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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

At the end of this thread on Frankenstein, I talk about how adaptations should deviate from the sourcematerial more. Meanwhile, I watched some of the Murderbot TV show and remain unsatisfied that Murderbot is just a handsome white dude instead of literally anything else so YMMV on adaptations.

Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is both incredible and unsatisfying. Which is no fault of the players. Oscar Isaac is *inspired* casting as Victor Frankenstein. He's handsome and charismatic yet you can see a darkness and egotistical edge to his performance that is perfection.

Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

If you want some of that and have nearly three hours to kill, you could spend them on worse projects than Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

So on the whole, Frankenstein is less than the sum of its parts. The parts ARE very good. Guillermo del Toro makes movies that look so good. Are so bright and colorful. That feel solid (probably because they're actual sets) and therefore fantastic but genuine.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

There is always going to be an allegory that the audience puts on the story. I recognize what I want from it might not be what it was intended or what others would want. I just find the end very unsatisfying. We have had it before.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

With the lesson being that we entertain the self delusion of people causing the problem at our peril--i.e. trying to protect Victor from the creature who is being attacked for no reason results in others dying when the creature reacts out of self-defense.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

And the movie would have subtly and then suddenly have shown all this to be a lie when the real creature emerges and is...just a very handsome, if scarred man. The boogeyman on the TV that the "right sort of person" was saying was terrible...is just a man, non-standard but still human.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

I think about adding this sort of disconnect from nature in the character of Victor Frankenstein would have been more timely. A man divorced from the consequences of his actions by a determination not to see them. To reframe the narrative with him being the hero.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

On the non-right-wing bullshit side of the spectrum, we should be worried about climate change and how unnatural technology like social media has caused lack of trust, loss of empathy, and deteriorated connections, the things that made us successful as a species.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 16h

Is that interesting now? Maybe? With the MAHA bullshit and demonizing everything from "ultra processed foods" (which have no definition) and vaccines (which are good and walk the line of natural vs unnatural), we might be more interested in the distance from nature than ever.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

She subtitled it "A Modern Prometheus," but the link, though Pagan by Christian standards, still involves blasphemy against the gods. Del Toro has that made clear with the tribunal expelling Frankenstein be explicitly religiously horrified by his actions. So it's a revolt against god in his movie.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

So book-Frankenstein suffers because he caused himself by attempting to usurp the power of God/natural order. Is that interesting in the time period in which you are adapting his work? At the time Shelley wrote it, hell yeah, people were Hella worried about how man had moved away from nature.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Christopher Lee was something of a curmudgeon about adapted works he starred in, but faithfulness to source material ignores that different media change how you interact with the story. It's just not the same to be nude (literally or metaphorically) on the page and on the screen in the same way.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Dracula, like Frankenstein, is not really a great time with a book. There are ideas explored that are great in works that are dull to read for a modern audience. That's actually an ideal work to adapt because you can take what works/titillates and do something better with it for your own time.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Overall, I think the worst thing you can say about del Toro's Frankenstein is that it hews too faithfully to the book's logics and not enough to the spirit of adaptation and, yes, the Tumblr of it all. I might be more sensitive to this after having watched A LOT of Dracula movies lately.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Oscar Isaac could have pulled it off, acting as Victor who is fiendishly determined without *seeming* to be darker/hateful. It would have been more subtle. The creature could have been SO much more horrific, too. (GDT is a monster-lover, so that wasn't happening.)

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

It would have been the final reveal that Victor was full of shit. The real monster was the man who, in making a man, thought he was doing great works and in trying to unmake him still thought the same. Victor's hubris is a much more scary and interesting form of "Frankenstein is the monster."

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

All the same steps could happen that Victor's narration would take one way and our eyes would another. The "romance" he believes he has w/his brother's fiance was just him being wildly inappropriate. The creature being described as horrifically grotesque and then turning out to be Jacob Elordi...

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Would had been unsettling and more effective. Like, Victor talking about how he wanted to help people! And he looked for the best parts of people...while the audience to his tale, more rightly, imagines what actually happens (he scavenges for bodies from people about to be hanged like a GHOUL).

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

It's just too late. I think a delusional Victor/martyr narrative where we can see a bunch of things being not quite right with his tale as he narrates it would have been better. He has an audience, so their darker interpretation would have been the flashback scenes and in contrast with Victor's tale

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

So you have a mercurial Victor who is not, actually, instantly horrified by his creation, just disappointed in it. And abusive to it. But he is self-aware enough to have hated that about his own father and to recognize it was wrong but not that he was repeating it...until SPOILERS

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

...if he's going to be a REAL monster, he would still have this martyr complex and wouldn't see what he had done was evil. I actually don't mind del Toro giving Frankenstein Daddy Issues. It fits, thematically, but the film doesn't commit to the bit where VICTOR realizes he's become his father.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

That Victor still isn't feeling remorse, or, at least, it doesn't feel that way from what I recall of the text. It feels more like martyrdom, his responsibility to stop his creature. He flew too close to the sun, etc etc. Literary analysis and Tumblr have decided Frankenstein is the monster, so...

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Because, sorta spoilers here..
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The creature is given his own chance to tell the story, but we don't spend a lot of time on the story of Victor through his creation's eyes. Victor, the wet-blanket, woe-is-me of the book who accepts he must take responsibility Yada yada...

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

His performance is "knowledge is knowing Frankenstein isn't the monster ans wisdom is knowing Frankenstein IS the monster." I think it would have worked better if he, Frankenstein, wasn't shown to be (in his own telling, no less) quite such a dour creature. It works better if he's more self-deluded.

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Feral Cat Lady @trinityvixen.bsky.social · 17h

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is both incredible and unsatisfying. Which is no fault of the players. Oscar Isaac is *inspired* casting as Victor Frankenstein. He's handsome and charismatic yet you can see a darkness and egotistical edge to his performance that is perfection.

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