Coming to a neighborhood near you?
by Erik the Cool Cricket
Anyone who has read "Frankenstein"--let me start over. There aren't too many people who know that there's a book, and I don't want to confuse the issue right from the start. I should begin by explaining that I will go back and forth between the two media--the written word and the flickering image--as I gradually get to my point.
Anyone who has seen "Frankenstein" knows that the scientist who creates the monster doesn't intend to do it. His plan is to do a good thing (in this case, to "bestow animation to lifeless matter"). His goal is kind of noble in a twisted way, and mostly he just wants to create something that will change the course of human history for good.
He has a moral compass, this impassioned student of the natural sciences. He tells the narrator of Mary Shelley's novel that the intensity of his pursuit should not have interfered with his respect for life and the wonders of the world around him. But he can't help it. Locked within the self-imposed jail of his obsession he even misses the beautiful change of seasons outdoors.
The book is a complex, tightly written epic that explicates the dangers of unconsidered success. The fact that it was written by a 19-year-old almost 200 years ago shows a depth and prescience that almost equals the eeriness of Shelley's work, but that's for scholars of the supernatural--or at least those who trace history by studying the common psyche of our mythological experience.
In the book, the monster becomes a cultivated, although immoral, well-spoken challenger of Frankenstein's temerity. "You are my creator," he says, but I am your master." Hollywood kept the basic story, but dumbed it down quite a bit, and if you've seen the movie, you know that a bunch of coincidental unplanned stuff happens, and pretty soon a giant, unstoppable, inarticulate oaf is harming wee children and threatening the poor doctor's friends and family right in his own neighborhood.
It's scary stuff, and kind of funny in an ironic sort of way, but it's sort of sad and pathetic, too.
One of the first movie versions of the story came out in 1931. It was directed by James Whale and starred Boris Karloff. It isn't all that big a deal to most of us 70 years later, but it was one of the most popular movies of its day (despite the fact that it was only in black and white).
The movie so ingrained itself into popular culture that it spawned quite a few sequels and remakes, and pretty much everybody in the world had been exposed to some version of this classic tale of doom--even people in Texas--by the time World War II blew a wide hole into the human timeline.
In the early 1940s, some American scientists began to work on their own bold project, at the behest of our grandparents' government. Their goal was also to change the course of history for good, see, but the result would be the de-animation of living matter (by vaporizing everything within several square kilometers).
At least a couple of these guys must have in their lifetime read or seen "Frankenstein" or one of its sequels. Whale's own clever follow-up, "The Bride of Frankenstein," was really a technical marvel in its day, so if they didn't see it, they weren't very conscientious scientists.
My question, which I'll put in quotes as if I'm asking it aloud, is "Didn't they know this monster they were making would come back and wreak havoc on their friends and family?"
Apparently there were plans in Germany and maybe the Soviet Union to build the monster themselves. That would have been their problem, for one thing, but it's also true that the second world war was totally winnable without dropping the bomb. The Allies threw stuff at cities in Germany until they were as black as a forgotten tray of burnt fish sticks--all without the use of elements of the radioactive persuasion.
We could have done the same to the "targets" in Japan. The war would have been over, and no one would have seen nor heard the big monster, and maybe no one would have felt the need to make their own--there wouldn't have been any sequels to worry about, anyway, which is where we're at now.
None of this, of course, is directly our fault. We've sort of inherited the monster from our granddads. And unfortunately, we get the terror and the creepy icky feeling of knowing the monster is out there, too, without being able to do much about it. We could send off an e-mail to the White House, but that might back up on us, what with the current government's sensitivity to unseemly displays of discord among its people.
One thing you learn from horror movies is that no matter how many times you kill a bloody thing, it or some weird relation will show up again and bash some serious heads. That's what seems to be the big problem coming toward us now. The movie could be titled "Son of the Cold War."
Even if it is inevitable in Hollywood terms that all bad things won't come to an end, in real life, it's better to kill the monster. One thing you don't do is dismantle a monster and put it in storage, like our President (or those who tell him what to say) has suggested in his plan to "reduce" the nuclear arms surplus.
You must destroy the monster. You don't save its parts. You split it into the tiniest pieces and crush it and stomp on it and get rid of it. Then it will take a longer time to get started again, to reanimate, and maybe you can jump on it before it gets the jump on you. Whatever you do, you don't give the creation enough power to become the master.
If you live in a big city like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York or Washington D.C., this may have occurred to you. You're not so worried about nuclear war. That threat's pretty much gone bye-bye. You worry that O.B.L. and his Al Quaida cronies, or someone else like them, will grab up some refined plutonium or tritium that has its origins in the labs of a few mad scientists long before most of us were born. Even if the goons only get enough to put together a bomb the size of a newborn baby, that's a few million of us dead in any given second. You might not even have time to finish reading this sentence.
So far so good. Anyway, if they do unleash the monster in any one of our downtowns, we can blame our great granddads, but we can also blame ourselves if we let it continue. America created this thing, and at any time it could come back and stomp on its children. And even after that, we'll probably keep feeding it, or we'll make a new monster so our future relatives get to dream of its roar in the middle of the night. I just hope they don't actually have to hear it in person.
I'm using nukes as the MacGuffin cuz it's on a lot of our minds. But plug in America's Middle East meddling, our tinkering with anthrax or any number of other worthwhile endeavors of the past and you get my point. The basic plot paradigm stands: There are monsters a-loose out there, and we made 'em!
I kind of wish people would read Shelley's book. The President says he likes to read. Maybe he'd get a kick out of it. It's full of nature and philosophy and nascent science, and it has an eloquent sense of horror that bleeds into the mind from the pages with a subtlety that no movie can convey, even one in color.
Early in the book, the weary and hollow-eyed Frankenstein warns: "I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale; one that may direct you if you succeed in your undertaking, and console you in case of failure."
I only hope we can figure out a way to stop our monsters before they put a stop to us.
c. March, 2002 The Cool Cricket Company (tm)