 'higher' intelligence. So he tries to kill him. And then the creature finds him and is capable of speech. So now we expect Victor to be happy and like, The Dream is Back On, let me contact the medical schools, let's go on tour, right? No, he's changed his mind.
Again, that's okay, characters can change their mindsâbut we just get nothing of the "why." It's one line of dialogue. Victor is like "it took me so long to regain my sanity again." Making the creature and playing God and trying to defeat death was "insanity," and now Victor doesn't want anything to do with the creature because, um, uh, he snapped out of it. He's back to a previous state of "sanity" now (not sure how 'previous' that state must have been, because this was presented at the beginning of the film as a very, very longstanding interest of his, beginning with Prototypical Dead Mother, but whatever, I guess he's over it now). And we're meant to be convinced of that enormous change in motivation within the space of 3 seconds. So flimsy. Sucks.
They woobified the creature. He didn't kill William, he didn't kill Elizabeth (treating her as an extension of or tool to use on Victor rather than her own person), he demanded a companion but didn't demand a female companion, didn't demand that a woman be made to, presumably, be compelled to have sex with him, didn't inherit a bunch of misogynist ideas from Paradise Lost, didn't insist on the value of his own life. He just wanted to die and end his suffering. A story about how being one kind of outsider doesn't necessarily give you empathy with another kind of outsider, a story about the cruelty people are capable of when they're treated with cruelty, a story about how the value of a life you're not included in can seem abstract and unimportant, a story about how harmful ideas are perpetuated and enactedâbecomes a story about how the creature is just super misunderstood. People keep thinking he killed people, even though he didn't!
That's fine, it's fine to change things, but if you take something away from the film, you should make sure that what you get in return is at least as compelling. And the issue of "interpretation" and "misinterpretation" never went anywhere, because this film was so averse to making anything ambiguous. More on this later.
I don't even automatically hate having the creature and Victor forgive each other. There's a universe where that works. There's a film out there in the aether somewhere that makes that compelling, interesting, troubling, earned, anything. Unfortunately it is not this film.
And then Victor is like "live! you have to live! don't be afraid to live!" Um, yeah, he's been repeatedly trying to do that! But every time he tries somebody goes "Augh, what is that thing? Shoot it!" and then they do!! That's what we've spent the last hour establishing!! Hello??
Despite these glaring plot and character issues, the largest issue I had with the movie was one of tone. And one of technique. It was so self-serious. It was so realist. At no point were we led to believe that anything that was shown on screen didn't "really" happen. Everything shown was 1:1 reality, as if a camera had been in the room when the events of the film occurredârather than a technique where what the camera shows you is more like somebody's interpretation of a scene, for instance. The film did not want to become surreal, it did not want to become non-linear, it did not want to become ambiguous.
But then on the other hand it was so, so saturated. The imagery was so insistent and repetitive, and the colours so imbued with textual and thematic meaning. The title cardsâ"Frankenstein's Story," "The Creature's Story"âbrought attention to the function of the film as narrative, the camera as something that is not only showing but making the story, the framing device of Frankenstein's speech, his telling of the story to an audience who must interpret it (diagetically, in the form of the ship captain, and extradiagetically, in the form of the viewer), being what leads us into the visual representation of the story. But then the visual representation of the story we see does not call attention to itself as representation or interpretation, does not fall into the ambiguous or surreal, is so realist! As if a camera was in the room! And it's just a really poor choice. The technical toolbox of this film is very limited. As if nobody involved was clever enough to know how to use film to tell a story, or as if they were afraid to make anything confusing to the audience. Because God forbid the audience miss anything.
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