Frankenstein

thinking thinking …….. about ‘frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus’ …..... about frankenstein the creator pushing the curious hands of the creature his creation away from fire …........ etc etc. there is much (much!!!!!) to be said on the topic of faithful adaptations (no this is NOT a safe space, emerald fennell; yorgos lanthimos) but !!!!!!!!!! whether you can accuse this of being such or whether you can denounce it for being the opposite, very little of it is relevant here.  something about del toro’s approach to shelley’s text reminds me of the finest of shakespearean adaptations in spirit: intending not to reproduce, but rather to reflect, and in doing so, to insist on its point rather than to waive it. that this victor is made sinister not by naïveté but by maturity; that his age suggests he has been intent on this idea, sitting with it, with this thirst, parsing it apart and putting it back together, for decades; that, here, at the very beginning, he does not abandon his creation; that he stays; that staying too is its own kind of violence sometimes. that this iteration of elizabeth challenges his obsession with death & redresses it; that the creature which haunts the peripheries of our understanding exists within that dichotomy (for he is simultaneously a ‘work of muscles & arteries’ & a stitchery of dead body parts); that he becomes desponded & mortified with himself because of cruel strangers & his own reflection but not in isolation from exposure to a discontented creator. if he is a tabula rasa, how else is he to learn? how is he to unlearn? shelley suggests the acquisition of knowledge is thoroughly irreversible: ‘sorrow only increase[s] with [it],’ because ‘it clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it’. in light of this it is almost necessary to consider that frankenstein’s quest (seeking knowledge) juxtaposes the creature’s own (seeking oblivion). the former in pursuit of defeating death through life; the latter in pursuit of defeating life through death ........ something poignant about frankenstein being allowed death at the end where the creature is not; the creature, in turn, life, where frankenstein is not. while you are alive what greater recourse do you have but to live. etc etc. something so lovely about this and its insistence on forgiveness as the ultimate act of humanity. in many ways it absurdly felt like being given a hug, or soup, like a band-aid, like sutures holding something together. hashtag deranged scientist oscar isaac hashtag call me