“Only monsters play God”: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein

(Of course, there will be spoilers ahead)

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein begins with a boat stranded on the Arctic ice. The trapped Danish Royal Navy ship is fighting desperately to reach the North Pole. In this context, a creepy creature of immense power has been haunting an apparently helpless, sick man, who takes refuge on the ship. They have hunted each other, we learn later, quite literally towards the very edge of the world.

“Every ounce of madness and destruction”

Frankenstein is a two-hour and a half epic about science, madness, horror, war and existence. Many people criticized it at various points for its deviations from Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but I think not only the movie works perfectly as a specific take on the story, it is also plainly an exquisitely made film. Everything from the cinematography, to the costumes, the settings and the soundtrack is nothing short of lavish. As much as the film revels in the grotesque, the gory and painful parts, there is a strange beauty to it. It's Gothic through and through. The Creature is the main example for this: he is large, somewhat “malformed” and very clearly not quite alive, he is patchy, botchy and yet there is beauty in that amalgamation of dead bodies because he was made to be perfect. The movie works in a similar way. I'll admit I don’t like Mary Shelley’s novel too much. In fact, I can’t recall many particular moments of the book, but I remember the distinct sensation that though the book was absolutely brilliant in its ideas, it was not so much in its execution. Del Toro’s adaptation is, for me, quite close to perfect because it takes many of the ideas that truly fascinated me from the source material, gives them a twist, adds new interpretations and layers, and feeds it all back in a breathtakingly beautiful package.

“In seeking life, I created death”

Thematically, there are various things at play, and they are layered up with different symbolisms, the most obvious of which are reflected in the movie’s magnificent costumes. Elizabeth’s bridal dress is nothing short of a masterpiece. Hair, makeup and costumes all work together with the actors' performances to create a distinct sense of each character. In the case of Mia Goth and her double portrayal of Victor’s mother and of Elizabeth, this is accentuated, as some internet commentators have pointed out, with contrasting colors. Victor’s mother, mostly veiled or “faceless”, wears red in every brief appearance. By contrast, Elizabeth (who is Victor and his brother’s love interest) appears in blues and greens. Red is, arguably, the color of motherhood in the film. Victor’s mother wears red, yes, and Victor wears red gloves while awakening/creating his Creature. He is, quite literally, birthing his nameless creature. The first thing he does once his Creature is awake, however, is to take off those gloves to touch him. Similarly, when Elizabeth is later accidentally shot by Victor during what was supposed to be her wedding to his brother William, her white dress turns (partially) red as the Creature takes her away and she tenderly caresses his cheeks and dies in his arms.

The Oedipus complex is strong here too, obviously, as it is so heavily remarked by the choice of casting Mia Goth as both the romantic lead and the mother figure of the film. I read a funny comment on Tumblr that commented on how properly Gothic it is that Elizabeth’s feelings towards the Creature are not easily labeled as motherly or romantic. Effectively, there is a bit of both. I already described Elizabeth’s death, and how her bridal dress turns red, a color associated with motherhood in the movie. When Elizabeth first meets the Creature, however, she is wearing green. Green/blue is the color most commonly associated with romantic love or lust in the movie, at least in my opinion. It’s the color Elizabeth most frequently wears, and she only stops wearing it for her wedding, the moment Victor definitely gives up hopes of any romantic or erotic liaison between them. Finally, white is obviously a color associated with purity. During the movie, one of the characters calls snow “cleansing” for the world and snow and water feature prominently throughout the film. In any case, Elizabeth is a good person, yet someone who suffers and struggles, a deeply spiritual and empathetic person that doesn’t quite feel understood or close to the people around her. It is her vitality, her brilliance, and the resources of her family (concretely, her uncle) which ultimately allow Victor Frankenstein to make his vision of the Creature come true.

Circling back to the Oedipus complex, what I like most about how it’s treated in the movie is that it stems from a very obvious and very deeply rooted trauma that has less to do with the “excessive” love for the mother and more with the fear and hatred of the father. To Victor, his mother is his entire world. He lives enclosed, his father is extremely strict, distant, and physically abusive. His father treats him as a mini-version of him that has to be trained (trained in a way that requires constant physical and emotional punishment). In a world that is cold, his mother is the only warmth, the only love, Victor gets. When his mother dies, he immediately resents his father, blaming him for her death, which begins his fixation of “overcoming” death. He notably pursues this path by continuing to study medicine, just like his father had demanded of him. It's ultimately his father’s behavior which pushes his Oedipal tendencies forward. By contrast, his younger brother, who his mother dies giving birth to, is rather pampered and obviously favored by their father. Later on, when he is betrothed to Elizabeth, Victor falls for her –an undoubtable sign of jealousy and just how irreparably marked by their father the brother’s relationship is. They are competing for a woman, but in a lot of ways they are only competing in Victor’s mind. William wasn't denied love in the same way that Victor was so the loss of the mother is not as traumatic. While Victor is sidelined by the academic world he longs to be introduced to, his little brother flourishes in his businesses and overall has his life together. Despite this, William seems to sincerely love Victor, supports all his endeavors, puts him in contact with the wealthy Harlander (Elizabeth’s uncle), and is the person who oversees the construction of his famous lab. Ultimately, when William dies, he uses his last words to express how he has always feared his older brother, and blames his own death (and Elizabeth's) on Victor's obsession. Victor's family allows him no redemption.

“Not something, someone”

Death is obviously an important motive, but not just any kind of death. Harlander is an arms merchant. He uses that blood money to finance Victor's scientific pursuits. Unespecified, but constant wars are talked about. The easiness and disregard with which Victor and Harlander go through bodies of men they sincerely don’t care about doesn’t go unnoticed. For Victor, it highlights just how obsessed he is. He goes to an execution row and chooses from those who will be executed the ones that seem best for his work. He's not looking at people about to die. He's looking at soon-to-be corpses, and corpses are just objects from which he'll obtain pieces. His work is that of a mechanic who goes to a scrapyard to fix a car in his garage.

Victor instructs Harlander’s men on which type of corpses he wants from a recently abandoned battlefield (no consideration for their families, who might want to get them back, or to the dead themselves, in their eternal sleep) and finally, with his red gloves, he mounts, literally piece by piece, the body of the Creature. The imagery is explicit: there is blood everywhere. We see how Victor piles up the muscles, introduces the bones, then mounts the skin bit by bit. We see him get rid of the unused pieces. Before that, we’ve seen a Creature “prototype” crouched on a table, its back literally torn open, for much of the beginning of the film. It's horrifyingly grotesque, yet so fixated on human anatomy it retains a scientific quality that makes it difficult to look away from.

But where Victor’s work comes up as obsession and morbid precision, Harlander’s disposition comes out as too cheerful, too cynical. Indeed, all he wants is to have his mind transferred into the creature because he is dying of syphilis. But he reveals this far too late and ends up dying, more or less accidentally, as the creature is born. I found this Substack article by pure coincidence. It argues that Harlander is a character added as a stand-in for our current rockstar-type of tech guru (the Musks of the world and whatnot) who are so obviously selfish and obsessed with life, youth, etc at any cost. I like this reading, and it didn’t completely fly over my head, but I’ll admit I didn’t make the connection between the sheer disregard of human life (or rather, death) in Harlander and this specific side of our current political climate. I must say I overall agree with the interpretation, except that I think Victor is more than a mere accomplice, but also a perpetrator. The first proper clothing the Creature wears is the leftover coat of a dead soldier, marking him as just another “thing” that was later discarded in the most cruel way by these powerful, selfish, narcissistic men.

“I will be the eagle that feasts on your liver”

To me, the most interesting thing in the movie was trauma. Not only fatherhood, as del Toro himself has said, but failed parenthood, a parenthood marked by abuse and intergenerational trauma. While Victor is moved by his Creature when he is first “born” and caresses him tenderly on the cheek, showing him the warmth of his own hands before he shows the warmth of the sun, he soon turns impatient, chains the Creature and later scolds him and punishes him physically. He is very cruel to the Creature, thinking him stupid. He has, in all truth, become just like his father: a tyrannical, cold and distant figure, yet the only one the Creature knows. He only knows how to say Victor’s name, which Victor takes for the Creature’s lack of intelligence but Elizabeth correctly deciphers. He calls everything “Victor” because Victor means everything to him. When Elizabeth and William first visit, the Creature gets to know warmth again, and learns another word: “Elizabeth”. Victor's cruelty and irresponsibility has unknowingly recreated his own same Oedipus complex.

Victor’s attitude towards the Creature is so obviously a metaphor for not just child abuse, but child neglect, that it’s almost painful to watch. Here I'd like to point out the symbolic power of water. It rains heavily when the Creature is born. Water fascinates the Creature when he’s taking his first steps in the world. When Victor tries to burn him alive along with the rest of the lab/house, he escapes and survives the fire by virtue of his rage and his intelligence, but also by following flowing water down a pipe.

Here follows the other main theme, and the most obvious not just in the movie but in the novel: existentialism. Del Toro wasn't subtle but neither was Shelley. The Creature is born into a world completely hostile to him. He isn’t even given a name to go by. It’s a world that’s utterly alien and that he is alienated from, a world he is not equipped to understand and his creator has cruelly released him into it. Interestingly, when living in hiding, by observing people and seeing a blind man teaching his granddaughter how to read, the Creature learns too. He was, of course, only “stupid” because Victor didn’t take the time to try to properly teach him anything. With patience. With love.

From the get go, the Creature is kind. He cares for animals and does acts of kindness to others, though he is bitterly attacked by people who shoot him on sight (literally). He, however, can’t die. Or rather he doesn't remain dead. He resurrects multiple times (a fate fitting a creature that was born literally tied to a wooden cross). He tells Victor something along the lines of “you have given me life and you deny me death”. The Creature doesn’t want to live. He calls life “merciless” when he returns to it, and it is understandable. The world has shown him very little love, and that love is constantly, brutally, removed from him. The blind man who he befriended is killed by wolves (and later the Creature is “killed” when the man’s family thinks he’s the culprit). Elizabeth dies too. Victor denies making him a companion, and refuses to take care of him. During an important confrontation, the Creature says “You gave me life unwanted.” This part resonated very deeply with me because I have sometimes struggled with a similar sentiment (why so much hardship I did not ask for? Why am I even alive, when I never asked for it? I have even expressed it in similar terms, and to my own parents). But the creature goes on and continues saying, “I give it back to you. You thought me a monster. Now I return the favor” and this is where the hunt begins.

Tired, exhausted, full of hate and scorn and murderous rage, creator and creation follow each other to the end of the world to finish once and for all their twisted, cursed relationship - their twisted, cursed lives. They will never let each other live, and they will never let each other die. It is only when they finally are able to talk to each other properly (by unknowing mediation of a Danish Sailor), when Victor truly listens because he has no other choice, that they recognize each other for what they are: father and son, stranded and hurt, possibly beyond repair. As long as they are unable to recognize each other as such, none can progress. Victor has to see himself as a father, not just creator, in order to see the error of his ways and repair what he can, but the Creature needs to understand himself as son, not just a "monstrous" creation put in the world by an obsessive conceit, so that he can reconcile his rotten legacy and understand that it's not his own fault in any way.

“Choice is the seed of the soul”

The body stores all of these burdens. While all the actors are excellent in their performance, it is the intensity of Oscar Isaac’s Victor and, particularly, the hypnotizing physicality of Jacob Elordi’s Creature rise above the rest. The Creature’s movements evolve from somewhat grotesque, animalistic, almost mimical, mechanical yet fluid, to the assured, aggressive steps of a bewildered killer. Elordi’s imposing height is maximized to effect in all scenes where he is with Isaac’s Victor, yet in the beginning, though strange and towering, he seems very delicate, very gentle, clumsy and frail. Small, in a way, like an oversized child. As the movie goes on, however, he grows truly fearsome, aggressive. He also learns how to talk eloquently.

Love, warmth and connection is something physical in the movie too. A stroke of the cheek means the world to the Creature. In a rather heartbreaking scene, after performing a good deed, the Creature pats himself on the head, as he has seen the blind man do with his grandchildren. Indeed, when he and the blind man finally meet, one of the things the Creature yearns for the most is that little touch, that bit of love. Love is expressed in touch but comes from truly being seen, being seeing on a profound level, beyond the physical. The blind man the Creature befriends does not see him physically, yet he sees him for who he is: a benefactor, a lonely person looking for affection, a lost child. And so does Elizabeth. Some of her last words go “to be lost and to be found, that is the lifespan of love. And in its brevity, it’s tragedy”. The Creature’s demand that Victor make “another like him” to serve as a companion expresses just how lonely he feels yet ultimately it’s somewhat illusory, is it not? Without realizing, he already had someone like him, in Elizabeth.

Just as love is represented physically, so is the lack of it. Victor loses one leg in the process of trying to kill the Creature (in fact when he, on a second thought, tries to go back inside the house to presumably free the Creature from the fire he himself has started). Victor's father punishes him by hitting his face when he doesn't know his lesson (face instead of the hands, he says, because Victor will need his hands as a doctor but a face is just “vanity”). Later on, in a confrontation after Elizabeth’s death, the Creature breaks Victor’s nose. In a previous confrontation, in words that echo Shakespeare’s Richard III (“since I cannot prove a lover [...] I am determined to prove a villain”) the Creature says “If you are not to award me love, then I will indulge in rage.” The confrontation following Elizabeth’s death, however, ends with the creature saying “You may be my creator, but from this day forward, I will be your master”, condemning Victor to the senseless, frenzied, hunting that will eventually lead to his death.

But at the very end, there is a happy ending of sorts. When finally they are reunited aboard the Danish navy ship, the Creature and his creator, talk, and forgive. “Forgive me, my son”, Victor says, “And if you have it in your heart, forgive yourself into existence”. This is the moment of catharsis in the film. With this symbolic gesture, Victor and his Creature, father and son, are finally closing the cycle of broken parenthood that has been binding them.

The ending differs from the book. It’s, in a way, more hopeful and provides a type of emotional release I wasn’t quite expecting, and that has sat with me ever since I finished the film a few days ago. “Perhaps now,” says the Creature “we can both be human”. And what is to be human if not to endure, to suffer but to love, to question, to anger at existence and yet perdure, yet find goodness? Earlier in the film, the anguished Creature tells the blind man he doesn’t know who or what he is, to which the blind man simply responds: I know what you are, you are a good person. This contrasts with Victor’s narcissism. And yet, he asks for redemption and receives it from the person he needs it most from, the same person whose humanity (whose childhood) he has constantly denied. He finally finds redemption in the family he created for himself. Recognizing the error of his ways is fundamental to his redemption, by seeing just how much damage he has caused. But ultimately the one sitting on high moral ground is the Creature, who chooses to forgive and to let go.

Snow has a cleansing property. As the Creature lets the ship out of the ice and the Danish Navy captain decides to turn back home instead of following the chimeric North Pole, there is relief. Resentment is gone. The wound is closing, and all that is left to do is to live. As Victor says in his final speech “while you are alive, what recourse do you have but to live?” The Creature lets the sun rays kiss his skin, as he did when he was born. He is, once again, and once for all, given life, and finally free of the (inherited) self hatred that has marked his existence. And perhaps now he can go on living, in forgiveness of himself.