Case Study: Week 15: Contemporary Renditions of the Frankenstein Myth Draft Written by: Jason McKahan Edited by: Dr. Kay Picart Web Design by: Michaela

Case Study: Week 15: Contemporary Renditions of the

Frankenstein Myth

Draft Written by: Jason McKahan

Edited by: Dr. Kay Picart

Web Design by: Michaela Densmore

Edited by Dr. Kay Picart and Michaela Densmore © 2001

IntroductionIntroductionIntroductionIntroduction

• The aim of this lecture is to focus on the treatment of the Frankenstein myth in more recent films, Franken-stein 1970 (Koch 1958) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Branagh 1994).

• In specific, we aim to examine how these films illustrate the changing visualization and narration of the myth.

Frankenstein 1970Frankenstein 1970 Frankenstein 1970Frankenstein 1970

• As Picart notes, Frankenstein 1970 (Koch, 1958), is a particularly inter-esting rendition insofar as it problem-atizes the process of capturing Frankenstein on film.


• The film begins with what appears to be another version of a Frankenstein film.

• A montage sequence builds tension by cutting back and forth between a shot of a blonde woman as she runs through the woods screaming and the legs and clawed hands of a monster who chases her.


• She repeatedly stumbles and runs into a lake in an attempt to evade the monster.

• The monster follows her into the lake and begins to choke her, pushing the woman under the water.


• However, we soon learn that this is only the scene of a Frankenstein movie production, when the male director’s voice calls “Cut!” and the next shot reveals a film crew on the shore.


• Thus, as Picart argues, from the opening, Frankenstein 1970 seems to be a meta-fiction on the making of Frankenstein films and contains caricatures of those involved in such a production.


• First, there is the mad scientist who appears as himself, with his obsequious servant.

• Second, we see the rest of the crew, an arrogant and profiteering director, an artsy cinematographer and a blonde actress, who becomes a sexual object/victim of the film within a film.


• Picart observes that the obsessive media commercialism that undergirds such renditions of the Frankenstein myth ultimately is parodied by the plodding slaughter of the crew by the monster.


• In the first scene, the director, Douglas

Roe, asks the cinematographer how

the first scene looked, to which he

responds, “Like a Rembrandt.”


• Picart maintains that this is an absurd

comparison because they equivocate

their B-film work with the aesthetic of

Baroque painting, in a manner not

unlike Hollywood’s commercial

plundering of Shelley’s Romantic

novel.


• Likewise, exploitation of women as victims in the Hollywood narrative is parodied by the blonde actress, when she glibly remarks, “How I suffer for Douglas Roe, Madison Avenue and all those lovely sponsors,” and continues to recall her victimization by celluloid Indians, wild expeditions and now, “200th Anniversary of Frankenstein.”


• In addition to this exploitation, Picart comments how the director has his own sexual designs on her and that her fate as an actress is fairly obvious, given the sacrifices of youth and beauty for an all too brief stint of celebrity.


• Picart points out how Frankenstein 1970 is absorbed in clichés of Ger-manic references found in the film adaptations of Frankenstein.

• The actor who plays the monster cannot speak English, but has to be given directions in German by Baron Frankenstein’s servant, Schuter.


• The actor’s first name is “Hans”, and his last name is allusive to the Nazi head of the Gestapo, the Waffen-SS and organizer of the mass murder of Jews in the Third Reich, “Himmler.”

• In fact, the conflation of Nazism with the Germanic is further brought out by the previous circumstances of Baron Frankenstein.


• Picart calls attention to the baron’s “hideous physical disfiguring,” a result of his having been tortured by the Nazis, with the exception of his hands, which they kept unblemished as they attempted to force him to participate in their maniacal surgical procedures.


• Picart also notes that the Germanic specter haunts the film and eclipses the repugnant experiments of the baron.

• Although the baron did not give into the Nazis, he nevertheless represents that same militant ruthlessness.


• This connection between the mon-strous and German Fascism highlights the American essentialist thought concerning Germans as a whole fol-lowing the Holocaust.


• Picart sees this as a parallelism between the baron and Nazism, as far as his malformed corpus is a rebirth of Nazi brutality and the baron himself recognizes his national kinship with the regime.

• “They believed in one thing. I believed in another. But they were running the country. That was my misfortune.”


• The interior of the castle functions for the director, Douglas Roe, as a live set for his fetishism of Hollywood realism.

• Before the crew returns from the shoot in the forest, we cut to the interior as the baron and his friend, Wilhelm Gotfried, discuss the annoyance of the ever-present film crew.


• This sacrifice of privacy is made to sustain the dwindling fortune of the Frankenstein estate and purchase an atomic reactor for the baron’s lab.

• Note how Cold War anxieties of nuclear paraphernalia renovate the technological shadow in this version – it is in no way made apparent just how the reactor is employed!


• Picart is particularly interested in this scene to the extent that it “highlights a disagreement concerning Franken-stein’s character.”

• Whereas Gotfried represents the baron as a martyr, who survived the menacing presence of the Nazi regime, the baron mockingly recalls his “Victory” of retaining his surgeon’s hands.


• Although Gotfried stresses the baron’s steadfast mind and spirit, the baron accentuates his bodily suffering and resultant deformation.

• Picart reasons that the baron realizes the futility of the mind/body split, which figures prominently in the Franken-steinian monster of the novel, but is rendered inoperative within the cine-matic adaptations.


• However, Gotfried steers the conversation to the subject of Fran-kenstein’s secretive experiments, as Picart posits, as if to “awaken Fran-kenstein’s conscience, and to save his tortured friend from himself . . .”


• The next scene repeats the meta-narrative function in that we observe the baron narrating the history of his ancestors, while he paces about the family crypt, only to be reminded that the crew is present and that they are merely rehearsing a scene for the film.


• While the realism of the scene pleases the director, Roe, this same effect causes Caroline to scream, and petrifies Hans.

• We, the audience, sense that it is pure biography.

• Picart considers the function of Roe as the comforter of Caroline (as victim).


• This is juxtaposed with the cynicism of Judy, Roe’s divorcee and script supervisor, in her mocking of Roe’s new infatuation with Caroline:

• “Judy is the most cruelly circumscribed by this iteration of the Frankenstein narrative, and occupies the position of the female-as-monstrous, the shadow formed from the conjunction of the feminine and the monstrous.”


• Finally, Picart draws an appealing parallel between Roe and the baron, even though handsomeness and disfiguration are perhaps contrasted.

• Roe is “manipulative, domineering, and thoroughly obsessed with any-thing that will enable him to maximize the economic and prestige-related benefits of creating a television pro-duction.”


• Similar to Frankenstein’s creation of beings lingering between life and death, Roe participates in an act of film production between reality and fiction.

• Picart reads the film production in relation to male birthing, relating how one crew member says about the film, “Okay, it’s your baby.”


• Lastly, both the baron and Roe share an infatuation with the blonde actress, “a woman who ‘sacrifices’ herself upon the high altar of commercialism and celluloid fantasy.”

Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinMary Shelley’s Frankenstein Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinMary Shelley’s Frankenstein

• The next film we will critique is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Branagh 1994), one of the most recent rendi-tions of the Frankenstein myth.

• If Frankenstein 1970 identifies mon-strosity with Fascism as a Cold War text, then we will see the attempt in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to equalize gender within the context of a postmodern dialogue.


• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is of particular interest to Picart because it attempts “to visualize what resists visualization in the original novel.”

• In James Heffernan’s words, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “prompts us to rethink [the monster’s] monstrosity in terms of visualization: how do we see the monster, what does he see, and how does he want to be seen?”


• In addition, Picart finds this film an interesting work with which to analyze representations of the “three shadows that hover between appearance and disappearance.”

• By way of concluding our study of the horror genre, we will examine the evolving thematics of the Monstrous in relation to gender and technology.


• In an early scene in the castle ballroom, we, the spectators, view Victor and Elizabeth gracefully dancing.

• If we compare the Universal series representation of Elizabeth to this scene, we will find a stark contrast between those domesticated, essentially a-sexual women and this apparently strong-willed and pas-sionate Elizabeth.


• Picart observes a clear revision of the original novel in Mary Shelley’s Fran-kenstein, in that equal gender rela-tions between Victor and Elizabeth are sought in this cinematic version.


• Picart quotes Branagh’s conscious decisions concerning gender representation:

• “We couldn’t be strictly authentic to the period, because I wanted to say at every stage: These two people are equal.”


• However, it does not seem clear exactly what Branagh means by “authentic to the period.”

• Does he mean to the Romantic (Shelley’s) period or the period of Universal’s patriarchal representations of gender relations?


• What is clear is that for Branagh, equality adds up to substituting repression with a contrived “individual consent” to patriarchal dominance in Elizabeth’s character.

• For instance, of their parting Branagh states, “She allows him to go off, because that is what he needs to do. It’s not what she needs-she wants to stay at home” (Picart’s italics).


• Even if we concede that Elizabeth truly desires this domestic role, it is clear that she is diminished into a peripheral companion of Victor, the active male, who “makes things happen” and is central to guiding the narrative.


• Picart takes this recreation of Elizabeth’s character as a possible substitute for the novel’s role of Henry Clerval, who functions “as Victor’s genuine and spiritual complement. . .” and “nurses him back to health when he is on the verge of madness and death.”


• Picart argues that this results in a “stronger female character, and thus enables a shadow of Baubo’s repressed myth of female erotic and reproductive power to emerge.”

• Simultaneously, it reduces Henry’s character to a comic sidekick, whose failures at the operating table reinforce Victor’s brilliance and erases the homoerotic tensions of the original novel.


• Finally, Picart observes that the attempt to empower Elizabeth’s cha-racter is ultimately undermined by the parthenogenetic myth.

• Elizabeth is excluded from the male self-birthing and is doomed to die twice – her second death, a suicide, much like Christina Kleve’s in Frankenstein Created Woman, is her only “choice.”


• During the parthenogenetic birth, we see Victor’s laboratory at last.

• Its birthing apparatus consists of a scrotum shaped sack full of electric eels that will later be released into the womb shaped sarcophagus in which the monster lies.

Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinMary Shelley’s Frankenstein Mary Shelley’s FrankensteinMary Shelley’s Frankenstein • Picart interprets this sarcophagus, a metal

“womb” in which normally corpses are laid, as a fitting visual appropriation of the nurturing power of the womb.

• She then proceeds to claim, “the hyperbolization of the power of the scrotum . . . ironically capitulates to the ancient belief, articulated by Aristotle, among others, that the woman is simply a warm vessel that provides nutrients, rather than contributes to, the generation of the child.”


• Thus, the apparatus conceals the feminine mythic counterpart, the scandal of Baubo’s ana-suromai, and stresses the male dominance in the parthenogenetic birth.

• This particularly masculine self-birthing is further highlighted in the sequence in which Victor brings the monster into life.


• He enters the scene wearing a red-orange cape and resembles Merlin the Magician.

• This sequence is erotically charged to the extent that Victor removes his cape to reveal his muscular form and release the sperm shaped eels from the scrotum shaped container into the womb shaped sarcophagus.


• Reminiscent of Frankenstein (1931), Victor peers through the porthole of the apparatus and cries, “Live, Live, Live!”

• After Victor has assumed that the experiment is a failure, we see the hand of the creature move, and when the sarcophagus begins to shudder, Victor utters, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”


• However, this scene radically differs from the 1931 version in its bare analogue between the parthenogenetic process and human birthing.


• As Picart observes, the lead bolts of the sarcophagus burst free and Victor slips in amniotic deluge that shoots forth from the artificial womb: “an act that simulates a pregnant woman’s loss of amniotic fluid that initiates labor.”


• Furthermore, Picart notes: “In a riveting revision [of the original script], the film has Victor pushing fluid out of the creature’s lungs by pushing against his chest—a procedure done to newly born babies by holding them upside down to drain any fluid remaining in the lungs.”


• However, Picart stresses that rather than stressing the wondrous pheno-menon that these parallels to natural birthing might suggest, this sequence is from a particularly masculine point of view and expresses an ambivalently misogynistic repulsion with the process of birth.


• The second birthing is that of the female monster, Elizabeth-Justine.

• Picart comments that this second parthenogenetic sequence duplicates the first with one major exception: the surging of the eels from the scrotum shaped container into the womb shaped sarcophagus: “. . . [this] powerful visual cue [is] kept harnessed within the realm of the birthing of the male creature.”


• Another difference from the male birthing that Picart detects is the demented waltz of Victor and Elizabeth-Justine, during which close-up flashes of Victor and Elizabeth’s earlier waltz are intercut.

• However, soon the dissonant waltz music abruptly stops as Victor notices the presence of the male monster.


• Now a rivalry between the creator and the monster arises.

• Whereas Victor claims possession of the female monster because she remembers his name, the monster declares ownership derived from their physiological affinity and method of birth.


• Picart sees this sequence as an extension and revision of Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein.

• First, the “bride” once again wears a wedding gown resembling a soiled shroud.

• Second, the female is again trapped between two men who attempt to control her.


• However, Picart distinguishes these similar sequences to the extent that Elizabeth-Justine is truly hideous, as opposed to the mixture of beauty and the grotesque found in the Bride of Frankenstein.


• In addition, unlike the female monster’s clear rejection of the male monster in Bride of Frankenstein, Elizabeth-Justine’s choice is more ambiguous.


• However, Elizabeth-Justine, looking at her scarred hands and feeling her face, soon realizes what Victor has done and her knowledge leads to her self-destruction (the narrative ritualistically demands this).


• Picart argues that although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein most endows the shadow of the female creature with some degree of freedom and sympathy, it still relegates the mon-strous female to the sphere of the inarticulate and powerless.


• It is also noted by Picart that the

potential reproductive power of the

female monster is never a focus in the

film; rather, she is the object of erotic

desire, as in the Hammer series.

Evolution of Frankenstein FilmsEvolution of Frankenstein Films- Conclusion- Conclusion


• Our study of the generic evolution of the horror genre, specifically the Frankenstein myth, provides insight into the simultaneous affirmation and negation of ideological progressivism and conservatism.



• To close this section, it is important to note that what Part III of this course has aimed to convey is that the evolution of the cinematic Franken-steins both reveals and conceals anx-ieties of gender and technology that are mythically negotiated by framing and generating three “shadows.”



• The first type is the feminized or inferior shadow (hyper-domesticated Elizabeths and absent mothers).

• The second type is the monstrous or overdeveloped shadow (the male creature as a voiceless brute, unlike the novel).



• Lastly, the third type is an intricate conjunction of the first two: the shadow of the female monster or the female / feminine-as-monstrous (the short-lived female monster and the sexual or aggressive female).

• The female thus becomes a triple threat: as female, as the unnaturally birthed, and as the potentially pregnant.



• Thus, this course closes with a study of Frankenstein films as a more spe-cialized topic to which earlier tools of film critical analysis, which are pertinent to the characterization of the ideological representations of gender, race, class and sexuality in popular Holly-wood film, are applied.



• As such, it serves as test case for whether all the prior tools of analysis have been incorporated into a viable vocabulary and whether a general methodology for analyzing the con-ventions of classical Hollywood cine-ma has been integrated into the way in which we, audience, consume films.

Final Words from Final Words from Your InstructorsYour Instructors Final Words from Final Words from Your InstructorsYour Instructors

• We hope you have enjoyed our We hope you have enjoyed our quick run through the quick run through the essentials of film form and essentials of film form and theory, and that viewing films theory, and that viewing films from now on will still be a from now on will still be a pleasurable, but not uncritical, pleasurable, but not uncritical, process.process.

Final Words from Final Words from Your InstructorsYour Instructors Final Words from Final Words from Your InstructorsYour Instructors

• And like all good movies, this course come to an end . . .

• “. . . And . . . CUT!”

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Case Study: Week 15: Contemporary Renditions of the Frankenstein Myth Draft Written by: Jason McKahan Edited by: Dr. Kay Picart Web Design by: Michaela