New Statesman & Society, Nov 4, 1994 v7 n327 p33(1)
Male order only. Maurice Hindle.
Abstract: Kenneth Branagh's version of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' explores both the
male bonding concerns of the 1990s men's movement and the dangers of interfering with
nature. Frankenstein becomes a father figure to his creation, but his actions lead to a
tragic end.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd. (UK) 1994
Towards the end of Kenneth Branagh's epic new film Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, there
is a poignant scene in which the Arctic explorer Captain Walton returns to his ship's
cabin to find the Creature weeping over the dead body of his creator, Victor Frankenstein.
"Who are you?" asks Walton. "He never gave me a name." "Why do you weep?" "He was
my father."
Soon after, the desperate creature braves the icy water to clamber
onto Frankenstein's funeral pyre as it drifts away on an ice floe. He cradles his father in
his arms as the flames consume them both, exulting in the experience of being united at
last with his creator, his sire, his god. And the film ends with this moving scene, complete
with fairytale epilogue--"The flaming pyre, bearing the Modern Prometheus and his son
disappears into the mist, borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."
I have seen the film twice, and both times I have been very moved
by this ending. A creature who has been rejected by everyone, finds some sense of
fulfilment in a deathly togetherness with the body of the man who created him. Yet I am
also curious about and concerned by this fascinating departure from Mary Shelley's
novel. There, with the exhausted Frankenstein dead, the Creature makes a stand of proud
defiance as a prelude to his intended suicide. In a moment of existential triumph, he
comes of age, reconciling himself to his father's loss and his own (lone) destiny. There is
a transcendent, spiritual quality about this ending which reveals the Creature as a being
who, despite universal rejection, has managed to conquer the poison of resentment.
Branagh's climax then is heart-rending for very different reasons: an abandoned son and
his dead father reunite in a kind of unorthodox male bonding ritual that seems to speak
more about 1990s anxieties over troubled masculinity than it does about the dangers of
tampering with nature.
Of course, Branagh's film deals with this issue emphatically. The idealistic young Victor
Frankenstein is a scientist wired on testosterone and in a hurry to save mankind through
medical innovation--so much in a hurry that he regards the components used to build his
Creature as "materials, nothing, more". Failing, as a consequence, to anticipate that a
successfully animated being will require nurturing and care, he recoils in horror once he
has vivified the Creature saying, "What have I done?" Far from being an all-knowing, allpowerful creator, he is no more than Enlightenment man suddenly rendered incompetent
when faced with the universe of dependency he has created--the new-born Creature's
needs.
Branagh sees the story as presenting a problem of generally incompetent
parenting: "The theme of parental abandonment is tremendously strong and
we tried to give Victor a moment when he is faced with what that means.
'What have I done?' he says. There have certainly been distressing cases in
modern times, where mothers have found it difficult to hold or care for their
offspring immediately after birth. We took some of these examples as our
cue."
The crucial omission in Branagh's analysis is that, however competent or incompetent
real mothers are in nurturing their children, Victor Frankenstein is not a mother, and,
despite his foray into the realms of reproduction, never could be. If he could fulfil any
parental function, it would be that of a father. Yet Shelley's ambivalence about
fatherhood lies at the heart of her novel. On the one hand there is the ideal, with
Frankenstein talking in clear paternalistic terms, envisioning himself as the progenitor of
a "new species" that "would bless me as its creator and source": "No father could claim
the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs," he says. On the other
hand, the reality. We all know the outcome when Frankenstein's over-reaching obsessive
ambition to create life rebounds on him as his abandoned, tragic Creature wreaks his
deathly revenge.
Could there have been a way that Frankenstein as responsible father might have
succeeded? The evidence is that Shelley thought not. In an essay she wrote on Rousseau-no less famous for his best-selling books on childrens' education than for putting all of his
own children in a foundling home--Mary Shelley expresses scepticism, believing his
example to prove that "a father is not to be trusted for natural instincts towards his
offspring."
It is the specific problem of absent fathers--recently and controversially expounded by
Robert Bly--and not, as Branagh, suggests, the general trials of parenting, that occupies
the moral centre of Frankenstein. Shelley's tale about an over-reaching man who
conflates scientific invention with the act of fathering only to find himself unable to cope
with the consequences, is still remarkably persuasive about the need for men to think
more carefully about what they are, and are not, capable of doing in the creative domain.
It seems no accident that Robert De Niro has been at the forefront of exploring
masculinity issues on the big screen from the time of Raging Bull (1980) to his own A
Bronx Tale (1994), in which heroic male charisma and sober fatherly virtue vie for the
soul of a son. Now, in tackling Shelley he has come up against the conviction that
responsible fatherhood is a lost cause.