Karly
My relationship with Frankenstein got off to a slightly unconventional start. I first read Mary Shelley when I was twelve because we were reading the novel in English class, got surprisingly invested and then, somewhere around the wedding night, our teacher decided the material was inappropriate for us and stopped the whole thing. I still find the logic of this extraordinary because we’d apparently been deemed mature enough for a story about a man assembling a living creature from dead body parts, rejecting him and setting off a chain of misery and death, but the wedding night was where somebody finally decided the children needed protecting. I have, for the record, read Frankenstein properly since then, so this isn’t going to be an essay based entirely on whatever fragments of Mary Shelley survived in my twelve-year-old brain, although that would admittedly be quite funny.
It does mean that I came to Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with enough knowledge to know what I was watching and enough affection for the novel to understand why adaptations of it inspire such strong opinions, while also carrying two biases that I should probably disclose immediately. By now, anybody who has spent more than about ten minutes on Nonsense & Lit knows that putting Helena Bonham Carter in a period drama is an extremely efficient way of getting my attention, and I also genuinely love Kenneth Branagh’s work. This isn’t a court of law, I have no intention of recusing myself and I’m perfectly happy for these facts to sit on the record while I tell you that I watched Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and thought it was actually good.
Apparently, I’m not supposed to think that, or at least that’s the impression you get from the reputation the film has accumulated since its release in 1994. It’s excessive, melodramatic, overwrought and apparently suffering from a terminal inability to calm down. Kenneth Branagh is doing too much, everybody else is doing too much, the camera is doing too much and the music is certainly doing too much, while there’s enough sweat, fire, blood, screaming, running, dramatic lighting and dramatic weather to suggest that nobody involved in the production was ever informed that human emotion can occur at anything below maximum capacity. If restraint was available on set, Branagh seems to have looked directly at it and said no thank you.
My question is whether we’ve considered that this is precisely why it’s so much fun, because I don’t mean fun in the sense that Frankenstein is secretly a lighthearted romp and we’ve all somehow failed to notice. The story remains horrifying, tragic and increasingly miserable for essentially everyone involved, but the film’s refusal to do anything by halves gives it an energy I found completely irresistible. It doesn’t politely invite you into its Gothic world and trust you to appreciate the tasteful production design. It grabs you by the shoulders, drags you into a laboratory and starts shouting about LIFE AND DEATH while lightning strikes something expensive in the background, and frankly I respect the commitment.
There’s a confidence to that kind of excess which I’ve realised I miss, particularly because so much contemporary film and television seems frightened of appearing earnest, as though every sincere emotion needs an escape hatch in the form of a joke, a knowing look or some little reassurance that everybody involved understands how silly stories can be. Branagh’s Frankenstein doesn’t seem embarrassed by itself for a second. It believes in Victor’s obsession, it believes in the Creature’s anguish, it believes in the horror of what’s happening and, perhaps most importantly, it believes that if Kenneth Branagh needs to sprint across a room looking damp and tormented to communicate any of this, somebody had better clear the floor.
This doesn’t mean every choice works simply because it’s made enthusiastically, nor does enjoying an adaptation require pretending that adaptation criticism doesn’t exist. Calling the film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein practically begs us to examine its relationship with Shelley, and there are choices to argue with because there are always choices to argue with when a novel becomes a film. Adaptation isn’t a matter of checking whether every event survived the journey from page to screen anyway, because a film can preserve an event while changing its meaning, collapse characters while retaining their function or invent something that never happens in the source and somehow capture an element of the novel perfectly. Fidelity is considerably messier than a checklist, which is also why Chels can tell you all about the adaptation itself while I’m currently much more interested in why this particular adaptation’s excess is apparently something I’m expected to apologise for enjoying.
The strangest thing about watching a film with an established reputation is that the reputation gets there before the film does. You press play already knowing which adjectives you’re supposed to reach for, and with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, words like overblown, hysterical and melodramatic are practically sitting beside you on the sofa waiting to be confirmed. You start noticing the excess because you’ve been told to notice the excess, waiting for the moment when the whole thing finally tips over and reveals why everybody agreed this was simply too much, and then the moment arrives and you discover that your response is essentially: yes, and?
I don’t particularly want a restrained Frankenstein. Shelley’s novel is full of enormous questions about creation, responsibility, ambition, isolation, monstrosity, knowledge and what one human being owes another after bringing him into existence, while the emotional consequences of Victor’s choices spread through practically every relationship around him. This is a man who decides that the ordinary limits of life and death are insufficient for him and then discovers, with almost impressive speed, that perhaps they existed for a reason. If there were ever material capable of surviving a director deciding to turn the Gothic dial until it comes off in his hand, I’d say this qualifies.
The Gothic has never exactly been famous for emotional minimalism either, which makes some of the complaints about the film’s theatricality particularly interesting to me. This is a mode full of bodies, storms, terror, desire, death, ruined spaces, forbidden knowledge and people making catastrophic decisions while the natural world provides suspiciously appropriate weather. Sometimes I want atmosphere to creep up on me, certainly, but sometimes I want it to kick the door down, throw open the curtains and announce that MAN HAS MEDDLED WITH THE LAWS OF NATURE, preferably while Patrick Doyle’s score makes absolutely certain I understand the severity of the situation.
Branagh commits to that scale completely, and I think commitment is a large part of what makes the film work for me. There’s no ironic distance protecting it from the possibility that somebody might find it ridiculous, and there’s no sense that the film is winking at us to prove it knows better than its own melodrama. Everyone is playing the stakes as though they genuinely matter because, to these characters, they do. Victor isn’t mildly interested in scientific innovation; he’s attempting to defeat death. The Creature hasn’t had a difficult adjustment period; he’s been dragged into existence without his consent, abandoned by the person responsible for him and left to discover humanity largely through its capacity for cruelty. Under those circumstances, I’m not sure I particularly want everyone sitting quietly in tastefully appointed rooms discussing their feelings at a moderate volume.
Then, of course, there’s Helena Bonham Carter, and I can already hear the accusations of bias because yes, obviously, I’m biased. If you give me Helena Bonham Carter in nineteenth-century clothing, I’m going to arrive predisposed to have a nice time, and I’ve never claimed otherwise. Elizabeth also gives the film something it desperately needs because all of Victor’s enormous ideas about life, death and creation ultimately have consequences for actual people, and his obsession can’t remain an abstract intellectual exercise once it begins destroying the lives around him. Knowing where the story is going doesn’t make watching that happen any less dreadful, although my longstanding HBC bias certainly makes me even less inclined to forgive Victor Frankenstein for anything.
That combination of sincerity and excess is also why I can’t bring myself to place the film in the category of the guilty pleasure, a concept I’ve never particularly believed in anyway. There’s a strange ritual involved in admitting you enjoy something with a questionable critical reputation in which you’re expected to demonstrate awareness of its supposed deficiencies before you’re allowed to say you like it. I know it’s bad, but I love it. I know it’s cheesy, but. I know the reviews were terrible, but. Only once you’ve sufficiently established that you possess taste are you allowed to confess that the allegedly tasteless thing gave you pleasure, as though enjoying a film without first acknowledging its correct place in the cultural hierarchy might result in somebody confiscating your Letterboxd account.
I’m not interested in doing that with Frankenstein because I don’t enjoy it ironically, nor am I watching from a safe intellectual distance while chuckling affectionately at all the silly people who thought they were making Serious Art. One of the things I like most about the film is precisely that they appear to be making Serious Art with absolutely no concern for whether somebody might find the result a little much. I can understand why that intensity exhausts some viewers, I can understand why readers disagree with adaptation choices and I can understand why Branagh’s maximalism isn’t going to work for everybody, but none of those things requires me to translate my own enjoyment into a guilty pleasure simply to prove I’m capable of recognising criticism.
That’s the distinction I think gets lost whenever we talk about pleasure as though it’s an embarrassing failure of critical judgement. I can recognise excess without wishing it had been restrained, hear a convincing argument against a creative choice while continuing to enjoy it and understand why somebody dislikes a film without quietly updating my own opinion to match theirs. Criticism gives us more language with which to understand art, but ideally that language should make our relationship with it more interesting rather than turning taste into an exam where there’s a correct response and everybody who enjoyed the wrong thing has to show their working.
If anything, reading Shelley makes Branagh’s choices more interesting to me because I can see the adaptation as an interpretation rather than a replacement, and I don’t need one to cancel out the other. The novel is still there. Branagh hasn’t sneaked into my house and removed it from the shelf, nor does enjoying his version require me to decide that every decision he makes is the only possible way to translate Shelley to screen. I can love the strange, unsettling intelligence of the novel and also enjoy a film that takes its Gothic impulses, pours petrol over them and lights a match.
Perhaps that’s ultimately why I’ve become so fond of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: it has the courage of its own ridiculous convictions. It wants to be huge, romantic, grotesque, tragic, frightening and operatic, sometimes all within approximately four minutes, and whether every attempt lands matters less to my experience of it than the fact that it never seems ashamed of trying. I’d much rather watch a film reach extravagantly for something and occasionally overextend itself than spend two hours watching one carefully protect itself from the possibility of being laughed at.
My twelve-year-old self never got to finish Frankenstein because an English teacher decided the wedding night was a bridge too far, but I eventually went back and finished what she started, and perhaps that makes the whole thing even funnier now. I know the novel, I know Branagh’s film isn’t the novel and I know there are perfectly legitimate reasons someone might dislike what he does with it, but none of that has produced the critical revelation that I was apparently supposed to have. I still like it, I still love HBC in a period drama, I still love Ken’s work and I still think a sweaty, thunderous, wildly committed Gothic spectacle has considerably more going for it than its reputation suggests.
So no, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t a guilty pleasure because I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, and I’m not going to preface liking it with an apology simply because somebody else has a beautifully articulated argument for why I shouldn’t. They can have their argument, Chels can have the detailed adaptation analysis, Helena Bonham Carter can continue making it virtually impossible for me to approach a period drama without bias and Kenneth Branagh can have every candle, thunderclap, billowing shirt and bead of sweat he can get his hands on. I’ll have my extremely uncomplicated pleasure in watching the whole ridiculous, sincere, Gothic thing unfold, because Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein is actually good, sorry, although by this point I think we’ve established that I’m not particularly sorry at all.
