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****/**** starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the book Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley directed by Guillermo del Toro
by Walter Chaw The poetry lives in the father. Do I mean the poetry? I’m not sure. No, I mean the place where this piece breathes and has always breathed is the father. The fathers. I say “poetry” because it’s a term that covers a lot of ground for me. Poetry is something that is ineffable, ephemeral, inexplicably alive. It is ageless and immortal. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about his father and Our Father. Fathers is where the poetry of it lives. It is, itself, poetry. My God, it’s beautiful. Let me explain.
Mary Shelley’s father is the great political philosopher William Godwin, who was with Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, for only a very short time before she delivered Mary and died in agony eleven days later from complications related to the birth. We know this because Godwin, a few months after the passing of his beloved, wrote an intimate memoir of her painful life that was something of a cause célèbre, since Mary Wollstonecraft was, at the time of her death, justly famous for her ferocious advocacy in the field of feminism. She wrote several novels, a children’s book, and a defense of the French Revolution that is particularly important because the fall of the Bastille in 1789 marks the beginning of the British Romanticist period, of which her daughter would soon, defiantly, become a part.
Mary Wollstonecraft believed, as the Romanticists believed, that Nature was the first testament of God in this world. She was a humanist, and she dreamed of a place where she could be regarded as an equal. She thought the French Revolution was a “glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe.” She helped give shape to the human subconscious, and then the collective unconscious. She wrote in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that women only seemed inferior to men because men created a system in which women are diminished. Were you to read her writing today, you would be shocked to discover it is still a few minutes ahead of our time.
She had an affair with the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli, whose best-known painting, The Nightmare (1781), depicts an imp squatting on the chest of a sleeping woman while a black “night mare” pushes its head through red velvet curtains behind them. She suggested a platonic ménage à trois living situation to Fuseli’s wife that was violently rejected. She then met, grew close with, and married Godwin, who loved her so that he wrote of his certainty he would never be happy again following her death. Who loved her so that he recorded every detail of Mary Wollstonecraft’s possible bisexuality, her depression and multiple suicide attempts, her despair and difficulty in getting along with others, because he believed, I feel, in the value, even nobility, of the entirety of her personhood. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation was soiled until the taboo that coalesced around mental illness began to lift a little in the twentieth century.
When I was studying her in grad school, she still carried the scandal of “mad woman.” The fog of it was burning off, but slowly and gauzily as if in a weak mid-winter sun. I read Godwin’s memoir. I found in it a person I recognized in all of her recklessness, her impulsiveness, her mulish idealism–even in the face of the guillotine, when she was identified as a Girondian sympathizer during the Reign of Terror. Only the intervention of her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, prevented her neck from tasting Jacobin steel. She bore witness to terrible things, and through it all wrote and wrote and wrote: “I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.” Arguably, the least known of her books, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794), is her finest.
She tried to kill herself a few times, the last by drenching her clothes in a torrential downpour and jumping into the Thames. A passerby saw her and saved her. She subsequently wrote: “I have only to lament, that, when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back to life and misery.” I have always thought of the night I tried to kill myself in 1989 as the day that I died. I’ve written on it often, but on the rare occasions I talk about it, I always speak of it with regret that I failed and the belief–irrational, I know–that in many ways I did not. William Godwin wrote in his private letters that he was more than half in love with Wollstonecraft’s melancholy. He was as dissolved by her tenderness as he was gobsmacked by her genius. All I have ever wanted is someone to love me despite the glory of my miserable imperfection. They married on March 29, 1797. Wollstonecraft died on September 10. She was 38 and had already changed the world.
Mary Shelley grew up in the care of her loving father, who encouraged her intellectual curiosity, and the shadow of her mother’s reputation. As the writing of Frankenstein is exhaustively documented, I won’t repeat it here, except to say that upon its anonymous publication, critics tried immediately to credit Percy Shelley and Lord Byron with its authorship. Mary had deftly imitated the styles of the High Romanticists in a way that could be read, if you were so inclined, as lightly satirical: a fine and agile mind poking fun at the boys and their preening. She had stitched together the styles of contemporary male poets, including her husband, in the same way her Victor Frankenstein assembles the bodies of the dead. Both had channelled lightning, had made their patchwork creations breathe somehow in the process. Both Mary and Victor did this, I believe, in response to their upbringing. Does anyone do anything that isn’t a response to their upbringing? We are prisoners. We are automatons made of springs and gears animated by infernal methods and soft winds. We are wound at birth by an invisible hand and set upon a track until our energies are spent. That’s what we do. We are a miracle. That’s what we are.
Frankenstein is the film Guillermo del Toro was meant to make. He was always making it. Each of his movies up to now has been preparation for this one: his version, at last, of the thing he saw as a child that created him in a shock of electric light splashed across a church wall. I consider Guillermo a friend and usually decline to review the work of friends, but I wanted to speak out for this one because I worry it will be mistreated, misunderstood, like Frankenstein’s Creature: abandoned when it’s newly born and most in need of a champion. I suspect my fears are misplaced, though I don’t know that I could bear it if I didn’t say, in full throat, how much I love this film. I spoke with Guillermo del Toro the night of Frankenstein‘s North American premiere at Telluride, and he was frightened. He wanted to know how the audience responded. I told him how proud I was of his accomplishment, how its perfect imperfection had made me cry.
Mary Shelley’s Victor, although he’s ultimately foiled by his childhood mania for dead philosophers and their exploded philosophies, creates life in what feels like a celebration of knowledge rather than a rebuke of God. He says, “I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood,” and his creation of “a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.” There’s arrogance here, sure (hubris, you would say), but it doesn’t feel much more malignant than many a young father’s wish for their progeny. Victor sees new life as a good thing–perhaps a reflection of his own upbringing, perhaps a reflection of Mary’s upbringing. He wishes to gather the garlands of parenthood. Those made of flowers grown in sweet gardens, doted-upon and cherished.
In contrast, del Toro’s Victor has had a troubled childhood, marked by the death of a sweet mother and the cruel tutelage of a stentorian father (Charles Dance), who only declines to batter his son’s knuckles when he fumbles a lesson because it might damage the boy’s future career as a surgeon. Instead, Leopold Frankenstein canes his son across the face. He draws blood. And he leaves a scar, the sting of which Victor can feel for the rest of his life. Del Toro’s Victor creates a life because he desires a scientific legacy. He needs this monstrous “son” to be an accomplishment, so that he might feel accomplished: proof of merit, as opposed to a new thing to love that will love him in return. His approval is conditional on the creature’s acceptance by others, its presentability. He needs his creature to be a success in ways, in other words, he could not be successful for his own father. Twenty years after my father’s death, I am still trying to win his approval. I want him to be proud of me. I ask if he is, but I can’t hear the answer. I am not in every way a fool, merely some.
Del Toro’s Victor is brutal to his creation. He hits it when it fails to learn at the pace he expects and keeps it in his stone basement, chained like the Titan Prometheus, who earned his martyrdom for giving knowledge to humans–his creation. Frankenstein‘s subtitle is “Or: The Modern Prometheus,” in reference, perhaps, to Victor’s trafficking in illicit science. For del Toro, it refers to the Creature (Jacob Elordi) itself, come to teach us a lesson about forgiveness. An impossible and ravishing grace. In the Christian mythology, Prometheus is the prophet Jesus, who allows Himself to be martyred for the sake of man. Del Toro’s Creature appears to be carved from old marble and draped in tattered, grave-stained shrouds. It is unbearably beautiful. Its hands are eternally wrapped for wounds that won’t heal, and its side bears a gash that doesn’t close. He is a relic clothed in the stigmata. He is the Titan chained in his agony–the gash left open where an eagle pecks away at his liver and never eats its fill. And never will.
Mary and Percy were awake. They didn’t eat sugar because it was a staple of the chattel slave trade. Mary crafted an eloquent Creature who memorized Milton yet was hated for his appearance and driven mad by isolation. “Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity,” he says. But the world received him unkindly. Chapter 11 of Mary’s book is one of the most beautiful pieces emerging from a period heavy with beautiful prose. It covers the first days of life for the Creature: his discovery of fire as the bringer of warmth and pain; his astonishment at the sun and the moon at play in the heavens beyond his reach; his emergent empathy while observing a small family hiding their sorrows from one another in secret moments consumed by quiet weeping. “I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.”
He learns how to read by following along with an old man, De Lacey (David Bradley), as he goes through Volney’s The Ruins of Empires, detailing the rise and folly of Man. How the Creature cries to learn the fate of Indigenous Americans at the hands of European conquerors! He wrestles with the fact that Man, like fire, is at once so powerful and lovely, and so vicious and base. “The strange system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood.” He learns of bloodlines and wealth–“a man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!” The Creature continues his learning as an autodidact, teaching himself to read with a book-filled leather satchel he discovers: Paradise Lost, Parallel Lives, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The last book on the shelf in del Toro’s Frankenstein is Paradise Lost, because del Toro knows that Milton’s aim was to explain the ways of God to Man. Just as del Toro’s is to explain the ways of the father to the son.
Mary’s Creature says, “Many times I considered [Milton’s] Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.” The Romanticists believed that Milton’s Satan was the “good” element of Paradise Lost, the active element, the human element, stained as it is in original sin. They believed, as the poet/shaman William Blake once said, that “Milton was a poet of the devil’s part without knowing it.” Any question that Frankenstein is, if not the perfect, then at least the most perfectly accessible manifesto for British Romanticism, should end with the Creature’s introspection and self-identification with a being who thought it better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. Satan’s is another story of divorce from a stern and distant father–an unforgiving one whose benevolence must be presumed and approval sought though never confirmed. Whose kindness must be interpreted through friction-glued sediments of cruelty and extraordinary pressure. I have become a geologist of our relationship, I tell my dead father; I measured us in geological time. Alas, we are flesh, and our time ran out.
There are many differences between Mary Shelley’s work and del Toro’s film, yet it’s the best, most personal interpretation of the text that I’ve seen. I know the earliest would be Edison’s 1910 version, whose one astonishing and uniquely cinematic insight finds Victor looking into a mirror and seeing his reflection become the Creature. I do love Bernard Rose’s modern updating, Kenneth Branagh’s snapping-sinew-and-electric-eels adaptation, Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein, and, of course, James Whale’s seminal, iconic takes, which still steal my breath in their ability to be read as a metaphor for being a gay man in a hostile world. It’s del Toro, however, who introduces a pack of wolves, which take the place of the sexual desires plaguing the Creature in past incarnations–a fairytale’s monster of the id multiplied and insatiable in this Frankenstein‘s fevered dreamlife. It’s del Toro who has Victor scavenge an active battlefield for body parts, a sequence that pays brilliant tribute to the acid fury of Joel Barlow’s 1812 poem “Advice to a Raven in Russia.” It’s del Toro who brings the Creature nose to nose with his creator in a climactic conversation I think every estranged son hopes to have with his father. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the muscle. I failed him. He failed me.
At the end of del Toro’s Frankenstein, the Creature forgives his father, and his father forgives him in kind. The film’s opening image is of a giant ship made of wood and iron that froze in the ocean amid its search for the North Pole. The closing image is of the Creature freeing this vessel. In Mary Shelley’s book, the ice melts on its own, and the motive for the captain’s decision to return home, lest he further endanger the lives of his men, is left to conjecture. For del Toro, there is intention: It’s a fairytale–and there are no accidents in fairytales. We are all delivered, in the end, by grace. We are blessed by the ability to put aside our pride and overcome our inadequacies just long enough to say we were wrong and how sorry we are. In this moment, nothing that happened before matters as much as a future that is free of uncertainty and this terrible pain. We are imperfect things capable of this perfect gesture. We can free each other. In so doing, we can free ourselves.
