BEFORE: Every year we seem to get one big-ass spider hanging around our house - outside, thank God. Last year we had one about the size of a hermit crab on our front porch, and it would spin a big web that prevented my wife from going out there to smoke. So I had to take action and catch it in a jar, and bring it to the cemetery three blocks away. This year we've had a slightly smaller one out in the backyard, and for a while it had a web over our back window to catch moths that were attracted to our dining-room light. But then just as I got my mind set on trimming back the overgrown weeds in the backyard, it spun a web on the stairs, completely blocking my route down from the back porch. Sure, I could bust right through it, but who wants a big spider mad at them? Instead I took it as a sign that it wasn't a good time to do yard work, and I was happy to put it off another couple of weeks.
Today I had a little bit of time before my wife's birthday dinner, and I figured I hadn't seen the spider in a while, so maybe it had moved on. But as I was cutting down weeds under the grape vines, I saw it, ascending a line right in the middle of the trellis - I must have cut down one of its web anchors, and so it retreated up to the biggest vine to figure out its next move. I was very careful not to walk right under it, and spent two hours clearing the backyard, with one eye on the spider the whole time. I'm willing to let this one be, and maybe I've realized that while it's a bit scary to see a big spider in a web in your yard, it's even scarier to know it's still out there somewhere, but not know exactly where.
Sticking on a bit of a literary theme tonight, from a parody of Jane Austen we move to the origins of the novel "Frankenstein". That's enough of a pre-Halloween tie-in, right? Douglas Booth carries over from "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies".
THE PLOT: The life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who at 16 met 21-year-old poet Percy Shelley, resulting in her writing the novel "Frankenstein".
AFTER: We can't help but to look back on the past through the lens of the present, so with that in mind we're re-visiting the life of Mary Shelley tonight - and to really do that, you have to go into her background as the child of a feminist author, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth, and William Godwin, a novelist known for his views on utilitarianism and anarchism - they must have been a fun couple at dinner parties! But after a swing in the U.K. back to conservatism, Godwin worked largely in publishing (and ran a struggling bookshop, according to this film) after his first wife's death and marrying his second wife. (Wollstonecraft's first daughter, Fanny Imlay, is conveniently not mentioned in this film, though she would have been alive at the time, committing suicide a few years later...)
It's tough to say, though, when we look back on these people's bios, whether we sometimes see what we want to see. Wollstonecraft was a feminist who wrote about "romantic friendships" with both men and women - but that may have meant something very different back in the late 1700's than it would today. But there are times when 16-year old Mary Godwin (later Shelley) makes references to her mother living in some kind of three-way relationship with a man and a woman - most likely some people did this back then, but didn't feel comfortable talking or writing about it, because it would have blown some people's minds, or ended up with them on trial for either debauchery or witchcraft. But while watching the film, this was very confusing, because I didn't know if the three-way was between Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the woman we see as Godwin's 2nd wife - which would explain the tension between Mary and her stepmother. Only that wasn't the case at all - the thrupple relationship, if it happened, happened before Wollstonecraft met Godwin.
Mary Godwin, however, apparently didn't learn much about feminism from her mother's writing, because when she falls in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley (god, what a pretentious middle name, and it seems like he used it like ALL the time...) that's it for her, she wants to run off with him and live together. OK, so they didn't get married at first, that was pretty progressive, but it feels like Percy believed in an open relationship, and she didn't. For another long time during the film, I was willing to bet that Percy was shagging both Mary and her younger half-sister Claire, but maybe they just liked hanging out. Shelley's friends would come over and think that they could also fool around with Mary, but she didn't go for that - she seems like she was a real party-pooper, everyone around her was practicing a 1700's version of "free love", and she wanted no part of it. Nobody told her that when your partner gives you a "free pass", that usually means they want one for themselves - or they're already sleeping with everyone in sight. (It's worth noting that Wikipedia supports my theory that Percy and Claire were almost certainly fooling around, and also that Shelley's legal wife gave birth to his son while Mary Godwin was pregnant with his daughter...the film makes no mention of his son, though.)
This is pretty much confirmed when Mary, Percy and Clare are invited to the home of Lord Byron for an extended stay - and Byron kisses Percy Shelley square on the lips when he arrives. (Yeah, they were SO doing it...) But again, perhaps that's just what we want to believe, projecting our modern complicated LGBTQ entanglements on to a past situation. But what we've all been told about the creation of the novel "Frankenstein" is that the genesis came from this summer-long holiday at Lord Byron's manor, when it was very rainy and they couldn't go outside, so they all pursued more indoor activities. Naturally, over the years, the stories surrouding this week-long party have ranged from intellectual pursuits, like challenging each other to a ghost-story writing contest, to a full-on drunken orgy. We may never know which is closer to the truth.
This same 3-day writing contest was also depicted on an episode of "Drunk History", with Evan Rachel Wood as Mary Shelley, Jack McBrayer as Lord Byron, and Elijah Wood as Percy Shelley. (And in the story-within-the-story, Seth Rogen played Victor Frankenstein and Will Ferrell played the monster!) Ken Russell also depicted the Shelley's stay at Lord Byron's manor in the 1986 film "Gothic", and that definitely leaned more toward the depiction of a drunken, drug-fueled orgy...
But either way, what everyone wants to know is, where did the story COME from? Obviously, Mary Godwin had read many ghost stories and tales of gothic horror as a young girl, even though her father wanted her to read the classics, and not horror stories - but that just probably made her want to read them even MORE. The film also shows her fascinated by a demonstration of "galvanism", which involved running an electric current into a frog's body to simulate real-life movements - so perhaps in her mind science in the early 1800's was very close to re-animating dead tissue. But clearly she also had an interest and a DESIRE to see dead people resurrected - it's not a large leap to imagine that she yearned to bring back her dead mother, or her young daughter who died in infancy.
The film doesn't divulge too greatly into the story of "Frankenstein", which I think is a mistake - OK, you can assume that everyone out there watching this movie knows the story, but do they? This world is full of people who see someone dressed as a tall green monster with bolts in his neck and they say, "Oh, look it's FRANKENSTEIN!" forgetting that the book is named after the DOCTOR, and not his MONSTER. For God's sake, people, let's get this right. You can call the character "Frankenstein's Monster", but not just by "Frankenstein", please! We do see William Godwin running some sort of "book club" where the book is being discussed, but that's about it - at first, everyone assumed that Percy Shelley wrote the book because it was published with no author credit, and he wrote the book's introduction. This was to get the story published, because publishers in 1818 didn't believe that a woman could write such a graphic horror story, or they didn't think anyone would buy such a book written by a woman.
Let's also reflect that many people believe the MONSTER to be the villain of the book, and it seems those people have missed the point of the book entirely. The title character, yes, the DOCTOR the book is named after, is more properly thought of as the villain - he robbed graves for body parts, he practiced un-natural science, he essentially played God to create/re-animated a new life-form. Any evil committed by the monster is really on his head, see? I believe that Dr. Frankenstein eventually comes to realize this over the course of the story, that he's not a good person. Meanwhile, every time the monster tries to act decently, or create a better life for himself, he's met with scorn and violence from that angry mob with torches and pitchforks, all because of his appearance and nature. He can't help who he is or how he was made, he had no control over that - so the mob really should have been chasing after the doctor, for messing with the natural order in the first place.
The real revelation here is not that Mary Shelley was capable of writing the story in the first place, it's the theory that she identified more with the monster than the doctor. The feeling of being betrayed and abandoned by her lover, that's what got channeled into the emotions of the "monster". I mean, on a certain level an author can be seen in all of his or her characters, but perhaps on some level, Mary saw herself as the monster and Percy as the doctor, the architect of her situation. It seems like maybe it's a bit of stretch, but who's to say? It's not blatant and we don't have anything more specific to point to, to say, "Oh, THERE'S where she got the idea..." so it's a working theory. And back then, if you felt betrayed by your live-in boyfriend because he was screwing around, you couldn't just write a bunch of songs for your next album, like Taylor Swift does.
But I'm not sure why Hollywood has become so obsessed with these "making of" movies about famous books and movies - certainly depicting the story itself is always going to be more exciting than the story about how the story was made, right? To this movie's credit, there wasn't a lot of screen time spent on watching a writer write (or worse, having writer's block) which is always extremely boring and never visually interesting. I'm not sure the alternative is much better - here Mary Shelley writes a few sentences in a notebook, and a few minutes later, she's got a 300-page manuscript in cursive longhand. Umm, OK, that was fast, she must have been working on this story for years in her head, to bang it out so quickly!
But the question remains, do we need a "Saving Mr. Banks", or "The Rebel in the Rye", or "Tolkien", and I suppose this goes back to "Shakespeare in Love" - do we really all need to see how the sausage is made? Are we obsessed with trying to discover whether the great authors are just as messed up as the rest of us? (Short answer: You bet!) Or does Hollywood just see this as another tangential revenue stream, after they make all of the "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" movies they can, why not something about the author himself? The problem usually becomes that there's the temptation to pepper in little fictional bits about the author's experiences to show us where all the little inspirations came from for each little element of their novel, and that's idle speculation, plus it removes all the mystery, assuming it's all true, which it probably isn't.
Here's the sad truth, though - your favorite author probably stole little bits of his or her story from many other stories. A little bit from here, a little bit from there, not enough so you'd notice, a bit of Greek mythology and then maybe unconsciously a bit from their favorite fairy tale, mix it up in a new way and nobody's the wiser. So while it's easy and tempting to think that "Frankenstein" is a thinly-veiled dig at Mary Shelley's philandering husband, the truth is that she read a lot of horror stories - who's to say what bits seeped in from where? I'm thinking now of that parody short, "George Lucas in Love", that (comically) suggested that he had a college girlfriend that looked like Princess Leia - and of course it's all too easy to point to his strained relationship with his father when you're looking for the inspiration for Darth Vader. But in all fairness, he mixed together bits of Flash Gordon, old westerns, and bits of Kurosawa films with a soupçon of classic mythology when he made the story cocktail that became "Star Wars", it didn't all just come to him one day in a dream, and I'm betting the same held true for Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein".
Also starring Elle Fanning (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Tom Sturridge (last seen in "On the Road"), Bel Powley (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Stephen Dillane (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Ben Hardy (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Maisie Williams (last heard in "Early Man"), Joanne Froggatt, Derek Riddell (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Hugh O'Conor, Owen Richards (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (1993)), Ciara Charteris, Jack Hickey, Sarah Lamesch.
RATING: 5 out of 10 angry creditors
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