On Subversion, Part I: "The Bride of Frankenstein"
On occasion, I write linked essays on broader topics. Entries in the first continuing series, "What Cinema Is" can be found here, here, and here. Entries in the second series, "Men and Guns" can be found here and here. This is the first entry in a third series, in which I will periodically put some thoughts down about the nature of subversive art.
A large part of the reason subversion works in art is that people are afraid of it.
By fear here, I'm not talking about when Scooby-Doo and Shaggy are standing in some secret cave hearing ghostly sounds, their legs shaking, getting ready to make a break for it. No, I'm talking about something unsettling, something threatening on the level of people's understanding of the world, something that gets under their skin in a way that they struggle to understand, no matter what kind of reasons they come up with for it.
It's a fear that's somehow at once close to dread and close to fury.
Whether it's a film satirizing the American conception of the superhero, or films that foreground a bracing cynicism, or a film about the horrors of Hollywood life, subversion in art generates this specific kind of fear because it undercuts things that people hold dear.
This is more than just a goring of sacred cows: it's also about psychological exposure. By its nature, subversion takes some set of a viewer's assumptions about the world and strips it down, throwing light on the things those assumptions cover.
In areas that people covet less dearly, like foreign policy or the workings of some industry or another, this revealing is less dangerous, and can remain as rather inoffensive satire. But when it touches the quick, needling in to those inviolable realms where folks hold their greatest insecurities and deepest unease – sexuality, race, religion, ideology – subversion stirs something very foundational indeed. People's reaction to it is emotional, bordering on panic; it's as if simply by watching a film or looking at a piece of art, some great terrifying void has opened up beneath them.
If you doubt this, you might think through the intensity of the reactions of certain folks to something like a drag show, or to the artist Andres Serrano's photograph "Piss Christ," or the act of burning an American flag, or even to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" all those years ago.
It's natural to be angry when you see something you value treated in this way. You may feel that it is being mocked or desecrated. But this is not what subversion is after. Subversion as an act, and in particular an artistic act, is precisely about opening that void beneath you. It's about forcing you to question some constituent part of your identity. It's about triggering an apprehension you that maybe the world is not the way you have assumed it to be, about making you question whether your assumptions are not in fact crutches, not in fact false fronts covering things you'd rather not face.
And therein lies its deep and lasting value. For people and societies who refuse to confront the implications of their own assumptions, their own strictures, their own normative rules are not simply inflexible and repressive. They will also inevitably find themselves pinned under the grinding boot of the powerful, because it's the powerful who always and forever make the assumptions, rules, and strictures.
If anyone is tempted to forget how subversion was present in the first half-century of Hollywood's existence James Whale is there to remind them.
His Frankenstein, from 1931, not only terrified people, but caused something of a national scandal, inducing calls to ban it from theaters. As the film historian Stephen Prince notes in Classical Film Violence, when the film was re-released in 1938, after already being in the cultural consciousness for nearly a decade, the response was violent. It so terrified people that in towns like White Plains, New York, local authorities sent voluminous numbers of "protest letters to the PCA [the Production Code Administration, the body responsible for enforcing the Hollywood production code that came into effect in 1934], asking how it could release such material to neighborhood screens where impressionable children would see it." He quotes a librarian in one such letter relating a story in which after a screening, a "small boy came running up Main Street looking wildly up into the faces of pedestrians. He stopped in front of me and begged to be shown the way to Grant Avenue. I could see that he was hysterical."
By this time, though, Whale had already released his follow-up, The Bride of Frankenstein, in 1935. And it was in this sequel that he really let his subversive tendencies take hold.
The story of the film goes like this. One night in dark and stormy ye olde England, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) are hanging around in a castle. There is creepiness in the air, and Byron and Shelley are brought to mind of Mary Shelley's story Frankenstein, which she had published several years before. (The first edition of her book came out in 1818.)
Mary responds that she's been thinking of how that story might continue, and offers to tell the men. The three of them sit on a couch, and the camera closes in…
We cut to the end of Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, in which, to all appearances, the Monster created by Henry Frankenstein has perished in a burning windmill. (That film made numerous alterations to Shelley's tale, including changing the name of the mad scientist from Victor to Henry.) The villagers from the town the Monster had been terrorizing are dancing around the burning windmill in glee, celebrating their victory over him.
Unfortunately for them, it turns out that the monster (played, to his eternal fame, by Boris Karloff) is not dead at all, but has simply fallen down into the flooded foundations of the windmill. Two of the villagers find this out the hard way – they are, in fact, the parents of the girl the Monster semi-accidentally killed in the first film – when he kills them.
The Monster then scares a hysterical old woman named Minnie (Una O'Connor), who carries the news about his survival back into town. There, she finds Henry (Colin Clive), recuperating from the tumble he took off the windmill during an attempt to subdue the Monster, and reunited with his long-suffering fiancée Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson).
The story then breaks into two lines. In the first, Henry encounters his old mentor, Doctor Septimus Pretorius (what a name! played by Ernest Thesiger) who tries to convince him to continue the process of unlocking the god-like power of being able to create life. Meanwhile, the Monster is having his own adventures. He saves a young girl from drowning and finds a friend in an old, blind, violin-playing hermit, who takes the Monster in and cares for him (in a scene, for all you schlocky horror fans out there, referenced in one of the most ridiculous movie openings of all time, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers).
After a bit, our two plot lines converge. The Monster and Dr. Pretorius meet up, and the good Dr. convinces Henry (by kidnapping Elizabeth) that what they really need to do is create a mate for the Monster. This gets Henry's creative juices flowing, and after their assistant murders a woman to get her fresh heart, Henry and Pretorius manage to build the Bride of Frankenstein.
The moment is upon us. They raise the inert body of the Bride (also played by Elsa Lanchester, who played Mary Shelley in the opening) up through the roof of their tower laboratory, where it gets zapped by electricity. It comes to life! For a brief instant, it seems as though everything will work out. Dr. Pretorius and Henry have demonstrated that humans are actually capable of harnessing the power of the creation of life, and the lonely Monster is going to get a wife. But in the film's final twist, the Bride is as repulsed by the Monster as everyone else. Driven to fury, and seeming to understand the horror of his own existence, the Monster helps Henry and Elizabeth flee the laboratory, and then pulls a lever that makes the whole place blow up, killing himself, Pretorius, and the Bride.
It's a fascinating film, and one that can bear the weight of a lot of thinking, not to mention enjoyment. Watching it again this week, two things were brought to mind. The first is the sheer complexity of the construction, which is why trying to summarize it is a tricky business. It's far more complicated – not necessarily in terms of plot, but in terms of its psychological dynamics – than a great deal of horror that has followed it in the past 90 years. The second is the tone, which blends horror, comedy, and camp in an extraordinary way.
And it's out of these two things, complexity and tone, that Whale creates his subversion.
Take, for example, the presentation of the Monster himself. As in the 1931 Frankenstein (and the films take their cue here from Shelley's still-extraordinary book) the Monster's monstrosity is a many-faceted thing. He's capable of violence onto death (as evidenced by his killing of the villagers in the opening) but at the same time is a victim of the very humans he threatens. He has been created, that is, by human beings trying to play god, which gives him a certain rage at his own existence; he's peaceful when given the chance, but that rage is always ready to flare up. At the same time, he's also possessed by that most basic human ailment, loneliness.
The Bride of Frankenstein takes this deep ethical complexity and pushes it in the viewer's face. Here we have something horrible: a murderous, hideous-looking Monster who so scares children when he appears on screen that they come staggering up the street insensate to the world – and remember that the scene in particular that seemed to most affected viewers in the first film was the Monster's killing of a child, one of the most taboo acts in all of storytelling;– yet this monster is somehow human. He's persecuted, he loves the music of the blind man's violin, he's lonely and capable of friendship, he wants above all else nothing more than acceptance and love.
Think about the assault here on the viewer's notions of good and evil, justice and punishment. This is not the witch in "Hansel and Gretel," or the vampire in Nosferatu, or the masked bad guy in Scooby Doo. Notions of separable good and bad are fundamentally comforting, as are notions of just deserts, and the idea that evil will always be punished. The Bride of Frankenstein upends these things through moral complexity. The Monster is a wanton murderer, and yet we care for him. Henry is in some sense the hero, counterpointed against the Monster, but he knowingly creates a Bride whose life will be, at best, equally as tormented as that of the Monster, sacrificing her to save another (Elizabeth) and also in part acting out of sheer hubristic arrogance.
Watch closely, and you'll feel the solid ground of good and evil, hero and monster, dropping away from beneath you.
This complexity is also extended by the film's probings into that most threatening area, gender. There is far more too in this realm than can be covered in a rumination of this length, but for starters, ask yourself: what we are to make of the fact that Mary Shelley, telling the story at the beginning, is the same woman as the doomed Bride at the end?
Here's a simple and preliminary reading. Shelley is, at the beginning, sitting with two of the most famous men of letters of her age. She enthralls them with a tale of terror. And in this tale, she appears again as one of the characters. The casting of Elsa Lancaster in both parts, it seems fair to say, indicates that in this story Shelley associates herself with the character of the Bride.
And what, exactly, is this story? Well, it's about three men – Henry, Dr. Pretorius, and the Monster – who are in a pickle. The first two are something like meddling kids who've gotten their hands on the ability to create life, and the last one is the result of that meddling. And now the villagers are pissed off, and the Monster is either going to be killed or kill some more people, and the only solution they can think of is to make a woman. So they do, expressly for the purpose of marrying her off to the most hideous guy they know, to quiet everyone down. And at her totally reasonable response – "You think I'm going to marry that guy, just to solve your problem?!" – they all freak out and end up killing her.
Or, to put it in slightly higher diction: Mary Shelley is telling a story, the true horror of which is the way men inevitably instrumentalize women, and the destruction of women that results. "Entertain us with a story," say the two men in the opening of the film, and the story she entertains them with is her rather savage prediction that in the end she (like all women) is at threat of being subjugated by them, destroyed if she does something other than what they want, which in this case is for her to become a sexual slave to a monster.
Hopefully, I do not have to spell out the terrifying nature of this subtext for male viewers. Instead, I'll simply note that if do not think that a great number of men would be enraged by suggestions of this sort, and that their refusal to even admit that power dynamics like this exist is maybe the greatest proof of their existence, then I would suggest that you have not been paying much attention to the world in which you live.
Whale's final twist of the knife in the film is the unmatched tone with which he imbues the whole. Is his movie in any way pedantic? No. Is there any hint of a thinky disquisition on good and evil, or the nature of the monstrous? No. Is it aggrieved or self-righteous in even the slightest way? No.
Instead, it's in turns joyful and fearsome, cheeky and tongue-in-cheek, serious and absurd. The word "camp" gets thrown around frequently, but it's a concept of great depth and complexity and so I'll avoid it here. I will instead say that the film dances with the viewer. In a very real way, the film loves the viewer. It loves all of humanity and its foibles.
The movie wants to entertain people at the same time it wants to unsettle them. It throws at the viewer a dizzying array of ideas, jokes, suggestions about human existence, visual splendors, glorious acting performances, tragedies, and conundrums, but it does not condescend or preach. Instead, it trips along ahead of us, always suggestive, but refusing ever to be captured. There is a deep, sprightly mischief in it, a playfulness that goes hand in hand with its provocations.
And it's this mischief that lies at the heart of its subversion, and at the heart of a great deal of artistic subversion in general.
Opening up of the question of good and evil is threatening. Suggesting a truth about the way our society has often cast gender dynamics is threatening. But perhaps the most threatening thing off all is the sense that our anger at having these things pointed out is something to be laughed off. Because if someone like Whale can provoke these feelings and then grin in the face of our fury, then he is in that provocation immune to our rules.
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