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The Frankenstein Discourse Is Bad. Let’s Talk About It

Kaz Rowe

289,960 views

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Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein film has been divisive. VERY divisive. Would it help this chaotic discourse if we knew a bit more about Mary Shelley and the original book? Probably! Come learn with me about toxic husbands, the horror of motherhood, and the queerness hidden in Frankenstein.
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Sources

Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

Monstrous desire : Frankenstein and the queer Gothic by Mair Rigby

Homophobia and the Queered Gothic in Frankenstein by Siyu Yang

The Queer and the Uncanny in Gothic Literature by Erin Jayes

The Trans Legacy of Frankenstein by Jolene Zigarovich

Frankenstein Unmasked: A Critical Analysis of “Otherness” in Frankenstein and its Significance for Establishing an Anti-Oppressive Education by Nagham Kourie

Uncanny, abject, mutant monster: From Frankenstein to Genderpunk
By Tof Eklund

Literary Construct of Otherness in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Ena Kapetanović

Uncanny Recognition: Queer Theory's Debt to the Gothic by Mair Rigby

Built Bodies: Representations of Monstrous Transsexuality in the Frankenstein Film, 1945-1975 by Carmilla M. Morrell

Homosexual Calm: Pausing to Listen to Queer Shame in Frankenstein by Benjamin Bagocius

‘Do you share my madness?’: Frankenstein’s queer Gothic by Mair Rigby

“Insurmountable barriers to our union”: Homosocial male bonding, homosexual panic, and death on the ice in Frankenstein by James Holt McGavran

Readings of Homosexuality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Four Film Adaptations by Michael Eberle-Sinatra

Constructing Connectedness: Gender, Sexuality and Race in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Jessica Hale

Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Katheryn Harkup

The Strange True Tale of Frankenstein’s Creator Mary Shelley by Catherine Reef

Why Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein? By Anthony F. Badalamenti

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity by Bette London

Rewriting the Family: Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ in its Biographical/Textual Context by Elisabeth Bronfen in Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley edited by Harold Bloom

20 Comments

@astrovoid9393 9 months ago

if there's one thing victor loves to do is be nursed back to health by a guy

@jogroves000 9 months ago

rip Mary Shelley you would’ve loved doomed yaoi😔

@cassidyfranklin8085 9 months ago

Off topic but did I hear WIFE?? Last I heard y'all were engaged, congrats you two 🥰

@rachelcarpenter2714 9 months ago

Hi! Frankenstein scholar here. I love this video!
I wanted to add that one of the primary motivations for Victor to destroy the female monster isn't just that he worries she will be evil. He's scared that she will either A) not want the Creature and instead long for the company of "normal men" and B) that the two Creatures will have children, making Victor forever linked to a hideous monster race.... Which. Is decidedly fucked up on a different level. The Creature's motivation for having a mate is also fucked up though. He figures that she'll be so ugly that the world will reject her and she won't have any choice but to date him. (Really interesting given the reception history of the bride often being portrayed as glamorous and beautiful). There's also so much mirroring in the novel. The Creature is a mirror of Victor. Henry is a mirror of Walton. The female creature is a mirror of Elizabeth, as Elizabeth was Victor's sister/cousin/wife and the female creature would, in turn, become the Creature's sister/wife....
Mary Shelley was messed up. I love her.

@jamieglitter 9 months ago

What do you mean "will we ever get a faithful adaptation?" It was right there at the six minute mark

@Weirdoeevee 9 months ago

My favourite part of the book was when the monster hid in the shed and watched the family. Tore my heart out when the family he came to love from afar rejected him by his looks.

@MeltedBrains89 9 months ago

25:30 that's insane. Victor's meltdown after the creature becomes alive looks so similar to postpartum depression that only a woman could have written it

@mnk9073 9 months ago

Btw, Percy Shelley died the dumbest death imaginable: As a boy he was haunted by dreams of drowning and like any reasonable adult would avoided open water like the plague and became an expert swimmer. Oh wait, the opposite is true. Percy vehemently refused to even learn the basics of "not drowning" but was obsessed with open waters and spend any minute he could spare by rivers, lakes, and the sea on boats of which he owned several. He finally managed to make his dreams prophetic by sailing his yacht into a storm and wrecking.

@bellamaz1972 9 months ago

Hey at least GDT admits he did his adaptation in large part to work through his daddy issues. I respect that, as opposed to denying it and insisting he did a perfectly faithful adaptation.

@franceenwebb9003 9 months ago

I read Frankenstein as a teenager, and found the plot interesting but a bit simple. Fast forward thirty years, and I am teaching the novel in night school to teens living on the margins of society. Together we explored the tragedy of the monster's life, and my heart hurt as I realized that some of them were living lives of isolation, rejection, and angry rejection of society.

@QuailQuests 9 months ago

This re-enactment of the book with Kaz playing every part is giving me life

@lolHippie1 9 months ago

"a book accurate adaptation would be impossible and also long and boring" and yet kaz rowe did it so funnily and effortlessly. true cinema

@botton.eyed.bunny.052 9 months ago

Honestly one of the things I would like to see you make is a video about Victorian orphanages and the Victorian view of orphans in general , it's a fascinating subject

@WeirdThingsForImaginaryPeople 9 months ago

One of the things that I find often gets neglected in rememberings of Frankenstein *the book) is how much it is about class, imperialism, and how both of those factors change the nature of justice. Henry Clerval is actively learning arabic & other languages as a means of advancing colonialism, the cottagers are living in the cottage after having lost all of their money for having tried to break out "the Turk" from prison & the creature only learns french because Safie (the Turk's daughter) is learning it so she can marry one of the cottagers. Justine and Victor both are wrongfully accused of the creature's murders, both are pressured into confessing- but Victor gets away with it because he's rich and is given sympathy for it.

@mysteriousginge 9 months ago

Something I find funny about Frankenstein adaptations is that Junji Ito of all people made a somewhat faithful manga adaptation.

@lucidcryptid 9 months ago

"Take responsibility for what you create." -Kaz
Me, looking at my crochet project as I'm working on it, which is just a little creature. (small dragon plushie) "Oh no, what have I done?"

@nicegirl611 9 months ago

My thing is, while it is not a completely faithful adaptation, it is a thoughtful and intentional adaptation that clearly held respect for the novel. In the behind the scenes it was described as blending her novel with his vision. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s understandable why fans of the book were upset. I believe in many ways he blended what he loved from old Hollywood adaptations, the book and his personal life. Which was best for a movie format imo. I agree the book has deeper nuance, but for what we were given it was the best adaptation we’ve had. I think it’s more appropriate to judge the movie through that vs book accuracy.

@littlegraybunnywren 9 months ago

I feel like I don’t see ANYONE talking about how GDT specifically calls this movie a Mexican adaptation. He focuses on toxic masculinity, yes, and I think that’s personal to him, but he also specifically gave direction to Oscar to act like a telenovela actor, and brought heavy latine Catholic themes to the relationship between Victor and the Creature, which I think can be seen as a very different reading of them than Mary might have intended. but I enjoyed that it divorced the story from a historically white european mythos. maybe it’s because I wasn’t expecting book accuracy going in, but I thought it made it extremely watchable. I think some of the subtlety of the book would have been difficult, if not impossible, to translate exactly to screen. (I have a personal thing about Victor’s move from idyllic childhood to manic mad science being described as the result of essentially the flap of a butterfly wing? I’m personally not sure how the story of Victor’s academic journey would have translated to film, but i’m sure smarter film buffs than me could argue that point.)

@songbirdmask 9 months ago

What book purist need to understand is that they don’t want a movie, they will always need a series because it’s simply not possible to “faithfully adapt” a book in such a short format. You can’t explore all of its nuances in a single film simply because there isn’t enough time.

@msjones6936 9 months ago (edited)

On latest reread, her exploration of male privilege and insecurity is shockingly applicable to modern discourse. And manages to be so scathing while also…caring and empathetic. The social themes of the novel hold up so so well.