Moviegoers are sick of Frankenstein. What about English majors?
Jeffrey Dubner at The American Prospect complains about the endurance of the Frankenstein myth in Hollywood, and the casual undergirding of modern luddism that it achieves. He concludes:
Why are there so many Frankenstein stories in the background of Hollywood movies, and why do we never seem to tire of them? The only possible answer is that the story has become a powerful myth -- one closely attached in the public mind to advances in biology and biotechnology. In his 1998 book, Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture, University College of London science and technology scholar Jon Turney even calls the Frankenstein story "the governing myth of modern biology," a narrative that's based on "science as a substitute for God" in that most mysterious and profound of acts, the creation of life.
The trouble is that the argument against "playing God" is frequently an anti-intellectual mantra used to stifle debate about new technologies, the epitome of fear-mongering. And if the Frankenstein argument is politically troubling, Frankenstein-like flicks have serious aesthetic shortcomings as well. Sure, I understand the power of myth. I can see why certain stories get recycled over and over again. But isn't there also something to be said for a little bit of originality now and again?
Dubner makes a very interesting point. But I think there's a broader dynamic at play: one reason our Frankenstein fetish persists today is that it has such broad ideological cachet. Conservatives can turn to it as a parable about the madness and loss of traditional order inherent in our hyper-modern, nihilistic secular society: as a warning against things like cloning, or morning-after pills, or stem cell research, or the breakdown of the tradition Judeo-Christian family unit, or even our incessent demand to explain how we got here in our current form. (I'm not personally as critical of intelligent design theory as most liberals, but the fact is that, behind all the fancy math and the "irreducible complexity" and the "no free lunch" algorithms, it's really a way of saying that, in H. Allen Orr's words, "Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart," -- i.e. we should just stop trying to figure things out we were never meant to know.
On the other side of the red-blue divide, however, left-liberals can also turn to Frankenstein to illustrate their fears about the potential dangers of genetically modified foodstuffs (how else to explain those lefty Europeans fighting the WTO over US agricultural imports?), or nuclear power, or the over-exploitation of global resources or -- perhaps most poignantly -- the legal personhood of the modern corporation, which, after all is a peverted form of humnaity created from the heat and light and lobbying generated by other powerful people's collective risk-aversion and greed.
No matter where you stand, you just can't go wrong with Frankenstein in today's politically aware, chronically insecure culture. It fits everybody's agenda, confirms everybody's prejudices. But there's another problem with the endurance of Frankenstein that Dubner doesn't get at: before Frankenstein was a bad, obvious, self-vadidating piece of Hollywood schtick, it was turgid, uninspired, culturally out-of-touch potboiler novel from a third-rate writer who happened to be married to a famous early nineteenth century poet. And, for some reason possibly having to do with Dubner's points, it continues to be shoved down the throats of high school and undergraduate university students as the quintessential examaple of early Romantic English literature. I for one had it inflicted on me in grade 11 Advanced English, grade 12 Creative Writing and then my freshman year of university.
As a novel, Frankenstein isn't literature; it's a bad teenage melodrama written in sophomoric, affected, frequently overwraught prose. It's not even an interesting sociological/historical representation of the social and technological turmoil of early Industrial England. Mary Shelley and her husband were basically rarified dilletantes whose almost total disconnect from the society and issues of their age outside the artistic community is hopelessly evident all through Mary's novel. Shelley writes about science and society in the Englightenment the way I wrote about sex when I was fifteen: she's vaguely aware that something's going on but is clueless as to exactly what that might be. Frankenstein is not really Romantic either, despite its billing. Actually, it's an amazingly prissy book: stylistically, it's Jane Austin without wisdom or tone-control or understanding of her subject matter.
Yet we idenifty with it. And, like the Hollywood movies inspired by it (if not exactly "based on" it), it endures. Funny how things work out that way.
Why are there so many Frankenstein stories in the background of Hollywood movies, and why do we never seem to tire of them? The only possible answer is that the story has become a powerful myth -- one closely attached in the public mind to advances in biology and biotechnology. In his 1998 book, Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture, University College of London science and technology scholar Jon Turney even calls the Frankenstein story "the governing myth of modern biology," a narrative that's based on "science as a substitute for God" in that most mysterious and profound of acts, the creation of life.
The trouble is that the argument against "playing God" is frequently an anti-intellectual mantra used to stifle debate about new technologies, the epitome of fear-mongering. And if the Frankenstein argument is politically troubling, Frankenstein-like flicks have serious aesthetic shortcomings as well. Sure, I understand the power of myth. I can see why certain stories get recycled over and over again. But isn't there also something to be said for a little bit of originality now and again?
Dubner makes a very interesting point. But I think there's a broader dynamic at play: one reason our Frankenstein fetish persists today is that it has such broad ideological cachet. Conservatives can turn to it as a parable about the madness and loss of traditional order inherent in our hyper-modern, nihilistic secular society: as a warning against things like cloning, or morning-after pills, or stem cell research, or the breakdown of the tradition Judeo-Christian family unit, or even our incessent demand to explain how we got here in our current form. (I'm not personally as critical of intelligent design theory as most liberals, but the fact is that, behind all the fancy math and the "irreducible complexity" and the "no free lunch" algorithms, it's really a way of saying that, in H. Allen Orr's words, "Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart," -- i.e. we should just stop trying to figure things out we were never meant to know.
On the other side of the red-blue divide, however, left-liberals can also turn to Frankenstein to illustrate their fears about the potential dangers of genetically modified foodstuffs (how else to explain those lefty Europeans fighting the WTO over US agricultural imports?), or nuclear power, or the over-exploitation of global resources or -- perhaps most poignantly -- the legal personhood of the modern corporation, which, after all is a peverted form of humnaity created from the heat and light and lobbying generated by other powerful people's collective risk-aversion and greed.
No matter where you stand, you just can't go wrong with Frankenstein in today's politically aware, chronically insecure culture. It fits everybody's agenda, confirms everybody's prejudices. But there's another problem with the endurance of Frankenstein that Dubner doesn't get at: before Frankenstein was a bad, obvious, self-vadidating piece of Hollywood schtick, it was turgid, uninspired, culturally out-of-touch potboiler novel from a third-rate writer who happened to be married to a famous early nineteenth century poet. And, for some reason possibly having to do with Dubner's points, it continues to be shoved down the throats of high school and undergraduate university students as the quintessential examaple of early Romantic English literature. I for one had it inflicted on me in grade 11 Advanced English, grade 12 Creative Writing and then my freshman year of university.
As a novel, Frankenstein isn't literature; it's a bad teenage melodrama written in sophomoric, affected, frequently overwraught prose. It's not even an interesting sociological/historical representation of the social and technological turmoil of early Industrial England. Mary Shelley and her husband were basically rarified dilletantes whose almost total disconnect from the society and issues of their age outside the artistic community is hopelessly evident all through Mary's novel. Shelley writes about science and society in the Englightenment the way I wrote about sex when I was fifteen: she's vaguely aware that something's going on but is clueless as to exactly what that might be. Frankenstein is not really Romantic either, despite its billing. Actually, it's an amazingly prissy book: stylistically, it's Jane Austin without wisdom or tone-control or understanding of her subject matter.
Yet we idenifty with it. And, like the Hollywood movies inspired by it (if not exactly "based on" it), it endures. Funny how things work out that way.
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