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50:169 Doctors in Film

Film Notes

Frankenstein

This is the first of the Hollywood films (Universal Studios) depicting Dr. Frankenstein delving into "the secrets of life and death" to create one of the world's most famous monsters. It is loosely based on the book by Mary Shelley, first published in 1818, which is a major literary classic -- one of the first modern horror novels.

Although the movie "Frankenstein" is set in an unidentified European country (at least as indicated by costumes of the townspeople), it is very much an American film and an Americanized version of the original story. It is difficult, but try to see the film as if you had never seen a horror film before and so might find aspects of it truly scary and even shocking.

Questions for discussion:

• what qualities make Dr. Frankenstein, a physician-scientist, the flawed hero of this tale?
• what social and moral transgressions does the monster represent?
• how is science depicted in the film -- literally, what are the props? the cultural symbols? the technology?
• is the monster an innate murderer? made that way? an accidental one? the film is not exactly subtle, but is there some ambiguity here?
• would you say that the film has a happy ending?
• Frankenstein appeared in 1931 -- where does it fit on the timeline in the history of medicine? That is, what had medical science actually accomplished to increase the prestige and power of "science" in Western culture?

For further reading:

Chris Baldick, “The Politics of Monstrosity,” in In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 10-29. Baldick creates a context for the social, physical, and moral meanings of “monster” at the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Baldick sees the novel as intending to challenge people’s ideas about identity and morality—i.e., the “monster” is a creation of human making, and thus demands that creators take responsibility for it.

Albert J. Lavalley, “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey, in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979, pp. 243-89.

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