Sango Bidani and Zahra Rizvi.
Sango Bidani is a
Ph.D. scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. He has
completed his graduation and post-graduation studies from St. Stephen’s
College, Delhi University. His research interests are in the fields of Film and
Adaptation Studies, Translation and Partition Studies. His translation of
Premchand’s “Rashtrabhasha Hindi aur Uski Samasyaein” has been published in Premchand
on National Language edited by Anuradha Ghosh, Saroj K. Mahananda and
Trisha Lalchandani, Aakar Books, 2019.
Zahra
Rizvi is a Ph.D. scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia,
India. She is an MHRD-SPARC Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and
Germanic, Slavic, African and Asian Language Studies, Michigan State
University, and works in the fields of digital humanities and cultural studies.
Her research interests include utopia/dystopia studies, popular culture, and
geopolitical issues in and of cross-platform media. She has previously taught
at the University of Delhi, and presented guest lectures at Michigan State
University.
Abstract
This essay aims to explore the Frankenstein
Myth through a close reading of select 21st century popular cultural texts,
namely Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” and Victor Frankenstein,
released in the year 2013 and 2015 respectively. Through a close reading of
these texts, the paper proposes to read them as markers of our current
engagement with science in an increasingly technology driven society. The essay
seeks to make an analysis of the Frankenstein myth and the monster through
cyborgian and posthuman considerations to understand the various intersections
and networks that stem from recreations of Mary Shelley’s text. A study of the
seriality and virality of the aforementioned adaptations through the presence
of the various ‘monster’ figures seeks to illuminate the closer enmeshing of
human lives with science and technic mediated through frames of loss.
Keywords: Frankenstein; adaptation; popular culture; cyborg;
posthuman
INTRODUCTION:
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1819) has
been subject to numerous adaptations on the big screen as well as the small
screen. This process of adapting the narrative of Frankenstein from its
literary form into the visual medium has been going on since the nineteenth
century itself with Richard Brinsley Peake's adaptation, Presumption; or,
the Fate of Frankenstein, being seen by Mary Shelley herself at the English
Opera House (Shelley’s Ghost n.pag.). The reception history of both the
novel and the film adaptations have often focused on the conflict between
science and religion, of powerful questions of life and death, creation and
destruction and the problem of the “monster” that was first created and then
abandoned by Victor Frankenstein. However, what is interesting to note about
the film adaptations of Frankenstein is that they in a way trace the evolution
in the understanding of the concept of “adaptation” and, as this paper will
subsequently show, its “consumption” in Western academia. When one is making
this claim, what one is alluding to is the fact that the very first adaptations
of the novel tried to be close to the source text, that is the novel, and
thereby there was an uncanny resemblance to the novel written by Mary Shelley.
However, as the twentieth century moved on, slowly the adaptations of the novel
started exploring other aspects of the novel that had hitherto not been
explored until that time. Those included presenting the narrative from the
point of view of the monster, to his search for a companion to finally looking
at futuristic representations of the uneasy relationship between the creator
and the created, the consumer and the consumption. One of the examples of an
adaptation that was extremely close to the original source text was the 2004
mini- series that was released in America titled Frankenstein which
followed the novel more closely than most adaptations. In other words, the
fabula as was discussed in the context of narratology, remains the same but the
context and fluidity in the re/presentation of the fabula takes precedence. The
context thereby gains extra significance in the way the adaptation appropriates
the fabula and thereby highlights aspects that have remained hidden until this
point.
Another way in which the adaptations
under consideration in this paper elucidate on the evolution in our
understanding of adaptations is that while the first source it looks at, the
film text, is a cinematic adaptation in the traditional sense, the second one
is an episode of a web series. It is important to point out here that the new
definition of adaptation as propounded by the Chicago School of Media Studies
allows the scope to move from the adaptation of films on the big screen to the
small screen. Mark Brokenshire in his entry on Adaptation on the Chicago School
of Media Theory says as follows: “As content moves away from notions of a
single, stable source, and an identifiable author, and towards an era of
transmedia creation by multiple entities and media conglomerates, it is the
biological meaning of the word which would appear to have a greater relevance
to more contemporary notions of adaptation” (n.pag.). Hence, an episode of a
web series becomes a part of the expanded understanding of the concept of
adaptation in media studies. Therefore, in this way the adaptations discussed
here track the evolution in the understanding of the term “adaptation.”
There
has also been an exploration by some critics and scholars about why the
narrative of Frankenstein continues to be such a popular narrative to fall back
on whenever one is facing a crisis in the engagement between the sciences and
the humanities. For example, Philip Ball in his essay titled “‘Frankenstein’
Reflects the Hopes and Fears of Every Scientific Era” published in The
Atlantic on April 20, 2017 observes how while one always considers this
narrative as a cautionary tale about science and the perils of misusing it,
what has not been emphasized enough is that how the cultural legacy of this
text is far more complicated than what has been appreciated so far. Therefore,
there is a need to expand the critical horizon and look at the other aspects of
this fascinating text that continues to capture the imagination of the reading
and filmic public even now, more than two centuries after it was originally
written. While the novel was a specific response to the contextual situation in
the nineteenth century, with its conflict between science and religion, new
technology and the question of the ‘human; in light of the emergence of
Enlightenment in England, perhaps this text needs to be considered more as a
mythic text that can be used to explore the relationship between human beings
and science across centuries through its adaptive seriality.
Drawing on this unexplored aspect of the complex cultural legacy of the
text, this essay would like to do a close reading of two narratives in the
visual medium, one of which is a cinematic adaptation that was released in the
year 2015 and the other being an episode from the web series titled Black
Mirror. While focusing largely on a close reading of these two adaptations,
the essay will allude to earlier adaptations and explain how these modern-day
adaptations of the novel are different from the earlier cinematic adaptations
of the text and how they illuminate certain aspects that have become even more
critical with the current scenario across the world caused by the pandemic.
Perhaps the biggest lesson that one needs to learn is about how the relationship
between human beings, science and technology and nature has become far more
complicated. One finds it urgent to re-evaluate this relationship to understand
the ecosystem that has become increasingly disjointed and simultaneously
hyperconnected due to one’s over/dependence on technology in the contemporary
era and its lived experiences. This will become acutely prevalent with the
episode from the web series Black Mirror that will be under
consideration in this paper.
Along with looking at the re/presentation and the complicated cultural
legacy of the Frankenstein myth this paper would also explore how and why the
narrative of Frankenstein continues to be devoured so voraciously in the
current scenario. This paper would be using the methodological tools stemming
from the intersection between Cultural Studies, Adaptation Studies and Cyborg
and Posthuman Studies, to explore the questions posed in this
paper.
Shane Denson in “Marvel Comics' Frankenstein: A Case Study in the Media
of Serial Figures” mentions an interesting dialogue from Marvel Comics' The
Monster of Frankenstein #3 (May 1973) where a figure cries, "God help
us! It's still alive!" (n. pag.) to introduce and acknowledge the
recurrence of the Frankenstein myth in popular culture and media as “a series
of endlessly quoted, conventionalized representations'' and suggests that “the
comic belongs to that series and that it is capable of both taking ownership of
it and writing its continuation” (Denson 531). The remark holds true for
continuing representations of the Frankenstein myth in the popular imaginary
but even more so for a theoretical understanding of the consumption of the
Frankenstein monster and the myth. One must look at both the monster and the
myth to understand this consumption because the two are so closely knit that
one informs the other as parts of an assemblage, the myth being as much a part
as the miscellaneous body of the monster and vice-versa.
THE
FRANKENSTEIN MYTH AND ITS NETWORK OF RE/PRESENTATION AND SERIALITY
Before exploring the two adaptations that form the core of this paper,
it is necessary to point out why there is an attempt and a need to look at
Frankenstein adaptations as mythic in nature and why it is important to consider
these adaptations as re/presentations of the original tale of Frankenstein.
What lends the Frankenstein its mythic propensity is that the narrative written
by Mary Shelley in 1819 in a particular context of 19th century
England has captured the imagination of people across the ages, with each
adaptation using the frame narrative to explore aspects of the relationship
between human beings and science and thereby capturing the hopes, aspirations
and fears of the age in which it was being adapted. It is this aspect of the
timelessness of the narrative by Mary Shelley that lends itself to being
considered as a mythic text that has relevance across ages and contexts. There
is a reason why the cultural significance of this mythic text deserves one’s
critical attention. The reason is that while it is generally considered a
cautionary tale about science and the argument between science and religion,
there are many aspects of the narrative which points to its larger significance
in society that these adaptations try to elucidate and therefore unless one
looks at all these diverse perspectives, one cannot understand why this text
has created a monster out of a myth and a myth out of a monster.
The history of adaptations of Frankenstein begins in the year 1910 with
the first silent production of the literary narrative. This process of
adaptation and retelling of the myth of Frankenstein continues till date. Also,
the range of the kinds of adaptations start with silent films to science
fiction films to satires and parodies. The sheer diversity of the kind of
adaptations shows how the text has acquired a serial and viral aspect. Also,
each of these adaptations range from being extremely faithful to the texts, to
adaptations which would be considered as a “loose adaptation” which just use
the frame narrative to discover other aspects of the text that haven’t been
explored until now. Among these is one of the adaptations that is the focus of
this paper, namely the first episode of Season 2 of the web series Black
Mirror, which is a dystopic science fiction web series. This episode titled
“Be Right Back” was first aired on 11 February 2013 on Channel 4 in
Britain.
The reason why Web Series as a form of adaptation is amenable to what
this paper is calling a re/presentation of a literary narrative is because
there is no compulsion to be faithful to the text given that it does not have
the luxury of dwelling into all aspects of the text that is being adapted. Due
to the limitation of brevity, a Web Series will have a series of Episodes which
will each focus on a particular topic or theme and develop it in a nuanced
manner that captures the imagination of the audience in a short space of time.
This issue of brevity is turned into an advantage by Web Series makers to
highlight aspects that might not have been considered due to the desire to be
faithful to the text, as was the case in the twentieth century when fidelity
discourse was extremely prominent in Adaptation Studies. With a Web Series
having no such compulsion, it utilizes the fabula and constructs its own
syuzhet to elucidate a new perspective. This is precisely what makes Web Series
and their episodes amenable to exploring unique aspects of a timeless text.
Keeping this in mind, one can look at the first episode of Season Two,
titled Be Right Back as a re/presentation of the narrative presented by
Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein. Using the fabula as a frame
narrative, this episode brings to light how even though with the help of
artificial intelligence, the protagonist of the episode tries to deal with the
grief of the death of her boyfriend, but the mechanical nature of artificial
intelligence complicates the relationship between the human and the non-human.
What sets this adaptation apart from the other adaptations and
re/presentations of the Frankenstein myth is the closing sequence. While most
of the adaptations till now had focused either on the creation of the monster
and the terror that he wreaked or on trying to show the monster having a
soulmate, this adaptation goes a step further. After Martha realizes that the
AI Ash cannot be/cannot replace her real boyfriend and she lets out a
shattering scream when the monster refuses to jump into the water (a refusal
that is commanded by her because the AI android listens to her), suddenly the
scene shifts back to her house. At this moment the audience, for the first
time, sees Martha and Ash’s who is presented in the scene. It is inventive on
the part of the creators of the episode that the daughter enters on her birthday,
reminding one of the other birth that Martha had been party to, that is, the
birth of the monster, the AI android Ash. As Martha cuts the cake for herself
and the daughter, she is surprised that the daughter insists that three pieces
of cake be cut. After the third piece of cake is cut, the daughter takes it
upstairs to the attic where the monster is standing, looking outside
listlessly. When the daughter calls out, he turns around and is pleasantly
surprised that the young girl has brought a piece of cake in her hand for him
and he wishes her cheerfully on her birthday. After giving the cake to the
android, the daughter calls out to Martha below and asks her to come upstairs
and after hesitating Martha sets foot on the stairs as the scene fades out. This
ending problematizes the Frankenstein myth in two ways. The first way is by the
fact that the writers show the monster in a family setting at the end of the
narrative, making a marked distinction from other adaptations where the monster
is either destroyed or left to a lonely, desolate life. Secondly, the ambiguity
with which the scene fades away just as Martha takes her first step on the
stairs, leaves it open ended but suggestive whether Martha's ‘human daughter’
might help her overcome her earlier realized awkwardness towards android Ash.
In this sense then, this is a loose adaptation and thereby a re/presentation of
the Frankenstein myth, adding a unique layer to the miscellaneous nature of the
myth.
This episode is a powerful reminder of the wider social implications of
the technology driven world that one inhabits thanks to the progress in
civilization. The idea behind creating an AI replica to deal with the sense of
loss felt due to the death of a human being interestingly becomes a focal point
for discussing the idea of the human, the posthuman and the parahuman. At a
time where our world is being subsumed by technology at increasingly more and
more aspects of our lives, it is a glaring depiction of the networks of
science, technological advancements, the living and the machinic and the
complex synthesis of life itself.
It is also interesting to note that when Martha is told by her friend
that she can use this technology to deal with the sense of loss then she
screams and feels completely horrified by the idea that an artificially created
human being can help deal with the personal loss she felt. However, until the
very end when she realizes that the artificially induced Ash doesn’t behave
like her deceased boyfriend, she did find solace in the artificial voice that
she hears of Ash. It’s when the AI Ash takes human form that she realizes the
inherent absence in the online presence of her boyfriend which is embodied by
android Ash.
Another interesting adaptation which is a modern day take on the Frankenstein
myth is the 2015 adaptation titled Victor Frankenstein. It is important
to note here that there is a similarly titled film called Victor
Frankenstein: Terror of Frankenstein that was released in 1977. While the
1977 adaptation focused on the havoc wreaked by the Frankenstein monster, this
2015 adaptation presents a postmodern prequel to the Frankenstein myth while
being set in the 1870s, in the same century in which Mary Shelley set her
narrative. What sets this narrative apart from the other Frankenstein
adaptations is that this film narrates the story of Frankenstein from the
perspective of a young assistant who initially wants to help Victor
Frankenstein but later withdraws from the project.
The film while being set in the 1870s presents a new perspective on the
Frankenstein myth by depicting a complex web of past histories that force
Victor Frankenstein to enlist the services of his junior assistant who is
excellent in his knowledge of human anatomy. What sets this adaptation apart
from the other adaptations of the Frankenstein myth is that it shows the humane
dilemma that faces both Victor Frankenstein and his assistant, and which
ultimately results in an unlikely reconciliation and an acknowledgement of the
problem with creating a humanoid. It is also interesting to note that while to
a certain extent Igor Straussman understands Victor Frankenstein’s desire to
create the humanoid, at the same time, notwithstanding his initial reluctance
to acknowledge the flaws in the experiment, it is Igor who tries to make Victor
understand that he is making a mistake in the very motivations of his
experiment, the religious idea of guilt hiding behind the very scientific idea
of the humanoid. When finally Igor Straussman saves Victor Frankenstein from
his own creation, the latter realizes that perhaps his creation was flawed.
Additionally, in showing the conflicting emotions that were depicted by Igor
Straussman because of his own relationship with an aerialist who he had saved
during a circus program that he attended, which led to him joining forces with
Victor Frankenstein, the adaptation shows the humane side behind the conflict
that ensues between him and Victor Frankenstein.
Another detail that needs to be kept in mind while considering this
adaptation as a re/presentation of the Frankenstein myth is that while in the
novel he is roundly harassed for his views and his unorthodox experiments, in
this cinematic adaptation, the police officer who goes to charge Victor
Frankenstein for conducting these experiments is charged with trying to carry
out arrests without any warrant. This minute detail helps us in getting a sense
of the postmodern as in the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for arrests
to happen without any warrants. The fact that this religious police inspector
was suspended shows what he considered blasphemy is no longer considered
blasphemous in modern society as one is fast moving towards an age where
artificial intelligence will not only be possible but will also play a far more
important role than would have ever been possible in the nineteenth century
where the debate between religion and science was at its peak.
CONSUMPTION,
CYBORGIAN BODIES AND THE FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER
In Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back”, one comes face to face with
yet another embodiment of this myth but perhaps in a sense as wildly novel as
ordinarily relatable. The first episode of Season Two, “Be Right Back” features
the use of technology and data by a grieving woman to generate a
Frankensteinian monster of her dead partner in order to deal/prevent dealing
with the loss. Just like the monster is stitched together from stolen body
parts, Martha’s monster, the AI Ash, is stitched together from the ‘stolen’
parts of her partner Ash’s digital presence. Grieving over her loss after just
moving in together, Martha’s life is intruded by advice from people and
programs alike, suggesting ways to get over her loss. One such instance which
serves to provide a striking glance at the ways technology is even more
enmeshed in human lives in the near-future is when Martha receives targeted
advertisement which perceptively but invasively offer books that can help deal
with grief. The normality of Martha swiping away the notification from her
touch-free laptop through simple hand movements offers more than a view into
this future, it offers a commentary on the parahuman aspects of what it means
to be human in hypertech societies where devices are increasingly as extension
of one’s self and gradually, maybe even as much a part of oneself as the hand
which swipes the notification away. Even before one meets AI Ash, the
cyborgization of Martha’s (and Ash’s identity) is presented to the viewers
through subtle cues, whether it is Ash’s deep investment in his online presence
and frequent loss of attention in the events around him for the events in his
phone or Martha’s touch-screen easel.
The episode suggests that events of emotional stress reveal
something about the tearing fabric of reality, “It's not real, is it? At Mark's
wake, I sat there thinking it's not real. The people didn't look real, their
voices weren't real” (00:09:24,960--00:09:29,320). The moment of extreme grief
and melancholia stemming from loss traverses an otherwise abysmal gap between
affect and technology, where the virtual once again becomes the becoming,
mediated by loss and technic. Martha’s acquaintance Sarah not only voices this
but also becomes the turning point in the episode by offering Martha another
way to deal with her loss, though not very differently from the targeted
advertisement Martha so viciously deletes. “I can sign you up to something that
helps…It will let you speak to him. I know he's dead. But it wouldn't work if
he wasn't… It's software. It mimics him” (00:12:15,760--00:12:17,960). Martha
finds the idea ‘obscene’, just as the Frankensteinian monster is found to be
‘profane’. However, she soon finds herself lonely and pregnant, and already
being ‘signed-up’ to the unique service, she begins to feed the ‘monster’ parts
of Ash’s public online body which is aplenty since he was an active and “heavy
user” and has tweets and Facebook posts. The AI Ash begins to form and soon
Martha is hooked, providing him with more parts to perfect it, including audio
and video files, private data. AI Ash can now talk and unlike Victor
Frankenstein, the creator who was repulsed by the monster he created, Martha is
intrigued and even obsessed. In the 2015 film, Victor Frankenstein, one
finds Martha’s double, another contemporary Frankenstein who seeks to create a
monster to overcome or as he says “balance” the loss of his brother, Henry
Frankenstein. This loss experienced by Victor in his youth prompts him to take
matters of creation, life, death and destruction into his own hands. There is
an almost parallel exploration of the experience of death by the living in both
these contemporary re-imaginings of Frankenstein. However, Victor loses
his fascination much more quickly than Martha when he beholds the monster in
flesh. In a comparative analysis, it is clear that Martha’s interaction with
the AI Ash is mediated through media, information generated from social media,
and technology that is already deeply and openly interspersed in her life and
hence, the monster, the AI Ash does not appear grotesque to her in the sense
that it does to Victor. Victor’s monster is physically very different from the
AI Ash. It has its beginning in a homicidal, animalistic homunculus and even
when he tries a second attempt to make it in his “image”, the monster is an
excess—an excess which comes from the original text and carries the multitude
of interpretation or as Salotto puts it “there will always be an excess of
meaning (embodied in the creature) that upsets the notion of a unitary
identity, thereby disturbing the notions of origins or closure”—with a larger
frame, two hearts, two pairs of lungs, a flat head (just because Victor likes
it so) (199). It is surprising then that it is revealed later in his meeting
with this now live monster that he always expected a brother, a strange
emotional reaction from this ‘mad but scientific genius’ who beholds a figure
who neither recognizes Victor nor feels anything for anyone around him.
“Be Right Back” bypasses this concern, this lack of emotive aspect of
the monster in Victor Frankenstein which if one compares to Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein is misplaced for Shelley’s creation has
feelings and desires, by an AI that looks human, though unsettlingly flawless, more
perfect that its human image, and is capable of humane emotions, kinder,
sympathetic…a quick learner of what it would mean to be the human it mimics, a
mimicry of the perfect image that one portrays of oneself online. While
Victor’s monster is an organism that suggests its cyborg identity and “is about
transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities"
(Haraway 71), the AI Ash complicates the idea of ‘human’ by the obviousness of
its cybernetic organity, an obviousness that is both expected and accepted due
to it being an application, a software service that one can sign-up for.
However, there is a sense of dread portrayed in the scenes beginning with the
actual embodiment of the AI when a plain manufactured ‘body’ is sold to Martha
as part of the next “level” of the app. In a scene reminiscent of expandable
water toys or ‘grow monsters’, especially ‘Grow a Boyfriend Toy’ that is often
advertised and sold online, android Ash is created by the embodiment of the
virtual, AI Ash. There is something uncanny in its perfect appearance, but
Martha does not spurn him and neither treats him like her creation, unlike
Victor whose aim is to create life and be the proclaimed ‘creator’ of life. She
is looking for her partner she can keep in secret and not a scientific
discovery which would grant her fame, and so she accepts the android but at the
same subconsciously compares it to Ash, her partner whom she has lost. She is
looking for a replacement but for her a perfect replacement should have the imperfections,
the flaws and the personality traits of Ash that were not necessarily portrayed
in his digital presence. In its perfection, android Ash doesn’t have these.
Martha has sex with the android who does not have a record of Ash’s sexual
responses but can “turn that on and off pretty much instantly” and emulates
pornographic videos it can access online (00:33:53,240--00:33:58,400). Android
Ash doesn’t need to eat or have sex but can do if the “administrator” desires.
As Martha finds out, he won’t fight or argue unless she commands and, as the
episode progresses, when she tries to destroy it, will even jump off a cliff if
that is what she desires. Android Ash is a programmed cyborg, a figure of what
Haraway calls the “post-gender world”—the android that is delivered is like a
plain doll and all the details (including appearance, gender and sexuality)
that make it Ash are programmed on to it—but this fluidity and incompleteness
that makes android Ash a possibility also unnerves Martha as she, unknowing of
her own cyborg status, still clings to the idea of an “organic wholeness” that
is now only available in the ghost of Ash, her memories of Ash that are
mediated through time and technology even without the AI and the android.
At the end of the episode, after a time skip during which Martha’s
daughter is born and is growing up, it is revealed that just like Ash’s mother
used to put photographs of dead family members in the attic, Martha has not
destroyed the android but placed it in the attic. The android is equated with
photographs of lost ones, a fragment of a presence stuck in time and yet it
lives, continuing to defy the two-dimensional frame it has been designated
into. Martha and Ash’s daughter, probably even more accustomed to the possible
newer developments of their hypertech society which must have taken place in
the years the audience is not privy to, neither treats nor imagines android Ash
as a photograph, spending and enjoying her time with him. While still not fully
accepting in its conclusion, “Be Right Back” might have come the closest to
those “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of
their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently
partial identities and contradictory standpoints” that Haraway talked about in
“A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (72).
The unresolved presence of the android reminds one of the Frankenstein
myth which continues to make its presence felt and grows in different hands and
minds to embody newer concerns of technology, of cyborgs, of the post-human, no
doubt, but also always an analysis of what it means to be human and the
continuing questions of growing fragmentation and documentation of human life
and its data. Lupton suggests,
Like Frankenstein’s monster, these personal data are new forms or
extensions of human life. More than data doubles or doppelgangers, these
personal data have their own liveliness, their own worlds, that exist beyond
the purview of the humans who created them. They are constantly changing and
moving into new formations. I have elsewhere suggested that we can think of
personal digital data as companion species, living with and co-evolving with
us. (n. pag.)
CONCLUSION
Densen refers to the Frankenstein monster in and across retellings and
adaptations as a “serial figure...a stock character of sorts”, that while “a
series character exists within a series, where he or evolves; the serial
figure, on the other hand, exists as a series—as a concatenation of
instantiations that evolves, not within a homogenous diegetic space but between
or across such spaces of narration” (536). Victor’s monster is one in a
series of monsters that fail and are destroyed and then recycled and created
again and again at various levels of success mimicking not man’s “image” but
also the progression of the Frankenstein myth. Just like the monster is remade
every time with new and older parts, the myth too is recreated through the
various parts of the serial figure in the numerous appropriations of the myth.
Thus, it might not be wrong to say that the myth is as much the Frankensteinian
monster in media as is the creature it talks about. Similar to the android Ash
who cannot ever be totally relegated as a forgotten photograph in the attic,
the myth returns over and over in contemporary ruminations on the human
condition in its networked existence.
Both these adaptations can be considered as re/presentations of the
Frankenstein myth. It also needs to be acknowledged that both of these
adaptations capture the hopes and fears of a postmodern humanist society which
is struggling to come to terms with the ever-increasing influence of science
and technology in our lives. Therefore, these re/presentations of the
Frankenstein myth need to be read as the markers of our society at different
times.
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Friedrich,
pencils and inks by Mike Ploog, colors by Dave Hunt, letters by
Charlotte Jetter. Marvel, 1973.
Terror
of Frankenstein. Directed
by Calvin Floyd, performances by Leon Vitali, Per
Oscarsson, Nicholas Clay, Aspect, National Film Society of Ireland, 1977.
Victor
Frankenstein.
Directed by Paul McGuigan, performances by Daniel Radcliffe, James
McAvoy, Jessica Brown Findlay and Andrew Scott, 20th Century Fox,
2015.