One thing about Frankenstein I don’t see people talking about is how the Creature doesn’t ask for a wife from Victor, he wants a companion. Victor takes it as him wanting a wife but the Creature never said that. He just wanted a friend.
hot take? idk. victor’s fascination with the figurine of the pregnant woman not only hints at the oedipal tension tied to his mother and the image of milk, but also anticipates his desire to create life without a woman’s involvement. the figurine becomes a symbol of the natural, maternal power he tries to control and surpass. in attempting to usurp the role of the mother, victor’s ambition reveals a deep misogyny, his belief that intellect can replace the body, and creation can exist without love or nurture.
there’s something about the creature’s many fragments and the stitches that bind it together that reminds me of a stained-glass window. just like a stained-glass piece is assembled from countless disparate shards, the creature itself seems intricately composed of different parts, its very patchwork giving it a strange, fragile kind of beauty.
del toros victor funniest guy of all time. tries to steal his brothers bride to be who looks like his mother who died in childbirth of said brother in an attempt to take something from his brother the same way his brother took something from him (their mother) but he can’t hack it so he creates life immediately treats it like his father whom he hated treated him in turn leading to the death of both his brother and his bride. and himself. and several hundred innocent bystanders. wants to fuck his mother. turns into his father. recreates himself. forces his other self to live in perpetuaty. dies. 👍
no dude it’s so cool how attached you are to that character who is singled out and ostracized due to the external monstrousness that clashes with their internal spark of humanity. and i love how drawn you are to themes of horror and love, nature versus nurture, otherness, isolation, and the abject. i bet you have normal feelings about your own personhood
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is about forgiving the person who brought you into this world without your permission when you do not want to be alive, and about forgiving yourself for being alive and accepting your life free of guilt and that is genuinely the most beautiful, validating thing I have ever seen in a film.
The Creature calling itself Viktor and following Viktor around is so much more tragic when you know how babies develop and how newborns don’t yet realise they and their mothers are two separate people. And one of the first things babies realise about themselves is that they’re a whole separate person. And one of the first things they do when they start developing as a person is find out they have hands and play with them and with textures and start exploring. And when they want to start talking, they put their hands and fingers on their parents lips and throats to figure out how that sound is coming out of there and then they start imitating. Guillermo Del Toro nailed every single step of human development in such a beautiful celebration of life.
And Viktor abused the crap out of the poor creature for not being smart enough when it was only following natural developmental milestones. Because, like most men, like his own father, he wanted to create life but he wasn’t interested in raising it beyond that and instead wanted it to be born a doctor ready to show the world how smart Viktor is for creating a carbon copy of his brain except in a stronger immortal body. Elizabeth gave him five minutes of love and let him explore how sounds come out of her mouth and he started talking.
Idk why some people are complaining about the movie being different from the book when the essence is literally the same, Viktor created life as if it were a godly feat and not something women have been doing since the dawn of humanity, and then he abandoned that life as deadbeat dads do. And that abandonment is what created a monster out of an innocent souls who could have become a beautiful being had it been nurtured. That’s literally what Mary Shelley wrote. She would have been proud of this story. On top of being an incredibly gorgeous visual story, the narrative is very loyal to the point Shelley wanted to make.
