The Modern PROMETHEU

178 years ago, Mary Shelley stayed awake all night writing a story "to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart." Her Frankenstein has kept generations of readers up in the nights since, but perhaps no group more than the film makers. Kenneth Branagh's new film, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", is yet another rebirth of the monster that has tested the pulse of our fears in versions ranging from animated cartoons to an X-rated Andy Warhol film.

Branaugh's latest vision--De Niro slathed in what appears to be Freddy Kruger's discarded latex--demands comparison to Boris Karloff"s popular 1931 interpretation of the monster. The Brattle Theatre's current series, "The Monster Within," provides an opportunity to re-examine Karloff's nifty neck bolts, and several films inspired by Mary Shelley's myth. Each presents a version of Shelley which contributes in various ways to our understanding of her classic work.

Branaugh's "Frankenstein" purports to be faithful to the novel (see review below). Adopting a different approach altogether, the dark and mesmerizing "The Spirit of the Beehive" explores the effect of the 1931 "Frankenstein" on a young girl in Franco's Spain during World War II. As the girl becomes deeply involved in a fantasy of the Karloff film, the world surrounding her begins eerily to echo the film. It often resembles a dark version of "Cinema Paradiso," stressing the importance of the child's imagination in creating her personal world. The 1977 new wave classic Eraserhead subjects a version of Shelley's myth to the vision of its own demented genius--none other than David Lynch. The film is an hallucinatory ride through the disturbingly strange visions of the disturbingly normal Henry Spencer (James Nance). Finding himself briefly with a wife, Henry feels obligated to care for the creature which is the alleged product of their union when she leaves him. He's the sort of guy you would take home to your parents, if your whole family was profoundly psychopathic.

The original inspiration for all these celluloid Frankensteins is James Whale's 1931 film which in fact takes only minimal plot elements from Mary Shelley's novel. Karloff's monster stands out in a production which is in many ways simply a Hollywood fluff treatment of the story. This time around, the handsome Dr. Frankenstein animates a monster who terrorizes the countryside, and Frankenstein's lovely fiancee, until he is hunted down and dies in a bizarre finale sequence at a windmill.

It is impossible to explore all the themes in Frankenstein which have inspired film makers since the earliest cinema. The 1931 version uses a tuxedoed emecee to explain to the audience that the story is about two of the universe's "greatest mysteries": life and death. Lynch draws more inspiration from the idea of unnatural parentage and child-rearing; whiie Victor Erice's "Spirit of the Beehive" focuses on the story's horror and its effect on the audience.

The incredible variety of Frankenstein films points to the richness of Shelley's text, and its uncanny ability to inspire horror. The novel is surprisingly unassuming, the first work of a 19 year-old writer who was to have few other lasting successes. But it is powerfully midwifed by the godfathers of the Romantic movement, Lord Byron and Percy Blythe Shelley, and Mary Shelley's own traumatic family experiences. The frustrations of her position--her selfimposed exile with the radical, and still-married, Shelley, her confinement in the home and her failed pregnancies--are expressed in the passion with which she narrates the creation, birth and development of Dr. Frankenstein's monster.

Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein is a man obsessed with the discovery of knowledge at any price, committed to the exploration of charlatanry, if necessary, to learn all the secrets of the natural world. He is above all completely self-absorbed, unable to see beyond the experiment at hand. His monster is the product of an inevitable sequence of events: he believes reanimation is possible, and works maniacally until it is achieved. The Frankenstein films have been less successful than Shelley in defining his motive for creating inhuman life. Branagh chooses to make the death of Victor Frankenstein's mother the catalyst for his passion for dark science, necessitating a melodramatic graveside pledge that "no one need ever die again." Eraserhead goes in the opposite extreme, informing the unsuspecting Henry that a baby is expected, and that be can pick it up at the hospital as soon as the marriage license is complete. That act of creation is not only involuntary, but surprising and unwelcome. His abberent creation is the expression of post-modern alienation from other like creatures, parodied brilliantly by Lynch.

Whale's 1931 doctor is a likeable young man, carried away by the future glory of his efforts. He attempts, like Branagh, to be hostile to his family's overtures during the creation process; both relent in the face of the beloved's tender words. The earlier doctor seeks glory in a way that Branagh's does not, permitting an audience for the actual reanimation process to prove his sanity and prowess. None of the creators can summon the demented courage of Shelley's doctor to choose science over their human life. This is a reflection of the horror in which Shelley held the act of human creation: it necessarily meant selling one's soul to pursue such a dark art.

The novel resolutely refuses to describe the actual techniques of its doctor, while film makers feel the need to explain to their audience how this miracle is wrought. This is not only a necessity for the visual medium of film, but an indication that as we move closer to Frankenstein's work in modern science, such unspeakable horrors become everyday occurences. The rebirth of tissue, while still contraversial, is conceiveable in our time, and we are certainly interested to hear how it might be realized.

The 1931 film treats the moment of birth as a dark triumph of reason and science. The monster, laid out on a surgery table, moves slowly under his clinical white sheets, just as the doctor hopes. This strips away the physical element of the birth as unnecessary in the face of governing science. This is in strong contrast with the child of "Spirit of the Beehive," in which the creative act is a spiritual calling to the monster to enter the world of the child The birth is perpetrated by the monster himself at her invitation and on her imagination.

Branagh's film, for all its transgressions, succeeds in communicating Shelley's own horror at the monstrous birth. Frankenstein's monster is neither child of God, nor of woman. He is an assault on universal order, on the principles of science and religion. This is most effectively described in the film's birth scenes. In the first, Victor Frankenstein's mother dies in caesarean delivery performed by her husband. Though physically (and graphically) destroying the mother, the birth produces a joyful child who is a delight from his first moments. The monster's birth, however, is an awkward torment. The doctor/father/mother/creator wrestles with a newborn twice his size in a bath of amniotic fluids. The child attempts to kill his mother immediately on emerging from his copper womb, struggling to use his malformed limbs and decaying mind in an act of revenge.

Shelley's novel explores not only the process of birth, but the effects of parenthood Frankenstein is littered with parentless children, like Shelley herself, whose mother died shortly after her birth. The monster's wrath stems from the refusal of the man he calls his father to acknowledge his offspring, or to provide for his spiritual comfort by creating a companion like him. The monster who grows under these circumstances has great capacities both for good and evil, presumably like all children at their birth. He is well-educated and seeks human companionship, but his rejection by the human race makes it the object of his wrath and vengence.

In "Spirit of the Beehive," Ana internalizes a powerful scene from the 1931 "Frankenstein" in which a little girl, having been befriended and then killed by the creature, is lovingly carried through the streets of the town by her father, who regrets having left her to go to work. Ana's mother writes love letters to an unknown man while Ana's older sister starts to play with children her age. Her father is removed and cold, listening stonily as Dr. Frankenstein describes his desperate hope to discover the meaning of beauty in the universe. He minds his beehives calmly, without a sting. Never properly nurtured, Ana begins to create a monster who will respond to her cries, giving him her father's clothing and gold watch when he materializes. Her fantasies are realized when the town must search to bring her back from the dream-world where she hides. The dark vastness of the countryside as they search mirrors the loneliness of her childhood. This film focuses on the role of the nurturing parent, far more closely than that of the creator of life.

Strangely enough, it is only under the bizarre care of David Lynch that the monster is treated responsibly by its father. Henry allows the truly revolting creature to cry softly for days, taking care of it when it becomes sick, sitting up with it, before he finally loses control and attempts to kill the child. The result of this rejection is, suffice to say, horrific enough to become the climax of even a David Lynch film. The monster's relationship with the creator/father is one of competition and resentment for affection not bestowed.

The 1931 film is a product of attitudes towards science in its time, thus ruling out Shelley's tragic father-son relationship. The 'science' of phrenology, the study of the physical characteristics of the skull as an indicator of personality and behavior, is used as a horror technique, obscuring true possibilities of horror. The brain transplanted into Boris Karloff's monster is that of a psychopathic criminal, presumed to be preprogrammed for murder and mayhem. The revealing of this fact to 'Dr. Frankenstein extracts a reaction of dread at the inevitable terrors such a brain, reanimated, will produce. Yet Karloff is at his most terrifying when he appears to be gentle, as when he plays in pure joy with the child he will soon kill. Shelley realized this, and both her monster and Branagh's display their capacity for good, before striking mercilessly into evil.

Films purporting to be inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein story often reflect the fascinations and obssessions of their creators far more accurately than the text they seek to imitate. Branagh's inclusion of a plague which destroys lives even faster than his monster, speaks dirctly to modern audiences, reconnecting them to Shelley's text. A film audience would be quite surprised, having viewed the films of the Brattle series or Branagh's film, to see what the text actually says. Its power, however, lies in that very ability to inspire the imagination which makes cinematic interpretations so problematic. There is so much human passion in Shelley's work that it does keep us up at night, whether in a darkened cinema or with a reading lamp. The story strikes at the most primative myths and fears of humankind, upsetting the assumtpions of natural laws so completely that it never fails to "curdle the blood."