Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein

 

 

I  walked out of the theatre seeing the movie less than an hour ago, as of the writing of this response. Before I tell you about that… let me take a step or two back and break it apart and discuss the topic in its constituent parts.

 

Frankenstein

 

Let’s start with “Frankenstein”, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the original vision and then what happened after. It is a matter of almost being beyond belief that Mary Shelly wrote this book, this story, when she was STILL A TEENAGER. The complexity of it, the layers, are something that a writer and a storyteller might work for years to accomplish and yet she, this slip of a girl, produced it whole cloth from out the gate – and more than just producing a story she created one that has remarkable longevity and staying power and has endured long after she herself  is dust. I read the original book many years ago now,  and I cannot even be sure which bits that I remember as canon were actually hers and which came after in adaptation after adaptation that followed. There were some tropes that were pure Gothic horror (the whole “I will be with you on your wedding night” vow by the creature after its desires are thwarted by its creator was an almost entirely reliant on the frisson of the virginal bride being assaulted by a man not her husband just after she had been handed over to him by her father in the wedding ceremony). And I suspect that Victor Frankenstein’s response to the creation of the “bride” monster (in the book, as I recall, he actually agrees and begins the work before MORALITY suddenly rears its ugly head and he, in service of its insistent questions – what if SHE is worse and more maleficent than HE is? What if she doesn’t like him and rejects him and now there’s two solitary murderous maniacs on the loose? What if she does like him and they procreate and they create a race of awful monstrous offspring that would supplant mankind? – tears his new creation apart before completion, thus setting the stage for his original monster’s mad murderous rampage) ends up rooted more in that Victorian recoil at the thought of the two monsters doing the Monster Mash and bumping uglies than in any actual physical barriers . I mean, I can’t be alone in thinking that most normal males would turn slightly green and instinctively cross their legs (while their cojones crawl back into their dark recesses and peer in terror from behind his navel) at the idea of basically having some other poor idiot castrated and then his danglies being stuck on the Creature’s body – but leaving aside the basic suspension of disbelief at everything else it HAS been said that the testes, once they have been severed, are essentially medical waste and cannot produce any procreative matter, never mind the physical aspects depending on blood circulation and hormones and a dose of having the hots for someone – or even the pure power play of the rapist, if it comes to that – required for the member to function in the manner in which it is supposed to. So there’s the male part of that coupling that needs some serious work and explanations on behalf of the creator – and why would something like that have been a close obsession when creating a monster? But even if all that works just perfectly then the simple solution is that, when creating the female, when you are stitching together her own composite parts, you simply give her a pre-hysterectomy and omit to  include any babymaking apparatus whatsoever and presto problem solved – even if they went at it like rabbits, in the aftermath, there could be no “procreation”. Victor Frankenstein could have created the bride and sent the two creatures away to play happy families without ever having told them if he had done that – I mean, he was playing God with so much for so long that this last sin of omission is almost an irrelevancy. But for all her breadth of vision and greatness of mind I suspect some of this wormed its way into the original material. You could have lots and lots of gore and rivers of blood and severed limbs and all that but S E X was a whole different animal.

The original story was then, as has been already mentioned, made into a veritable Frankenstein’s Monster as and of itself, adapted and readapted lots and lots and LOTS of times, from silent movies, to Boris Karloff’s iconic bolts-in-the-neck monster, to movies with Gene Wilder in them, to movies with the likes of Kenneth Brannagh and Robert de Niro, to, yes, Rocky Horror Picture Show (Janet! Doctor Scott! Brad! Doctor Scott! ROCKY?!?) We have had pure horror, we have had Gothic visions, we have had “literary” adaptations, we have had camp, we have had parody. ALL of it.  A shifting kaleidoscope of images and tropes, enough to make you dizzy just by thinking about it all. By this stage you would be forgiven for not knowing which bit came from what, when the whole “monster” story was stitched together. I mean, I may have simply forgotten about them, but I’m pretty sure that Shelley never mentioned those bolts, for instance. And yet the story simply sat there and took it, and survived. Mary Shelley’s original “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus” was published anonymously in London in January 1818, with the first version which bore Shelley’s own name released in 1831; the story is close to two hundred years old, and still going strong. Various adaptations have cherry picked things to emphasize (or elide, to be sure) but the basic bones of the story have stayed true. And that, in itself, is astonishing – the way the story has been planted, and grew, and flourished, and bore seeds of inspiration which have sprouted into child-stories, changed and yet faithful to an original vision of an 18-year-old girl from another time who somehow managed to unerringly plant her flag into a story which is quintessentially about what makes us human.

 

Guillermo Del Toro

 

Guillermo Del Toro is a writer, producer, and director who by his own admission has been haunted by the Frankenstein story for decades – but who has, in the meantime, become a recognizable name in the storytelling firmament by staking out his own particular personal and beautifully realized territory. He has become synonymous with finding the beauty in horror, and redemption in the monstrous. He does not shy away from difficult tropes; he embraces them, and makes them so peculiarly his own that I believe that it is entirely possible to know that you are watching a Del Toro movie even if you hadn’t known you were watching one when you began it. He has put his own stamp on the work that he does, and he is inimitable. His is a name that is known, and remembered.

Some people who are reading this write-up will know the story of how I encountered Guillermo Del Toro’s work, but some will not, and so I will tell it again.

Hubby and I were at a small regional Science Fiction convention lo these many years ago now, and it was a single-track convention with no parallel programming so  it was almost kind of a panel-at-a-time kind of setup, and it had this insane focus on PIRATES which were apparently a thing that year (complete with a Johnny Depp as Captain Sparrow lifesize cardboard cutout figure leering at you from the corner of what was supposed to be a fairly sparsely supplied Green Room) and in fact there were several panels which basically focused on how to create a good pirate costume… and I finally had enough, after a while of arrgh-matey in the corridors and absolutely nobody there apparently interested in anything that I had to bring to the table, and so Hubs and I and a local friend who knew the lay of the land decided to escape the con and go to the movies.

We kind of hit a double doozy. The first one we saw was “Children of Men” (which, if you haven’t seen it, is hard hitting in its own way). Before we fully had a chance to recover from that we went into a second movie, one about which I knew absolutely nothing at all when I walked into the theatre.

Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth”.

When I walked out of the movie theatre after that I was wide-eyed and shaking. The lullaby from that film will never leave my head, and will always make me want to cry. And the sheer visual gorgeousness of that dark fairy tale, against the brutality of the story itself, engraved itself inside of me forever more. Del Toro took part of my soul that day and he has never given it back.

Many years later, I went with a friend to see “The Shape of Water”, and I remember sitting frozen in my seat in the still-darkened movie theatre as the credits rolled, knowing that another piece of my soul was gone. The scene from that movie where the mute girl suddenly has a dream-scene where she is doing a Fred-and-Ginger dance number with her monster partner and singing in full voice, only to fade away back into silence with a whispered “you’ll never know if you don’t know now” while staring him across her kitchen table, locked right back into her voiceless world. That scene. That scene stayed with me. The movie is full of Del Toro’s trademark horrors, and cruelties, and blood and guts and gore, and loss, and betrayal, and the pure darkness at the heart of everything if you look closely enough… and the beauty he finds and shows in the midst of it all, like some strange fragrant flower that only opens under moonlight when there is a full moon and breaks your heart with its loveliness when you least expects it. Del Toro has almost weaponized this – he waits until you’re lulled into the grotesqueries and then he lances into your unprotected vulnerable bits with a lance that is pure beautiful pain. He is so good at this. Oh, he is so GOOD at this.

I knew, of course, about the Frankenstein obsession. Anyone who knew of Del Toro knew that he wanted to make his own version of Frankenstein.

It was a long time coming.

But it is here.

Okay. The movie.

 

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein

 

Oh, I have waited for so many years for this movie. When something has the weight of that many expectations on it, there is always a danger of its collapsing under the load, and I actually looked at a few reviews of the thing before I went to see it – in a movie theater – this is out in a VERY limited release and I was lucky enough to live in a place where it was being shown within easy reach of me but honestly I would have driven a couple of hours to see this if I had to. It’s a crying shame that it’s out in so few outlets and for so short a time, and then it will be locked away behind a Netflix paywall and on a small screen which can never quite show things in the same way as you can see on a theater-sized wall-sized screen. If you can – still, while it’s still out there – see in in a movie theater, do yourself a favour and do that. Nothing will replace that vision for you, even if you then go and hoard it in the Netflix vault ever after.

From here there WILL be spoilers – if there is such a thing as a spoiler for a story that’s two hundred years old – but if you don’t want to know anything about THIS  version, you were warned. Because this version does things… differently.

• There is no question here that Victor Frankenstein is a monster. In fact, his brother’s dying words to him pretty much serve to underline that in thick black Sharpie, just in case you missed it. Oscar Isaac sinks his teeth into the role, playing the manic, the obsessed, the exhilarated, the broken, the impatient, the entitled, the dismissive, the petulant, the hubris-filled, the bleak Victor Frankenstein to the marrow of his bones, to the point that he is sometimes on the verge of stepping into a parody of himself – but he doesn’t. He stays in the persona. And yes, he is a monster. But I don’t think, in this version, he is THE monster. More on that in a moment.
• Jacob Elordi as the Creature will break your heart. From childlike to vulnerable to broken to recoiling from being hated because of what he is, to hating himself because of what he is, to the final denouement of the movie (we’ll get to that) and the final stage of grief, acceptance. I knew nothing about him before this and apparently he’s had some currency as a screen “hottie”, and some have dubbed him the “sexy Frankenstein” – and he is. He’s… kind of… beautiful. In the inimitable Del Toro horror trope way. He never asked to be here. He doesn’t know why he is here (unless it’s as a sop to his creator’s massive ego). He runs out of people and places to ask questions about any and all of it because when he encounters others the uniform reaction he seems to get is people shooting at him. I know he’s supposed to be fiendishly tall in real life but lordy if that is his real body (as opposed to ANY CGI tweakery whatsoever) he’s a scary-big guy. I’ve heard that someone else was originally tapped to play the part, not him, but whoever that was can basically curl up and die – Elordi OWNS this part. He was literally galvanized into life in this movie. He EATS the SCENERY. And by the end of the movie you belong to him. Make no mistake about that.
• It goes without saying that these two people, Isaac and Elordi, carry the movie between them, really, and if either had skidded or fallen off to the side the movie would have collapsed. But they don’t. It doesn’t. They hold it up like twin colossi.
• Short digression into sundry other minor characters, before circling back to something I want to pay more attention to. Charles Dance seems to have basically slipped into a full-time “nasty father” kind of role, and he does that beautifully here. His face is practically a mask throughout the movie, right until the deathmask is put on his lifeless body at his funeral. He feels nothing, gives nothing, and is probably instrumental in making his son Victor into what he became. The monster’s monster maker, as it were. William Frankenstein, the younger brother, who dies as a child in the original story, is here allowed to grow up into manhood (that’s one change) and is in fact the one engaged to Elizabeth (that’s another – she is originally Victor’s love interest). He isn’t really more than a prop in the movie, other than that. The sole female in the movie is Mia Goth, who plays both the ill-fated Elizabeth and Victor and William’s late mother in her few scenes on screen. She is a change in the original version in that she is betrothed to the younger brother and never to Victor, although he clearly has feelings for her, and that her death comes about not at the Creature’s hands but at Victor’s own in a tragic accident where she steps in front of a bullet he is aiming at the Creature. She dies in the Creature’s arms, and is part of what sets Victor off on the hunt for the Creature thereafter. In this movie she is portrayed as the niece of moneybags Heinrich Harlander of whom more in a moment but might I just say that we never, then, glimpse Elizabeth’s actual parents, and it might have been instructive to see the pair of pheasants who spawned this particular phoenix. But, about Heinrich Harlander…
• …here played by Christoph Waltz… may I posit that the real monster at the heart of this movie is this man. The one who eggs Victor on and feeds Victor’s obsessions. The one who pays for it all, whatever Victor wants, so that he can go on to create his Creature. And not because of any kind of magnanimity or philanthropy or even the pure scientific curiosity which is initially what drives Victor himself. No, his final goal is… to BECOME THE CREATURE. If Victor is playing God, then this twisted syphilitic creature who demands that he himself be placed in the immortal body that Victor is about to reanimate wants to BE God. It’s all done because his own body is beginning to fail him, he knows what a death from syphilis entails and where he is headed, he knows very well that he does not wish to go there, and basically he’s looking for a golden lottery ticket – he had to have led the kind of life which gave him the syphilis in the first place so he is probably a user and abuser, he doesn’t flinch at the things Victor thinks and does, and it’s all done so that he, himself, his puny mean-minded irrelevant irredeemable stupid venal I-have-all-the-money-and-therefore-I-can-buy-anything-I-want person can live forever in an invulnerable and immortal shell in which he can continue to lord it over people and oppress them. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the monster. I am pointing at him. Victor’s appalled “No!” when this scheme is revealed to him is practically ripped from him, in astonishment that it should even have been proposed. He did what he did and he must answer for it – but without this evil angel, this moneyed devil, pushing him and prodding him and enabling him and cajoling him and flattering him into it none of this tragedy need ever have happened…
• …because make no mistake here. This might be a Frrankenstein adaptation, and it might well be full of pure horror (honestly, that scene where Victor inspects the still-living malefactors about to be hanged for their crimes and talking right in front of them about what is going to be happening to their bodies after they’re cut down from the gallows is horror in its purest form)… and it might be shades of a Gothic romance (it has an honest-to-goodness scene of the movie’s Maiden coming down a sweeping Gothic staircase with her gorgeous long hair down for the night and all about her like a cloak, wearing nothing but a nightgown and carrying a candelabrum with four flickering lit candles – it’s almost cliché)… and it might be a monster-yarn… but in the end, what this version of Frankenstein turns out to be is a tragedy, and at the same time a story of redemption, even hope. I think it was in the Branagh/de Niro version of the movie (which everyone says was really bad and it might have been because I truly don’t remember much of it) that one of the most tragic lines in Frankensteiniana was uttered – the Creature, at the end of the movie, uttering the bleak, “He never gave me a name.” But in that movie the maker and the creature do not connect, do not reach an understanding, do not forgive. In Del Toro’s version, Victor Frankenstein is forgiven. And the Creature With No Name is almost ready to forgive himself. Victor tells him that, if it is true that he cannot die, then all that is left for him to do is live, and in the end he calls the creature his son. The man whose own father damaged and twisted him manages to break the mold and accepts the thing he has created as his own child. He is given absolution. And if his malignant rich-bastard egger-on and nemesis probably went straight to Hell when he dies, Victor Frankenstein might – just might – have a shot at Heaven yet.

 

I sat still, paralysed, as the end credits rolled when the movie was over. Not quite crying. Not quite not crying. Knowing that Del Toro just did it again.

 

I know he hangs out at Bluesky these days, and he’s been gleefully reposting people’s responses to his “Frankenstein” there for days now.

Before I left the movie theatre I sent out a brief Bluesky post in which I tagged him. I’ll end this write up with the words I sent out into the ether then: “Oh, Guillermo Del Toro… damn you. You broke my heart again.”