If you've seen Mel Brooks' beloved horror spoof Young Frankenstein, I'm sure you remember this scene:
It is Igor explaining that the genius brain he was supposed to collect met with an unfortunate accident. So he improvised by grabbing another brain - that of Abby Normal. Or, if you missed it, abnormal.
That is a trope in most movie renderings of the Frankenstein story. Perhaps it's based on some other source material than the novel, like a play. But whether Dwight Frye, or Marty Feldman, or a fight between Peter Cushing and Robert Urquhart, somehow the correct brain is always lost, damaged, or replaced by a defective specimen. And it's from that unintentionally inferior brain that the monster's savagery and violence arises.
Yet my sons noticed, as we were chatting about books and horror and Halloween, that this isn't what happens in the book. In the movies, everything goes wrong because the design of the scientist is thwarted somehow. Usually because of a meddling assistant.
But in the book, everything goes wrong because the scientific experiment succeeds. There is no damaged brain. There is no wrong specimen. Dr. Frankenstein achieves his goals according to his plans. He succeeds as he expected to succeed. He played God and won. And in the book, that is the problem.
Through its rendering of the Frankenstein story, the movie industry has sort of conditioned us to think that science misfires only when lab assistants, or other mischief makers, interfere. As if the the best thing we not-scientific experts can do is stay out of the way, lest we mess up everything. Then scientists will get it right, because when things go their way, the results are always good.
I'll leave it to others to figure if that is the lesson from history we should learn or not.
(Tom New Poster)
ReplyDeleteSame thing happened with "The Time Machine", which I once read with my seventh-graders. The movie has the Traveller return with books to help the Eloi (whom he liberates from the Morlocks) rebuild civilization. The movie has civilization destroyed by nuclear disaster, while in the book it is success that does us in. In the book, Eloi and Morlock alike are beyond saving and the Traveller can see that physical processes will destroy the Earth and end the 1890s Victorian progressive vision of "onward and upward", no matter what man does. Wells was an agnostic pushing evolution and progress (as understood) to their limits, and the vision was bleak.
I had fun with the Traveller's return journey. When we finished the kids had to plan for a week at "Camp Morlock": what ten items would they bring in their knapsacks and why?
If your youngest hasn't read "The Time Machine" yet, read it with him.