Frankenstein

Frankenstein: Reaction to the movie by Kenneth Branagh

12/24/08

Fred Allebach

The impulse of Victor Frankenstein (VF) was to cheat death of its finality through a combination of emerging medical technology and past wizardry and shamanism (the guys who turned lead into gold?).

What resulted was an abomination, a homunculus, Frankenstein the monster (F), which served as a symbolic, unnamed vessel for all of humanity’s fears, intolerance and superstition. Frankenstein shows how we make a monster out of our fellow man by projecting onto him all of our worst impulses. Frankenstein’s lesson shows not to judge a book or an individual, by its cover.

There was also a morality play. VF couldn’t wait to realize his ideas and experiments. He went on with singular purpose to challenge death but in the meantime lost his focus on the life in front of him. Here we have a symbolic representation of science losing its soul by dissecting the flesh and completely missing the animating factors of life and humanity.

VF created a monster yet tried to go on living a normal life denying his complicity. VF was contradicted. He was an emerging modern man. His intellect fought with his heart. The monster would not go away. He had opened Pandora’s box. The contradiction was at once in his own soul and a representation of science out of balance with life.

The monster had volition, could play the recorder, could read, reflect, had good impulses, wanted to belong and to have friends. Shunned, the monster was lonely. VF could not control the monster as his creative impulse, his intention was out of balance  and unclear internally. His horses were strong and unruly, out of control. He shows how the road to Hell can be paved with good intentions. VF’s actions spoke louder than his noble intentions to defeat death. This is at once a personal flaw and representative of the contradictions of technology and the heart in the modern world. The modern world makes a contradicted man; it is at once a personal and a structural issue. 

In a fit of blind rage at its own creation and existence, the monster runs off. Facing revulsion and violence, Frankenstein retreated to the hinterlands where he showed his humanity by anonymously helping some cottagers. They dubbed him the good spirit of the forest. His actions were respected, through them his intentions were seen as intrinsically good but once the cottagers saw his face, they judged on appearance only.

What a nice twist on the whole dilemma of action and intent. VF the creator had good intentions but his actions came out all wrong. Frankenstein the monster’s intent and actions were good but other’s could not accept what came from his heart because of his looks.

In some respects you could see all of modern medical technology as a Frankenstein type of monster. There is an entirely physical focus, the meat only.  The animating factors are ignored and all addressed by the non-objective spheres of psychology and religion. Scientific, allopathic medicine seeks a cure to simple causes and effects. The body, and life, is seen as a type of machine. Any sense of the whole is lost in the meantime. Scientific medicine deals not with the soul of its patient, Frankenstein. Modern medicine turns us all into Frankensteins. The practitioners of this modern school, of this inertia of technology, while well-intentioned, lose their own souls as a result. The carcass of a butterfly or a bird contains none of the beauty of life. How aptly symbolic that the hideous face of Frankenstein is the metaphor for what medical science has come up with. This is the total antithesis of understanding life or death, of any graceful acceptance of the nuts and bolts rules of what it means to be alive, to die.

So as humanity emerges from the Dark Ages, as Classical science is resurrected in the Renaissance, as the Age of Discovery, Age of Reason emerge, as chains of cultural limitations are broken in quests for freedom with the Reformation, the French and American Revolutions, maybe the baby of living in nature got thrown out with the bathwater. Technology came right along with all the other advances and with the invention of more complex machines; the machine itself became metaphor for life. The machine replaced nature as the compelling metaphor. Man could control nature with technology and machines. Man came to be the dominator, the infant terrible on the world stage, wielding incredible power but lacking in all judgment and perspective. As the machine came to prominence, it’s ubiquity caused it to become the going metaphor, obscuring and replacing nature. Indeed, now the going metaphor for our very consciousness is hardware and software. 

Frankenstein also has a love story aspect, of a relationship gone awry. If you try to make someone how you want them rather than to love them as they are, you miss their spirit, you are blind to their interiority, you become trapped by your own projections and miss the beauty of another soul. In the Frankenstein story you have the classic guy running off and leaving the girl behind only to later realize the error of his man-conquers-world impulse. He loses the substance of his love by chasing his folly.

And indeed, when the bride of Frankenstein realizes what has become of her, that she has been horridly abused by VF, made over in his image, made an object of the monster’s revenge, she chooses death over life as an abomination.

This and the other themes, all go back to resolve in the message of the Ecclesiastes chapter of the Bible, that all the grasping for control in this life, it amounts to no more than chasing the wind, so be content with your lot, don’t over reach for illusions of power and control, find the beauty of life right in front of your eyes where it has been waiting all along.

This could be seen as another layer in Shelley’s swipe at science, as Descartian dualism, the separation of soul from body, is what gave birth to the scientific worldview. What got left behind was the Platonic, Greek classical, Biblical notion of a sort of inbuilt perfection to start. In the world of Plato’s perfect Forms, there is no need to dissect and control from an external vantage, as it is simply waiting inside to be discovered. Even the Classical Greeks were leaving a nature-based animism behind, humanity even then had “progressed” through stages of technology. The metaphors kept adjusting to the technological changes. And while technology has made life progressively easier in a physical sense, finding our place in the heart of the world has become more and more difficult the farther we get from nature.

In the end Frankenstein chooses to leave the world of men.  The ship’s captain and crew witness the tragic undoing of VF and his monster. The lesson is learned. The captain gives up his folly, of finding eternity in a monumental discovery of the North Pole; he witnesses how it is all chasing the wind; he saves his crew and goes home. And what is home but a retreat to wholeness? Home is back with the girl. Home is the antithesis of modern fragmentation and scientific world-views. Home is the hearth and fire burning warm, safe, being content with your lot, knowing your place in nature.