Autumn 1997
Volume 24, Number 1

Since Bazin, film theory has become more explicitly linguistic but no less committed to the principle that the language of cinema is fundamentally visual. When Christian Metz explains the semiotics of film, he treats its "syntagmatic" and "paradigmatic" axes as chains and stacks of images, not of words.6 When Kaja Silverman applies the linguistic concept of suture to film, she redefines suture in terms of interlocking shots.7 To realize that both these formulations could apply just as well to silent as to talking films is to see how tenaciously the image dominates film theory and criticism. Seventy years of sound have not really loosened its grip.

This stubborn visuality of cinema--or, rather, our habit of considering it predominantly visual--may help to explain why film versions of Frankenstein have drawn so little attention from academic critics of the novel. Not long after its publication, Percy Shelley asserted that language "is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, . . . than colour, form, or motion."8 Film versions of Frankenstein seem to confirm this axiom by showing us far less of the monster's inner life than his long autobiographical narratives in the novel do.9 In the first talking film version, James Whale's Frankenstein of 1931, the monster is totally silenced and thus forced--like the monster of Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823), the first of many plays based on the novel--to make gesture and expression tell a fraction of his story, which is mutilated as well as severely abridged.10 Mary Shelley's monster leaves us with a poignant apologia pro vita sua delivered to Walton over the body of Victor; Whale's creature dies in a burning windmill, while Elizabeth and Victor (unaccountably named Henry) both survive to beget what Victor's father (who also survives, in perfect health) expects will be a son. The latest film version is much closer to the book but nonetheless adds its own twists. In Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), the creature rips out Elizabeth's heart and in so doing reenacts what filmmakers regularly do to Mary Shelley's text. They rip out its heart by making the creature speechless, as Whale's version did, or at the very least cutting out his narrative, as even Branagh's version does.

What then can film versions of Frankenstein offer to academic critics of the novel? Can they be anything more than vulgarizations or travesties of the original? To answer these questions in anything but the negative, we must consider what film can tell us--or show us--about the role of the visual in the life of the monster represented by the text. If film versions of the novel ignore or elide the inner life of the monster, they nonetheless foreground for the viewer precisely what the novel largely hides from the reader. By forcing us to face the monster's physical repulsiveness, which he can never deny or escape and which aborts his every hope of gaining sympathy, film versions of Frankenstein prompt us to rethink his monstrosity in terms of visualization: how do we see the monster, what does he see, and how does he want to be seen? To answer these questions, I will chiefly consider three of the nearly two hundred films that Frankenstein has spawned: Whale's version, Branagh's version, and Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (1974).11

6. See Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York, 1974), pp. 108-46.

7. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York, 1983), pp. 201-25.

8. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled 'The Four Ages of Poetry'" (1821), Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York, 1977), p. 483.

9. The namelessness of the being created by Victor Frankenstein makes the very act of designating him problematic. Victor calls him a "miserable monster" from the moment he is animated--simply because of the way he appears (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle [Harmondsworth, 1992], p. 57; hereafter abbreviated F.) Shorn of Victor's instant prejudice against him--a prejudice shared by everyone else who sees him--he is properly Victor's "'creature,'" which is what he calls himself (F, p. 96). Yet when he sees his own reflection for the first time, he concludes that he is "'in reality [a] monster'" (F, p. 110). Taking this cue, I call him a monster except where special conditions necessitate the term "creature."

10. Following common practice, I refer to the 1931 Universal Frankenstein as James Whale's version because he directed it. But the genesis of this film exemplifies the way filmmaking disperses the notion of authorship--a topic I cannot adequately explore in this essay. Based on an Americanized version of Peggy Webling's 1927 London stage play of the novel, the screenplay for the 1931 Frankenstein was credited to Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh but shaped in part by three other writers (Robert Florey, John L. Balderston, and Richard L. Schayer), and at least one more--the young John Huston, no less--helped with the prologue. See Wheeler Winston Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein," in Approaches to Teaching Shelley's "Frankenstein," ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York, 1990), p. 169. See also David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York, 1993), p. 138. Even if we hold Whale chiefly responsible for translating a multiauthored screenplay into the film we call his, the crucial scene in which the creature unintentionally drowns the child Maria--a scene that for at least one critic "utterly" shapes the meaning of the film as a whole film (Dixon, "The Films of Frankenstein," p, 171) --embodies not so much Whale's intentions as those of Boris Karloff as shown below in section 3.

11. My source for the total number of Frankenstein films, including independent and privately distributed versions, is Steven Earl Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of "Frankenstein" from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 127. For annotated lists of the more notable versions, see Alan G. Barbour, "The Frankenstein Films," in Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein (Boston, 1975), pp. 189-211, and Leonard Wolf, "A Selected Frankenstein Filmography," in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein": The Classic Tale of Terror Reborn on Film, ed. Diana Landau (New York, 1994), pp. 186-88.

James A. W. Heffernan, professor of English and Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, has published widely on English romantic literature and on the relations between literature and visual art. His latest book is Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993).