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Tag: victor frankenstein

  • Guillermo del Toro delivers a Frankenstein for the tech bro era

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    There’s a reason the story of Frankenstein endures. Its examination of mankind’s hubris and inhumane scientific progress has only become more relevant since Mary Shelley’s time. The pursuit of “innovation at all costs” has led to new monsters, born from people who failed (or refused) to consider the consequences of their actions. So it’s no wonder that Victor Frankenstein in Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix adaptation feels so much like a modern day tech bro. He is practically their template.

    Squint a bit, and you can see Frankenstein’s recklessness in Mark Zuckerberg ignoring Facebook’s role in promoting the genocide in Myanmar, with Elon Musk lying about Tesla’s real self-driving capabilities (potentially leading to several crashes), or Sam Altman’s OpenAI building a hallucinating AI search engine trained on stolen content. Screw the consequences, they just want to shout “it’s alive!” as their products go viral (and as their investors lap up the engagement).

    Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a remix of the major elements of the novel — there’s the doomed love story, the mad scientist driven by his ego and the sympathetic monster who demonstrates far more humanity than his creator — refashioned in the director’s opulent style. But it’s also clear from the film’s explosive opening, where an Arctic ship encounters Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) being chased by a seemingly unkillable Creature (Jacob Elordi), that del Toro isn’t shying away from his campier horror roots. Arms are torn off, gallons of blood are spilled. This Frankenstein contains multitudes.

    Why did Victor Frankenstein go through hell to reanimate the dead? Because he could. In the novel and this film, the whole ordeal was always about bragging rights and demonstrating his greatness as a scientist. He didn’t consider what he owed to the new life form, or the cruelty of bringing a being into the world with no companion. It didn’t matter who he hurt. Sound familiar?

    Mia Goth and Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein (Netflix)

    What truly makes del Toro’s Frankenstein work is his understanding of the characters. As Victor Frankenstein, Oscar Isaac embodies the punk rock charm of a rebel scientist who thinks he alone can invent a way to reanimate life. But he also lives with the memory of an abusive father who likely killed his beloved mother. Elizabeth fascinates and intrigues Victor, but she’s also disgusted by his apathy for the natural world. It’s not hard to see why she feels immediate sympathy for the Creature, who is portrayed by Jacob Elordi as a sort of child-like super human. He’s an immediate disappointment to Frankenstein, who can’t help but repeat the cycle of abuse he experienced with his father.

    Looking back at his career, it’s as if del Toro has been trying to adapt Shelley’s novel through all of his films. You can see elements of the story in his debut feature Cronos, which centers on a device that makes people immortal (but also curses them with a thirst for blood). The tragic father and son relationship between Frankenstein and the Creature is mapped directly onto the evil vampires in Blade 2. The Gothic romance between Frankenstein and his sister-in-law Elizabeth (who also has eyes for the Creature) echoes Crimson Peak. And the desire for a seemingly “evil” being to fit into normal human life is front and center in del Toro’s Hellboy films.

    Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein

    Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein (Netflix)

    In an interview with NPR, del Toro mentioned that, as a child, seeing the monster appear for the first time in the 1931 Frankenstein film was “an epiphany.” It was an experience that helped him understand his own faith, and seemingly his entire view of life and art. His Frankenstein is the work of someone who has been living with the story for decades. It comes to life with lavish sets, his love of voluptuous colors (there’s a scene of a red scarf floating in the air that haunts me) and his fascination with the macabre.

    There’s a lesson in Frankenstein for today’s tech elite, but given their current obsession with AI despite its potentially massive societal and environmental impacts, I have little hope they’ll learn anything from it. But when Guillermo del Toro was asked about using generative AI by NPR, he spoke as someone who truly understood Shelley’s novel. “I’d rather die,” he said.

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  • Mary Shelley Invented Science Fiction—and Pioneered Polyamory Too

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    Baron George Gordon Byron had become an overnight literary sensation in 1812, and lived accordingly; he spent profligately, abused alcohol and opium, and fornicated indiscriminately with both men and women. Byron slept with Claire because she was there and willing, the biographers say. But why did Claire so desperately want to sleep with Byron? “I don’t think Claire knows about the gay stuff, and he has a reputation as a ladies’ man,” says Gordon. “For her, it’s like sleeping with Mick Jagger.” That her poet-boyfriend was more esteemed and famous than Mary’s was icing on the cake.

    Neither woman suspected that their getaway’s central romance would, in fact, be the bromance between Percy and Byron. To be clear, it’s not certain that the two were physically romantic in Geneva: “Whether their genitals touched, I don’t know,” says Gordon. “But they’re fawning all over each other and their ideas.” Ignoring their relative partners, the men took day trips together, sailed and swam, had deep discussions about Napoleon. By the end of the vacation, Bryon was what Gordon calls “heartily sick” of Claire, who was also newly sick herself; she was pregnant with Bryon’s baby.

    Dr. John William Polidori: Bryon’s Secretary, Companion, “Personal Physician”

    Complicating matters further, Byron had traveled to Geneva with another guest: 21-year-old doctor John Polidori. “Bryon travels with a personal physician, like Michael Jackson,” explains Sampson. The pair’s relationship was volatile and complicated, and some modern-day scholars suspect the perpetually single doctor of being secretly in love with Bryon. Polidori not-so-subtly based the seductive blood-sucking aristocrat in his story, The Vampyre, on the poet. Three years later, the story was published under Byron’s byline.

    At the Geneva villa, Byron and Percy mercilessly teased Polidori, giving him the effeminate nickname “Polly-Dolly.” To compensate, perhaps, Polidori wrote endlessly in his diary about Mary, for whom he dramatically jumped off a balcony and sprained his ankle. “Now Polidori’s in love with Mary per se, because really they’re all in love with Byron—except Mary, who’s busy with her six-month-old son and writing her masterpiece,” says Gordon. After shutting him down repeatedly, Mary would leave Geneva at the end of the summer and never again see Polidori—who never married, and died by suspected suicide five years after the trip. So too did Percy’s estranged wife, allowing the Shelleys to finally marry in 1816.

    Edward and Jane Williams: Unmarried Couple, Probable Swingers

    Frankenstein was published anonymously at first, then again in 1821 by “M.me Shelley”—a shocking abomination, to some, that a woman would write something so dark and grotesque. With Mary Shelley’s reputation at an all-time low, the entourage moved next to Italy. In a relatively small expat community, they met a couple about their age, Edward and Jane Williams. Like the Shelleys and company, their relationship was unconventional: “She’d left an abusive husband to be with Edward, so they weren’t actually married,” says Sampson. Also like many in the Shelleys’ cohort, the Williamses were already exiled—and therefore free to flaunt convention however they saw fit.

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