Now that Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein has arrived on Netflix, it's time to settle in and pick a side – we're about to experience weeks of people arguing over what Mary Shelley's classic novel is really 'about'. The limits of technology? Slavery and empire? God's abandonment of man? A parent's abandonment of their child? Motherhood? Fatherhood? The folly of men? Women's agency? Empathy for the outsider?
You'll hear plenty of people convinced it's one interpretation above all others. Yet that, ultimately, undermines the beauty of Frankenstein. All those answers are justified, and there are a hundred more if you look at it under the right light. It's a novel that's not only thematically infinite, but a structural Russian doll, too – one in which a man writes about the wild tale shared with him by Victor Frankenstein, who in turn recounts a story told to him by the Creature he made.
And so, while it's easy to slap del Toro on the wrist for what's missing from his otherwise loyal adaptation, what he's achieved is ultimately far more moving than any true 1:1 translation, especially so in how the new movie changes the ending of Shelley's masterpiece.
In his Frankenstein, del Toro speaks directly to Shelley, artist to artist, Romantic to Romantic. Knowing that Frankenstein could be almost anything, he chooses to make it about what feelings it inspired in him and that, if anything, is a truer mark of how he's wrestled with and engaged with its story.
Del Toro, evidently, sees the personal in Frankenstein. To him, every parent plays God when they create life, and every parent can be as cataclysmic in their grace or their cruelty. And so, his Victor and his Creature become part of a wider cycle of abuse and neglect. Victor's father is no longer kind, like in the novel, but a tyrant who barely sees him as a son, more as an extension of his legacy as a physician. "You bear my name, Victor, and with it my reputation," he warns him.
There are roots, here, in Shelley's own biography – she conceived Frankenstein at a point in her life in which she'd been unexpectedly spurned by her father, William Godwin, for eloping with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It's hard to believe her sense of abandonment didn't shape the Creature's perspective.
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After conception, Victor tries to teach his Creature to speak. He points to himself, "Victor". The Creature points to himself, "Victor", and then he continues, "Victor… Victor… Victor…" It drives his creator, at first, to irritation, then to violence. He's frustrated, in part, because the Creature seems not to possess the intelligence he'd hoped to see in him.
But by hearing that name, again and again, is he not also disgusted by the realisation that this being he made to be more than what he is, to be more than what his father saw him as, turned out to be nothing but a reflection of himself? Children, ultimately, are shaped by two forces: love and expectation, by their presence or the lack of it. When Victor's father says his name, it's with the weight of expectation; when the Creature says it, at first, it's with love.
Many of the changes del Toro makes to the Creature's story are to intensify that bond: his violence, unlike the novel, isn't directed at Victor's own family as a retributive act for his creator refusing to make him a companion, but at Victor himself as an expression of those cyclical forces.
All the same rage is there, it's just directed at its source. He tosses him around, stabs him, breaks his nose. "You only listen when I hurt you," the Creature roars. You imagine Victor's father might have said the same.
And here is where we get to the crux of del Toro's version. It ends not as the novel does, with Victor already dead when the Creature finds him so that he instead vows to leave and end his miserable life. Here, we're finally allowed closure.
"Say my name," Victor asks of his Creature. "My father gave me that name, and it meant nothing. Now I ask you to give it back to me one last time, the way you said it at the beginning of our time, when it meant the world to you." The Creature obliges. He says his name with love, before walking away towards the sunrise to try, at least, to live.
Shelley was born in the shadow of the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, which championed objectivity and reason, with scientific advancement as its prize and Victor embodies these ideals.
Yet, Shelley herself was part of the Romantic movement (her husband and their close friend Lord Byron, too, whom del Toro both references), and wrote Frankenstein partially as a means to explore Romantic anxieties around the price technological advancement demands from our connection to nature, the spiritual, and the self.
In del Toro's movie, it's Elizabeth, Victor's love interest, who provides the Romantic counterweight. She's as intellectual and curious, but sees the unexplained miracles of nature (the butterfly? A mystery!) as markers of God's design. They're sublime. They're the point of life. It's why she's able to see the Creature with such compassion, because she doesn't need to understand or to control to love.
In truth, Shelley's warnings might be too late for our world. She was living on the precipice, we're in the thick of it, in the after of so many Frankensteins and their bombs and machines.
"How much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world," she warns us, "than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." What would she think that we can't even escape the world leaking out to us from our phone screens? Or that we're dumping half our nature into ChatGPT to see what it thinks?
Guillermo del Toro, then, has made a Frankenstein for today. It's personal to him and, maybe, to us, too – aren't we all just Creatures, now, pushed into a world that isn't really built for us to exist in? And, to paraphrase Victor, what recourse then do we have but to live?
Frankenstein is available to watch now on Netflix.
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