Frankenstein
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Netflix
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of the most deeply misinterpreted works of poetry in the past 400 years. It was conceived and interpreted in two very different times. Initially, it was born into the Aristotelian world of tragedy that Shakespeare understood all too well, where foible and sin drag humans into a preventable demise.
Milton conceived of his Lucifer as a tragic figure who could have turned his back on goodness at every step. By lacking humility and a belief in redemption, he dug himself so deep into evil that death consumed the world, and all those in Hell had been transformed into snakes against their wills. He’s only the protagonist in a sense, and not one to be emulated.
By the time of the 19th-century Romantics, Satan was given a whole new meaning. The romantics saw Lucifer’s tragic fall as sympathetic, and recast the fateful story as one of rebellion and liberty against the tyranny of God and king. The poet William Blake offered one of Milton’s most egregious interpretations when he declared the poet was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.â€
This is now the version that pop culture imbibes, in which the villain must be sympathetic and endless rebellion against authority is justified (cough cough, Rom. 13). It’s not surprising, then, to see that acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro has used this version as the foundation for his Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein.
The heart of del Toro’s growing body of work has always been in inversion. His monster movies and fairy tales flip the reactionary symbolism of classic stories and become progressive love stories for freaks and the oppressed. They look at the normal man as cruel and hateful, while the marginalized are his heroes. He’s the anti-Lovecraft. He leaps into the abyss because it can only be more loving than this world. He lionizes disobedience, fluidity, and impulsivity. He loves the metaphorical other.
Thus, his version of Frankenstein comes into focus. Very much following the classic structure and beats of the original Mary Shelley story, his version picks up with Victor Frankenstein explaining the story of his life. Raised under the watchful eye of a strict Catholic family and a domineering father, he develops an aversion to death and begins a lifelong quest to conquer it through medical science.
As the academy pushes back against his experiments as unholy abominations, Victor proudly declares “perhaps God is inept†and castigates their “cowardly dogma.†He sees himself as transcendent and above petty morality, falling under the influence of the opportunistic, wealthy Baron Harlander, who seizes opportunities afforded by World War I to feed money and bodies into his experiments.
Del Toro’s most evident avatar is Mia Goth’s character Elizabeth Harlander, a joyful goth debutante who is fascinated by death and insects and sees past Victor’s worldview from the outset. She’s the niece of the baron and an evident love interest for Victor, whom she repeatedly repudiates in favor of his younger brother, William. She rightly understands Victor as cruel and foolish, bluntly foreshadowing to him that “only monsters play God.â€
But if Elizabeth is the angel on his shoulder, the baron exists to enable his worst tendencies and sees them to a bloody conclusion, as the creature is brought to life in a distinctly unholy scene of reverse crucifixion.
The dynamics of the oppressor and the oppressed are never far from del Toro’s mind across his body of work, and that’s true with Frankenstein. Once the creature is born, the film’s rhythmic structure becomes obvious, and Victor’s worst tendencies come out. The film makes it clear that Victor gets his abusive God complex from the expectations and cruelty of his father, something he plays out in kind with his creation.
By the film’s halfway point, the perspective shifts from Victor’s perspective to the creature, becoming a more empathetic story about his understanding of the world and its rejection of him as an outsider. Slowly, the movie transforms the brutal monster into an empathetic being seeking justice. Whereas he escaped the cyclical Christian violence of his creator, he finds peace in the woods, living near a mixed Pagan-Christian family that comes to believe he is the benevolent spirit of the woods. Here, he begins to unravel his identity and humanity and begins his final quest to find meaning.
There’s very little classical tragedy in del Toro’s vision, especially considering the film technically has a happy ending—one in which the creature finds freedom in choosing life outside his creator’s control. Just as his creator was scared by the possibility of walking across the horizon of human knowledge and control, the creature’s fulfillment comes in happily embracing it. There is no punishment or eternal torment, but merely moving on and accepting life for what it is.
In many ways, Frankenstein feels like the culmination of del Toro’s filmography. Its heart is the battle that seems to rage within all his work: the war between man and God, creator and created, oppressor and oppressed. Del Toro’s romanticism flows through every scene, with shots of gore and flowing viscera accompanied by lush, upbeat music. It’s impossible not to see which side of the film’s dichotomies he’s chosen. He’s in love with the creature, while man is the true monster.
Del Toro has said that he intends to shift towards animated films like Pinocchio after this film, but Frankenstein has been a project he’s wanted to accomplish since he declared he wanted to retell the story as a “Miltonian tragedy†in 2007. This is clearly the most passionate project of his late career, and a long time coming. It’s one of the strongest proclamations of his life philosophy put to screen in his long and venerable career.
Tyler Hummel is a freelance writer based in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
