Puttin' on the Ritz: A review of Frankenstein: A Cultural History

This explains why students every year are disappointed when they encounter the book's multiple viewpoints, its shifting scenes from the Alps to the Arctic, its inconclusive ending. The hunchbacked assistant they know from a hundred pop-culture references ("What hump?"), the grunting monster, the shrieking doctor, the angry villagers waving torches: All of these originally came from Victorian stage adaptations which served as source material for the Hollywood scriptwriters.

As the stage and screen adaptations made Frankenstein more dramatic and more lurid, Ms. Hitchcock notes, the story also became less provocative and ambivalent, more conservative and cautionary -- until only Karloff's performance on screen lends the monster a shred of human pathos. Frankenstein is about what it means to be human, about the source of our morality. It is Mary Godwin's bold, somewhat muddled answer to Milton's Paradise Lost. But instead, it came to express primitive fears of scientific advances we don't understand, of any tinkering with God's creation.

In the novel, for instance, the monster learns both kindness and hatred from human society -- from reading books (including Milton) and spying on a family. But in the original 1931 movie, as we all remember, the sadistic assistant Fritz dropped the good brain that he'd been sent to steal and took the "criminal" one instead. It seems, therefore, that people are not taught evil -- some of us are just born with evil brains! (sound effect: crash of thunder) -- exactly the opposite of what Godwin intended.

This is some of Ms. Hitchcock's best material, tracing the early ways the monster was pumped up and dumbed down. She is also good at the other end of the book, on the controversies over genetic engineering ("Frankenfood") and how even the name "Frankenstein" was avoided by Bush administrators working to curtail cloning and stem-cell research. With good cause, they'd already been labeled "anti-science"; bringing up the monster would only make them look worse.

On this point, Ms. Hitchcock seems rather partial to Leon R. Kass, Bush's conservative point man on bio-ethics, famous for his argument that revulsion is a sound basis for moral judgment: If something grosses you out, you should trust your instinct and conclude that it's probably bad. Despite this peculiar reasoning -- which surely would lead one to conclude that the music of Celine Dion is morally suspect, at best -- Mr. Kass gets high marks (and extra attention) from Ms. Hitchcock: at least he turns to fiction like Frankenstein when weighing such matters.

In between these two ends, Frankenstein: A Cultural History is a survey of films and comic books, toys and even postage stamp versions of the bolt-necked creature -- including such send-ups as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, currently on Broadway. Unfortunately, by the end, this leads to a rapid litany of artifacts. It also means Ms. Hitchcock keeps making the same general observations, keeps writing about yet another story of man playing God and getting his comeuppance from his own creation.

Her inclination toward Jungian myth criticism increases this sameness. That is, she sees myths as much as individuals -- they all blur together into a convenient archetype: yet another story about man playing God, etc., etc. At one point, for instance, she makes the generalization that liberals tend to be Promethean characters (testing our limits -- like Victor Frankenstein) while conservatives are more like Adam (accepting the world as it is).

A half-minute's consideration, and the large holes here are apparent. Surely, Rudolph Guiliani is one of the more Promethean political figures around today; one could make the same case for Dick Cheney (defying Constitutional limits on executive power the way he does). Or even Joe McCarthy (he went too far and took on the Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings). Conversely, much of the point of eco-liberalism would seem to be humbly "living within limits," not just accepting but trying to preserve our bio-world as it is.

Ms. Hitchcock clearly has the impulses of a fan, and a word needs to be said in favor of such thoroughness: She touches on rare nuggets beyond the usual chronology of Hammer horror films: a 1910 Edison silent-film short, for example, Theodore Roszak's novel, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and even an NBC-TV adaptation by, of all people, Christopher Isherwood.

Given this thoroughness, though, it's surprising when this otherwise entertaining book overlooks some remarkable touchstones: