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the psychic mess with which Shelley presents us, reducing the body to a
commodity. This others the monster into the role of “shadow,” or what
Picart deems the “‘not I’ … instantiated in the realms of the feminine,
the body, people of color, and anything else that deviates from rational
ego-consciousness” (19). Accordingly, the uncertainty of Depression-era
United States saw plenty to scapegoat, and this is one more hijacking
of the empty referent, a place for the monster to reveal himself in vivid
ugliness.
Even more of a contrast is Branagh’s version of the monster, who
comments on and questions his body. He wonders aloud to his creator,
of whose body is he comprised and were they good or bad people and do
their moral character have any bearing on his. Zakharieva calls this the
“hypercorporality”:
[T]he Creature discusses his own body, and this body—
fragmented, ambiguous, abject—which he can comprehend
nor apprehend … is a body that “remembers” (and it is a “remembered”
body); it knows and acts out of knowledge; in other
words, it is already discursive. … [In Branagh’s version], the
body stands out because it is problematic. Being disorderly and
creating disorder, the body becomes visible, not “transparent.”
The dysfunctional body, hence, is made to function aesthetically.
(425-26)
In this latest film, the role of the body comes full circle: instead of being
hidden away in the discursive gaps of the narrative, or being simply
abjectified as in the Whale film, the body becomes a discourse in its own
right.
The idea that the monster should represent something less abstract
than linguistic and narrative uncertainties has long been popular with
critics. What the monster in the novel represents has long been fodder for
discussion. Typical answers are the other, the feminine, science, etc. The
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movies sometimes buy into these intellectualizations, but since the movie
versions heavily fetishize the physicality of the monster, it is possible
that they more basically work to relieve the terror of the unknown that
Derrida posits. One could argue that the fear of the unknown is what
underlies these physical—often increasingly violent—portrayals, and
that they fail to assuage our deep-seated fears. However, one fascinating
aspect of horror films as a genre is that what shocked audiences in past
generations no longer produces the same effect with later audiences.
What these films are more likely doing is trying to depict rather
than relieve these fears, but the visual language they use becomes trite
simply because the ever-progressing technical aspect of filmmaking
keeps pushing audiences’ expectations of how violence is portrayed. It
is the same with the other great taboo that we fetishize on the screen:
the sex act. I do not need to innumerate how portrayals of physical sex
have become more explicit and increasingly less suggestive throughout
the history of cinema, especially over the last forty years. Picart notes
that Branagh’s film portrays an “unabashed display of sexuality, and
startling[ly] showcase[s] … dismembered body parts, yet does so with a
certain deftness that prevents these technical resonances from being mere
clichés” (26). “Frankenstein” merely evolves with the times. If he rears his
ugly head, it is not because we seek to de-repress, but because he demands
to be seen, to crawl up from the depth of the psyche—but he must do so
on each generation’s terms.
When we title a movie as “Frankenstein,” we have to contend with
the baggage of not only what Mary Shelley wrote, but also what she
refused to write. Instead of the failing of science, or of a single man, or
of the family as the center of the narrative, we have a body to represent
whatever it is politically and culturally convenient to impose upon it.
That monster, particularly the fact that his body is an empty referent,
plays on repressed fears, and we cannot transcend or assuage those fears,
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