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monster. … [H]e includes himself among those who “turn their
eyes away when faced by the yet unnamable which is proclaiming
itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is
in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the
formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.” 2
Derrida strikes on something that is equally terrifying about language as
it is about the novel. Language tends to mask these gaps of the unknown
with deferral of meaning, where Shelley’s novel makes no such pretenses.
She allows this terror to form in the psyche of her reader, precisely by
allowing the gap to form. There is something about the unknown, or
the misunderstood (which we can claim is an aspect of Frankenstein’s
creature), that is terrifying.
The Films
Clayton reviews the etymology of “monster”: its Latin origin is
monstrare—to show. The monster that hides within the gap (within
the gap) demands that he be shown. It is no surprise, then, that this is
precisely the work that the filmic adaptations of “Frankenstein” take up.
The “introduction” to James Whale’s 1931 film indicates that it intends
to show the monster in all its gruesomeness. This appears as a warning
that some of what the audience is about to see is very “shocking.” More
importantly, Zakharieva tells us that:
The innovation of the composite body, of creation through
cutting and montage, brings the ideology of Frankenstein closer
to the aesthetics of cinema. As the principle of montage in
cinema works against the classical aesthetics of representation
and undermines the idea of authenticity, so does the composite
Monster problematize the idea that natural man is an integral
being. This Monster also questions the limits and nature of
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organic as an axiomatic given, the binary opposition of the
given verses the produced, nature versus culture. (419)
It is not so much the “shocking” elements of the monster’s body that
the language of “Frankenstein” films consists of, but the political aspects.
While Derrida and the poststructuralists call into question the concept
of “nature,” the concept of culture tends more and more to stand not
for an opposite or a binary, but an irrevocable lens with which we view
“nature”—whatever “nature” may be. How we see the monster in filmic
representations is a direct corollary to this notion: we see the monster
move, kill, sometimes talk, and certainly act, but he does so out of our
paradigm, not his. We must remember as we venture forth that the
monster has no context of his own; he never has. Each time we see the
monster, he is an idiomatic expression—an invention, if you will—of
the circumstances that stitched him together just as the celluloid that
contains him was stitched together.
The most salient point critics have made about the differences
between book and movie is that we must do something with the
monster’s body physically. What that seems to have meant was to make
a new binarism out of physique and language, so that the monster may
no longer speak. The role of two kinds of language, spoken language and
that of the body, are suddenly juxtaposed over the old binary of internal/
external.When Jodie Picart conducts her seminal analysis of Frankenstein
in movies, she notes:
[The] tense dialectic binding word and image, which is at the
heart of the novel, becomes radically reworked, particularly as
we now see the monster before we see him speak—the chaos of
his physicality takes center stage, and he can no longer, as in the
novel, deprive us of the sight of his mangled and mismatched
body. (17)
Picart’s language suggests that when “Frankenstein” hit the cinema, the
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