Response #2: Frankenstein

No “Scarcity of Convolutions”: What Constitutes A Creature in James Whale’s Frankenstein

                       

            A lesser amount of folds in the brain make for a lesser being, according to this 1932 rendering of Frankenstein. This film is often straightforward in its criteria for personhood, but there are more subterranean questions to consider.

            We are given both justification and blame for the way the monster turns out nearly immediately: in a university exhibition, we are shown both a pristine and a criminal brain (here, already, a commentary on what is “human” and what is decidedly less-so), and we can guess at what happens next. We see the perfect specimen and its potential lost at the hands of a careless assistant, and not by the doctor himself. He is not allowed fault for this human error and, being like God, he says, in his interaction with life, he has only “first to destroy it, then to create it.” His “mad dream” leaves no room for mistakes or blame on his holy part.

            We learn that the progression of his experiments began with dead animals, that it then moved to the human heart, and lastly to human bodies. The whole corpus and its faculties are what we finally recognize as a person, the crowning piece being the mind. And it’s interesting to note here the value of the mind over the heart, raising questions about what is specifically human, paying attention to what is specifically reanimated, understanding that it is quite literally the brains and inclinations of a particular person, though they are not that person any longer—“That body is not dead,” Henry says, “It has never lived. I created it.” The mind in the body has lived, however. It has a past we have been warned of: the organ controlling this creature is criminal, with “degenerate characteristics,” prone to brutality and murder. And the mind revives!

            On body parts and their past lives: we know that Dr. Frankenstein’s creation is a patchwork job, and he could have the hands of a murderer for all anyone knows. But the part most important to this reanimation is one that has some kind of memory, awareness, one that makes decisions even if we don’t see it as intelligent enough to do so. It is a part we understand as unique to the individual.

            To make a premature excuse for the uncultivated come to life, the Doctor reminds that his creation is “only a few days old, remember, he’s been kept in complete darkness.” This prompts the incessant question of nature over nurture, even as the nature of the monster seems to be set in stone—indeed, it is etched in gray matter.

            Frankenstein’s monster is seen as increasingly savage and violent, the most popular cure being to “kill it as you would any savage animal.” Henry knows that he has created life, though he is steadily unsure as to what sort of life this is. Still, he recognizes something familiar, perhaps something human enough, in it to see to it that his creation is “painlessly destroyed.”

            As far as painful endings go, a close reading of the final scene (maybe too close) raises more questions about our composition as creatures. Henry’s father partakes in wine meant to enliven his son, while toasting the family lineage. It calls up notions of F/fathers and S/sons (and of their G/gods), and reads as ceremonial. It could be anything from consecration to benediction to eulogy (as Henry lies unseen in his bed); and if the wine figures symbolically as blood—lifeblood, which it often does—it’s especially stinging to note his father’s decision that “Henry doesn’t really need this.”

            This comment could take any number of convolutions: Is it a restriction by the father in feeding his own creation, and then a reflection of Henry and his “child”? Should we consider the Doctor’s purporting to be as God? He would neither be fit for blood, then, nor in need of it. Perhaps he is less divine and more monstrous—his manic and blasphemous crime making him somehow subhuman—and again, not fit, not in need of a mortal substance.

            In the equally incessant dilemma of deciding who is the “real” monster in this film, we see blood-and-thunder behavior from both creator and created. But we are also asked, subtly, about what kind of behavior might classify us as specifically human creatures. We should note how the film frames personhood, and how we as viewers respond to that (whether based on our own notions of actions, morals, intent, and/or on the shell that surrounds all that). Whale’s film compels us to think about where that “human” criteria might be situated in us—body, brain, or blood—or whether it is in us at all.