The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties

22. Bods and Monsters: The Return of the Bride of Frankenstein

22 Bods and Monsters The Return of the Bride of Frankenstein ElizabethYoung THE FRANKENSTEIN PLOT has been a remarkably protean one, subject to constant remaking, since the publication of the novel Frankenstein in 1818. Film has been an especially generative medium for such remaking . There have been well over a hundred films based on Mary Shelley’s novel, beginning with the 1910 Edison Frankenstein and ranging , more recently, from the comic burlesque of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) to the Blaxploitation drama of William Levey’s Blackenstein (1972), and from Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), a doggedly faithful adaptation, to Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (1984), the inspired story of a boy and his reconstituted dog. In its more general form—as a narrative about the construction of monstrous bodies—the long cinematic arm of the Frankenstein plot extends even further. For example, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) features a serial killer who attempts to play Dr. Frankenstein to himself.1 My focus in this essay is on one striking feature of this cinematic genealogy : films that depict a female monster. In Mary Shelley’s story, this possibility is invoked but never realized. Late in the novel, Victor Frankenstein reluctantly agrees to the monster’s demands for a bride, but then, realizing that such a figure “might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate,” he aborts the female monster before animating her.2 This “malignant” figure is nonetheless alive in many Frankenstein films, from James Whale’s horror classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to such later spin-offs as Frankenstein’s Daughter (1959) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1966). Often these films focus specifically 225 on monstrous brides: one is simply entitled The Bride (1986), and another announces its debt to Whale with the title Bride of Re-Animator (1989). When the monster is female, I suggest, two structural elements of the Frankenstein story are heightened: dismemberment and reanimation . While these elements are central to the making of any monster, they take on an added charge when they are applied to female bodies. In films with female Frankenstein monsters, dismemberment and reanimation are at once theme and technique: their narratives include sequences of men taking apart and reconstructing female bodies, while their cinematic form disassembles and reimagines the imagery of the Frankenstein story through parody and pastiche. Yet even as these films organize fantasies of male control over female bodies, I argue, they also undermine those fantasies. This unstable dynamic is already implicit in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, the template for imagery of a female Frankenstein monster. It is further realized in divergent directions in two films of the last decade: Frank Henenlotter’s 1990 low-budget cult movie Frankenhooker and Bill Condon’s 1998 art film success, Gods and Monsters. In “low” and “high” cinematic registers, these films reveal some radical uses of the figure of the bride of Frankenstein. Frankenhooker suggests the feminist potential of the bride of Frankenstein story, while Gods and Monsters develops the gay male possibilities of Whale’s original film. From its cinematic inception to its more recent incarnations , I argue, the bride of Frankenstein bridles at norms of both gender and sexuality. In so doing, this figure provides a valuable laboratory not only for studying the gendered anatomy of monstrous bodies, but also for understanding the ongoing cinematic modes through which such bodies continue to be brought to life. In James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, the monstrous bride appears only once, at the end. The climax of the film is a creation scene in which two scientists, Drs. Pretorius and Frankenstein, bring to life a female monster who is to be a companion to Boris Karloff’s lonely male monster . But the bride—played, unforgettably, by Elsa Lanchester in a long white dress with a Nefertiti hairdo, glazed eyes, and jerky movements —recoils from the monster; enraged and despairing, he blows up the castle, killing all but Dr. Frankenstein and his bride, Elizabeth. This scene is notable for, among other things, its comically hyperbolic gender relations. The bride is a female body trafficked between men: the monster himself, Dr. Pretorius, and Dr. Frankenstein, whose own bride, Elizabeth, is abducted by the monster, in an intertwining of two women 226 ELIZABETH YOUNG who both qualify for the title “bride of Frankenstein.” Both brides are animated by men, a process that...