Dufour, Sander

Frankensteins; Or, The Postmodern Prometheans

        My continual questioning over the past ten weeks has been centered around the precise relation of Frankenstein (1931) to the separate fantastic world of 1950’s science fiction. This continually pervasive idea was only clarified during the concurrently rising and falling end credits of the final film, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). It is not only interesting to view the generic discourse as bound by these two films, but I believe it is essential. Briefed in the essay “What's A Horror Movie?: Discourse and Psychoanalysis”, the discourse and desired definition of each independent film creates the “form (institution, discourse, genre)” of what is collectively called “horror’. By assuming this, we can understand that no film truly stands independently, designing their successive definitions of the genre, informed by predecessor. Each film is working as “a proposed definition of the genre of which it aspires to be a member” (Leicester, 12). As such, it has been productive to view precise moments of these intrafilmic communications rather than simply noting the diegetic modulations between incarnations of Frankenstein (and his interchangeable monster). Naturally, when looking for these parts of the symbolic, it is difficult to discern origins; the grave from which the camera rises in Frankenstein can be picked up in meteor craters or an entrance to an anthill. Other film manifestations of Frankenstein inevitably inform the genre as well; the psychological mirror ending to J. Searle Dawley’s “liberal adaptation” Frankenstein (made for Edison Pictures in 1910) reappears in Dead of Night (1945), The Hungry Glass (1961), Prince of Darkness (1987) among many others. The madness of Dr. Caligari seems to skip the 1931 version of Frankenstein, yet is surrounds the plot in The Curse of Frankenstein. Theses archetypical characters are repeated similarly and ambiguously. Victor seems to become Dr. Carrington in The Thing From Another World (1951), the scientist blinded by creation. However, each subsequent films begins to stir and blend the origins of significations. Is Carrington equivalent Victor or does he share the frozen isolation of the electrified creation or even innocence of the naturally observant little girl? It is through the space between difference, between each occurrence, each mutation of signifier, from where the genre and institution bloom. There is, unfortunately, no thesis for this paper; rather, I will attempt to stitch the notes of memories together with ideas, bound by the fluidity of synchronic moving pictures, in the hopes of reanimating a poorly-worded account of how my viewing experience has drastically altered over the past eleven weeks.

        One particularly useful scene to approach this unstable différance comes in the third act of The Blob. The first act takes the form of many precursory films, establishing the source of terror. At 23 minutes into the film, the secondary cast disappears unannounced to a “midnight spook show” leaving the young lovers alone to convince authority of the danger. The film moves into its third act when the secondary cast is summoned in the middle of their (and our) movie to address the danger of the real. Unlike the police, these teenagers immediately believe the horror and further, their actions seem to be informed by the interrupted and unfinished film. In the following scenes, the youth are fully aware of how to warn the public and locate the monster, modeled after so many surrounding films. Here, it is clear the audience and characters share a similar but slightly distorted pool of influence. The exeunt from the theater, act three, is backdropped by a poster portraying one one of the most useful sign systems from Frankenstein, the woman in the arms of the monster, the bridal carry (fig. 1). However, in this scene it

appears that that image is secured by the frame-within-frame and restrained to the world in which Frankenstein exists, the world of the film-within-film. This composition seems to bridge the symbolic and the imaginary; the title is a fictional creation, the poster is a promotion from the real Forbidden Planet (1956), yet the image does not actually occur in the film. Rather, the image is born out of a mutation and memory of Frankenstein.  

As the blob grows in size, the characters find themselves deeper and deeper in the fantasy world of the filmic, until naturally, the leading lady lifted away (fig. 2)- a subsumption to the genre. Here, color is the primary difference between the film proper and the Mechanical’s film-within-a-film. As with the rear-projected scenery in It Came From Outer Space (1953), this mise-en-abyme is the discursive process in action and in reaction. The later simulation/reenactment of the movie poster perfectly describes the chain of signification, shifting between the discontinuous world of films. I will return to this scene to define how these borders of significance define our generic expectation.

Beyond simple equivalence and transmission, these films are separate from contemporary films in other genres. In the precursory essay, this particular genre is set aside by the fact that its name is both “a subject matter and an affect for feeling which that subject matter is supposed or expected (or hoped) to produce” (Leicester 1). This is absolutely accurate, however, there is another dimension to the singularity of the sci-fi/horror genre, which was only apparent to me through the addendum of The Curse of Frankenstein. Chilean film director Raúl Ruiz writes in his book The Poetics of Cinema, “… if cinema is the art of mixing up and combining discontinuous lengths of image, how can we rebel against the industrial standards without producing monsters?” (78). The physical act of filmmaking bears much in common with the dreams of Victor Frankenstein and, short of producing a Menardian duplication of these experiments, the creation of a film maybe be the closest simulation of this action. Dissection of the continuous moving image, sliced and spliced back together, forms the synthesis or illusion of a whole. As discussed, the use of stock photography, most atrociously in Invasion U.S.A., differs little from the piecing together of deceased bodies. For Ruiz, the creation of a monster is inseparable from the creation of anything contrary to the standard and the mutations of the monstrous film create an uncontrollable genre.

There are pro-filmic elements of the Promethean myth at play here, both in the creation of individual films as well as the formation of what is tentatively referred to as the sci-fi/horror genre. Frankenstein’s creation, unlike Caligari’s somnambulist, is not subject enacting the desires of the creator. While House of Frankenstein (1944) and Evil of Frankenstein (1964) pick up on a Caligarian puppenspiel and highlight the malicious intention of creation, the son invariably turns upon the father. As such, it seems the creation of a single film effectively turns upon collective forms from which it makes and takes its definition (Leicester, 12). The pool of influence is diluted by its parts, eroding the crest of affect. In the distance of time and technology between Frankensteins, the effect clarifies. Through bookending the section of films with the two Frankenstein's, through a decade of modulation and experimentation, we see the self-decay of a genre. While I am certainly not well-versed in the separate grandchildren of these 50’s sci-fi/horror films, our reaction, irony, to viewing the films today, seems to indicate that they are somewhat self-destructive and elegantly disposable. The later Curse of Frankenstein can certainly “considered as a critical response to the SF cinema that's on it way out” (Leicester, email 3.15.18), simultaneously critiquing the decay of the genre and perpetuating that decline. Moreover, the initial shock to the initial audience is infected by the successive adoptions and manipulations of these sign images. From 1931’s Frankenstein to the 1957 version, we already see a degeneration of the techniques of suspension and internalization of the genre. Compared to the expressiveness of Caligari, the 1957 Frankenstein internalizes the atrocities against the body (unborn and dead) to the confines of the castle, developed through an education now shown in isolation.

Returning for a moment to The Blob’s adoption of the bridal carry (fig.2): Steve (Steve McQueen) takes his girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corsaut) in his arms to escape the approaching gelatinous form (placed appropriately on the floor of a supermarket below the conserves). The 180-degree turn of this image, the principle character taking the place of the monster, absolutely does more than imply that we, the humans or audience, are the monsters. I am entertained by this reading, however it is not necessarily productive to insinuate that every visual reversal is intended to be viewed this way. Also, it is indeed too simplified to say that, as the genre and medium operate in parallel to the creation of a Frankenstein's monster, we can declare the unreliability of the filmic as the definitive monster. Rather, by confining an image signifier and expanding the defined borders of who occupies which role (who stands where the monster stood and who is held), a form of generic claustrophobia is produced. Each possible example expands and dilutes the preceding and succeeding. The films consciously and unconsciously use this claustrophobia and anxiety adaptively, mirroring the name and affect of the genre.

As with the creation of anything- a film, a genre, a monster, a look, a word, an essay-intention plays little into the resultant life that thing will have. Many of these films may take a stance against the constraint or filtration of creation; the restriction of creation cannot change the inevitability of the creator’s death. Bach and Queneau show us that the limitations of a creation are bound only to form. Frankenstein translated across generation, medium and variation result in a collected image, which if painted, would resemble Picasso’s Figure dans un Fauteuil. In analogy with itself, Frankenstein is the absolute perfect vehicle to understating a phenomena of filmic aura; the impossibility of tracking the origins of signification and the beautiful cognominally interchangeable Frankenstein/Monster meld the distant archetypes of the literary. Generic ambiguity and the irreducibility of thematic all give way to the instability of artistic and/or scientific creation. In prospective memoriam, each individual who worked on The Curse of Frankenstein is successively summoned to the rising guillotine along with Victor during the end credits; as with any creation, the end is always built into the beginning. To reach my own compositional end, I can now accept why this course has collided my thoughts, just escaping definition for eleven weeks. Perhaps this too will justify the abrasiveness and inadequacy of my preceding sentences. The incomplete frame of Frankenstein has already influenced and entered into everything, simultaneously merging by observations of likeness while being pulled apart by variance. Each thought and recognition has formed monstrous whole. It is only clear now, as the interior films have been bound, how very dependent upon the discourse of significance each utterance of creation remains.