Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  Frankenstein

  Bride of Frankenstein begins, not with the Monster or his creator, but with a prologue set in a Swiss villa. It is, of course, a dark and stormy night. The actor Gavin Gordon stands by the window with his chin set at an impressive angle and tosses his curly locks about. He begins to poetise, in a fairly overripe English accent, about the raging storm outside. ‘I should like to think that an irate Jehovah was pointing those arrows of lightning directly at my head — the unbowed head of George Gordon, Lord Byron — England’s greatest sinner!’1

  A young woman sits across from him, clearly bemused by Byron’s posing. She refuses Byron’s invitation to come to the window and watch the storm, and asks her fiancé, Shelley, to light another candle. Byron is tickled by this. ‘Frightened of thunder! Fearful of the dark! And yet you have written a tale that has turned my blood to ice!’2

  Mary Shelley smiles a secretive smile, as if to say, There’s more where that came from. The tale Byron is referring to is Frankenstein — the dark horse of the story writing contest he’d instigated.

  While the characters and the setting are based on fact, this little scene in the film is a fiction — Mary never imagined a sequel to her horror story. In fact, when the contest was first suggested, she’d despaired of being able to contribute anything at all. Byron had written his vampire fragment, and Polidori — when not flirting with Mary or challenging her pacifist fiancé to a duel — had written the tale of his skull-headed woman. But Mary’s inspiration had deserted her. ‘Have you thought of a story?’ her friends would ask her when she came down for breakfast. ‘Each morning,’ she says, ‘I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.’3

  One night, still furiously trying to think of something really scary, Mary half drifted off to sleep. As she floated in that strange zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, she saw, in her mind’s eye, a series of terrifying visions — a dark shape bent over a corpse, an unnatural twitch, and a pair of watery yellow eyes in the darkness. Scared out of her wits, she sat up in bed and tried to compose herself. Well, she thought, that was terrifying. If only I could come up with something as scary as that, I’d be able to write the best ghost story ever…hang on!

  The story Mary Shelley set down over the next few days — and eventually expanded into a novel — tells of a young doctor named Victor Frankenstein who sets out to break the ultimate scientific taboo: the creation of life itself. Frankenstein works in darkness and secrecy for two years to get it done. But as soon as his goal is accomplished and his creature begins to twitch with artificial life, he sees that he shouldn’t have done it, never in a million years. Not only has he made a terrible mistake — he’s made a mistake that walks, a mistake that creeps up to his bed in the dead of night, pulls back the curtain, and reaches a horrible greyish hand in his direction. Frankenstein flees his apartment at the university and spends a cold night on the street, hoping that the nightmare will simply evaporate in the morning. And at first, it seems as though it has — until his friends and family begin to die…

  When the monster and his maker finally meet again, we are surprised, along with Frankenstein, at how eloquently he expresses himself. The monster learned the rudiments of conversation, it turns out, by eavesdropping on a rustic family as he hid in their barn. But his education was completed by a package of books he found by the roadside one day — that included Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther — which moved him deeply. ‘I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case,’ said the monster of Werther’s tale, ‘yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it.’ The monster, it seems, sympathises in a very profound way with Werther’s feelings of apartness and aloneness. He takes Goethe’s advice in the book’s preface — The Sorrows of Young Werther becomes a friend to the creature, who has no friends at all.4

  It’s fitting that Frankenstein’s monster should identify with Goethe’s angst-ridden young romantic, since young romantics have always found something to relate to in the monster. He is, as Bertrand Russell has observed, virtually the embodiment of romanticism, and the changes he undergoes in the novel demonstrate the trajectory of romantic philosophy in a startling way.5 Byron’s words in ‘Lara’:

  his early dreams of good outstripped the truth

  and troubled manhood followed baffled youth6

  neatly sum up the monster’s life up to the point when Frankenstein confronts him. He is barely human, but just human enough to want to be loved like everybody else. And because he was cursed at birth to be freakish and unlovable, humanity lets him down.

  The monster tells his creator that, after fleeing Frankenstein’s apartment, he made several attempts to befriend his fellow beings, all of which ended disastrously — the only exception being a blind man, who only loved him because he couldn’t see how ugly he was — which only goes to show how shallow and judgemental human beings are! The whole human race turned away from him in horror, so the monster turned his back on humanity. He sought solace in nature — even the steely-grey sky above the alps seemed more welcoming to him than the people who lived beneath it. But being an artificial creature, he didn’t feel at home in nature any more than he did in society. At this point, the monster’s natural goodness began to collapse under the strain of his exile. ‘The mildness of my nature had fled’, he explains, ‘and all within me was turned to gall and bitterness… I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?’7

  And yet even in his despair, the monster believed he could be redeemed, which is why he set out to find Frankenstein — whom he had grown to hate by this point — who held the keys to his happiness. Now, he implores his creator to recognise him and his needs, to create a female who will complete him. Frankenstein, horrified by the idea, rejects the monster’s plea out of hand — and this proves to be the last straw. Now, having nothing to live for, the creature’s rampage becomes unstoppable.

  But Frankenstein’s creature never becomes an unthinking killer — and he certainly never becomes an unfeeling one. On the contrary, the inhuman monster is full of human feeling. As Bertrand Russell points out in his History of Western Philosophy, no matter how base his actions become, his sentiments are always noble.8 After he commits the patricide he has been threatening for the entire book, he stands above Frankenstein’s corpse and delivers a moving soliloquy.

  Oh, Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being!

  What does it avail thee that I now ask thee to pardon me?9

  Walton, the ship’s captain who observes this, boldly points out that it doesn’t avail Frankenstein much at all that the monster is so full of remorse. If you’d listened to your conscience and not killed all those people, says Walton, none of this would have happened. The monster is outraged at this suggestion. Don’t you understand, he asks Walton, how I feel?

  ‘Do you think that I was then dead to agony and remorse? He,’ he continued, pointing to the corpse, ‘he suffered not in the consummation of the deed. Oh! Not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution… Think you that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot imagine.’10

  Here, romantic solipsism is taken to its most frightening conclusion. The monster’s murders are justified by his feelings. No wonder he found so much to admire in Werther — Frank-enstein’s creature is in fact a super-Werther, whose physical strength gives him the power to act out his feelings in ways that Goethe’s gloomy protagonist could only dream about.

  In The Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Disarm’, Billy Corgan invents a fantasy version of this scenario, in which he hacks off his parents’ limbs in order to teach them a lesson about what it’s like to live your life as a lonely freak. But like Byron and Frank
enstein’s monster, he doesn’t do harm because he’s evil, but because he feels too much, and he can’t contain his feelings any longer. The singer in ‘Disarm’ feels ‘the bitterness of one who’s left alone’11 — all those years sitting by himself in the school cafeteria — because his heart is full of ‘tender feelings’.12 The way he sees it, his parents gave him the desire for love, and then made him unlovable, condemned to eternity in a lonely Tower of Doom. ‘Ooh, the years burn’, sighs Corgan.13 How can they expect him to play nicely with the other children when he is, as Frankenstein’s monster puts it, ‘shunned and hated by all mankind’?14 The extreme menace in ‘Disarm’ comes from the idea, never too far from the surface, that a killing spree has been only narrowly averted by cathartic song writing.

  Edward Scissorhands

  IN THE WINTER of 1989 Johnny Depp was sent a movie script called Edward Scissorhands. At that time the actor was stuck in the depths of TV hell, mouthing god-awful dialogue on the set of 21 Jump Street. After reading this script, he believed he could be saved.

  It was the story of a boy with scissors for hands — an innocent outcast in suburbia. I was so affected and moved by it that strong waves of images flooded my brain — dogs I’d had as a kid, feeling freakish and obtuse while growing up, the unconditional love that only infants and dogs are evolved enough to have.1

  Soon, the nervous actor was meeting with the director, and after talking to him for an hour or so, he realised, ‘this hypersensitive madman is Edward Scissorhands’.2 Here Depp was right on the money. If the script had brought his awkward teenage years flooding back to him, it was because it was heavily inspired by the director’s own painful adolescence — a period of time when, as Burton later described it, he felt like he had a big sign around his neck saying ‘Leave me the fuck alone’.3 The whole idea for the film came from a drawing Burton did when he was a teenager of ‘a character who wants to touch but can’t, who was both creative and destructive’.4

  Depp also recognised in the script a feeling of profound sympathy for ‘those who are not others’ — just one of the many important lessons Burton learned from his steady diet of B-movies while growing up.

  I always loved monsters and monster movies. I was never terrified of them, I just loved them… I felt most monsters were basically misperceived, usually they had much more heartfelt souls than the human characters around them.5

  After a short prologue, Edward Scissorhands begins with Avon lady Peg Boggs having a bad day. She drives around her pastel-coloured suburban town in her pastel-coloured car trying to sell make-up to bored housewives and surly teenagers, but to no avail. So, with nothing left to lose, she decides to try the one house in the neighbourhood she’s never been to — the evil-looking gothic mansion at the top of the hill. She drives up the winding path and walks through the massive front doors. ‘Avon calling,’ she cries hopefully into the gloom, her words echoing through the castle’s empty halls. Not quite empty as it turns out. Peg finds a strange creature hiding in the shadows — deathly-pale, encased in black from head to foot, with giant scissors where his hands should be. Her heart breaks:

  Peg: What happened to you?

  Edward: I’m not finished.6

  Edward, like Frankenstein’s monster, is an experiment abandoned by his creator in a half-formed state. His inventor father (played by Vincent Price), died before he was finished, so instead of real hands, Edward is stuck with scissors. His freakish appearance has kept him confined to his crumbling castle, where he lives in a world of imagination and memory, cutting the hedges in the garden into giant pairs of human hands — topiary as dream-wish fulfilment.

  Peg takes him home and cleans him up, and for a little while it looks like he might have finally broken back into the lovely world below, redeemed himself by being accepted and loved. But eventually the regular folk turn on the monster in their midst — and who can blame them? Those scissor-hands he uses to cut the townspeople’s hedges and barbecue their shish kebabs are terrifying weapons. Not that sensitive Edward would ever intentionally harm anyone. But he’s pushed and pushed by these shallow greedy people until he can’t help it. And then, in the moments where he’s most human, when he reaches out to touch or protect someone he loves, he hurts them.

  As his story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that he just doesn’t belong with other people, that he has to be alone. Like little Vincent Malloy, he goes back to his tower of doom, where he spends the rest of his days poring over his painful memories. The sculptures he makes in his garden are suffused with all the longing he feels to be a part of human life — to be loved, to be accepted.

  Of all the director’s films, Edward Scissorhands is probably the purest distillation of Tim Burton’s worldview. In a telling moment near the start of the film, just as Peg is about to give up on her door-to-door sales and head home for the day, she adjusts her side-view mirror. We see from Peg’s point of view out the car window and into the street, where neat pastel-coloured houses roll out as far as the eye can see. Then, in the mirror, we catch a glimpse, as she does, of Edward’s spooky, dilapidated home on the hill. Edward’s world is the reverse of Peg’s — but only the one in the mirror is real for Burton.

  ‘People ask me when I’m going to make a film with real people,’7 Burton once remarked. Of course, for him, monsters like Edward are real people, the only people worth knowing. All his heroes are freaks or outcasts of some description: Edward is a half-finished science project, Ed Wood is a toothless cross-dresser who makes terrible movies about grave robbers from outer space, and Burton’s Batman is a sociophobe with a fetish for latex. In Beetlejuice, Betelgeuse the bio-exorcist is a disgusting undead ghoul, the young couple he agrees to help are ghosts who distort their faces into monstrous masks or rot away before our eyes, and Lydia, the teenage girl who befriends them, can only see the strange and unusual beings haunting her parents’ house because she is, herself, strange and unusual.

  Lydia is an original ‘80’s goth — her decision to wear black and obsess about death is an intentional affront to her shallow, materialistic, style-obsessed mother. Her dad doesn’t really understand her either — but he does at least try to keep with her interests. He makes an attempt to cheer her up by promising to build her a darkroom in the attic so she can develop her photos. But Lydia will not be consoled — ‘My whole life is a dark room. One. Big. Dark. Room.’8

  One of the film’s funniest moments comes when Lydia sneaks into the attic where the ghosts have taken up residence. The ghosts aren’t in — but Betelgeuse has made himself at home — Lydia finds the miniaturised ghoul lounging obscenely on a tiny deckchair. At the sight of Lydia, with her funereal get-up and deathly complexion, Betelgeuse perks up. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘you look like someone I could relate to!’9 Like Frankenstein’s monster reading Werther, the bio-exorcist senses an important connection between himself — a horrible monster shunned by humanity — and the miserable teenage girl in front of him. Betelgeuse hopes to enlist Lydia in his efforts to get out of the underworld and into the game. Lydia wishes they could trade places. ‘I wanna be in there!’ she says, pointing to the miniature diorama that represents the spirit world in the film’s peculiar mythology. Betelgeuse is mystified by this. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Well’, he goes on, ‘I’m sure you have your reasons.’10

  She does. Like Vincent Malloy, Lydia has been banished to the tower of doom. But not by her parents — they want her to get out, get involved in social life, have some fun. No, Lydia has banished herself to the tower of doom, locked the door from the inside, and swallowed the key. She knows she’ll never be like all the other kids, so she rejects the possibility of joining their world and moves permanently into her own. Here, she thinks, in darkness and isolation, is where I belong. Lydia shares the fate of all Tim Burton’s oddball heroes. She has been kicked out of the garden — and has come to understand that what everyone else calls happiness is not for her.

  Lydia: Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?

&nb
sp; The Dark Side of Human Things

  THE TENOR OF Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is profoundly religious. Victor Frankenstein is clearly shown to be a sinner — plunging himself into death and filth in order to create life. His account of his midnight expeditions in search of corpses for his experiments, is permeated by a deep sense of shame. In fact, his whole tale is a confessional. We hear the story through the device of Frankenstein unburdening himself to the captain of the ship which will take him to his final encounter with the monster (and this will become a convention of horror stories for decades to come — My tale is almost too horrible to relate, yet I must confide in you before it is too late…). And to hear Frankenstein tell it, he knew, even at the time, that what he was doing was deeply unnatural and wrong, but he imagined that in his perversion of nature the scientific ends might justify the means, and that he would in the end be rewarded. But he sees now that he could not have been more wrong — his only reward is death — for himself and for those he loves. Frankenstein’s monster is the punishment for his sin — which turns out to be one of the oldest — the sin of wanting to know too much.

  Of course, all of this stuff about sin and punishment is very medieval, part of a way of thinking that was supposed to have vanished long before 1819. But the Shelleys had grown up in an age that had already stretched the eighteenth-century ideal of reason and enlightenment to breaking point. Prior to arriving at Lake Geneva, the couple had seen up close the havoc and destruction that the Revolutionary wars had visited on the people of rural France. The romantics of Wordsworth’s generation had already processed the effects of this, watching as the carefully maintained equilibrium of the eighteenth century was destroyed, giving voice to the crisis in their poetry, and finally finding a third position outside it all, the state of grace Wordsworth achieved with ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’.