Danse Macabre

*Much of the story is unintentionally hilarious. The monster hides in a shed adjacent to a peasant hut. One of the peasants, Felix, just happens to be teaching his girlfriend, a runaway Arabian noblewoman named Safie, his language; thus the monster learns how to talk. His reading primers are Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter {sic}, books he has discovered in a cast-off trunk lying in a ditch. This baroque tale-within-a-tale is only rivaled in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, when Crusoe strips naked, swims out to the foundering ship that has marooned him, and then, according to Defoe, fills his pockets with all sorts of goodies.

My admiration for such invention knows no bounds.

At length, Victor agrees, and actually does make the woman. He accomplishes this second act of creation on a desolate island in the Orkney chain, and in these pages Mary Shelley creates an intensity of mood and atmosphere that nearly rivals the creation of the original.

Doubts assail Frankenstein moments before he is to imbue the creature with life. He imagines the world desolated by the pair of them. Even worse, he imagines them as a hideous Adam and Eve of an entire race of monsters. A child of her times, Shelley apparently never considered the idea that for a man capable of creating life from moldering spare parts, it would be child's play to create a woman without the capacity for conceiving a child.

The monster turns up immediately after Frankenstein has destroyed its mate, of course; he has several words for Victor Frankenstein and none of them are "happy birthday." The reign of terror he has promised takes place like a chain of exploding firecrackers (although in Ms.

Shelley's sedate prose they are more like a roll of caps). Frankenstein's boyhood friend, Henry Clerval, is strangled by the monster for openers. Shortly thereafter the monster utters the book's most horrible i

Frankenstein responds to this threat by almost immediately marrying his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth-not one of the book's more believable moments, although hardly in a class with the abandoned trunk in the ditch or the runaway Arabian noblewoman. On their wedding night, Victor goes out to confront the creature, having naively assumed that the monster's threat is against himself. Meanwhile, the monster has broken into the small but Victor and Elizabeth have taken for the night. Exit Elizabeth. Frankenstein's father goes next, a victim of shock and heartbreak.

Frankenstein pursues his demon creation relentlessly north, into the Arctic wastes, where lie dies aboard the Polebound ship of Robert Walton, another scientist determined to crack open the mysteries of God and Nature . . . and the circle neatly closes.

3

So the question arises: How did it happen that this modest gothic tale, which was only about a hundred pages long in its first draft (Ms. Shelley's husband, Percy, encouraged her to flesh it out), became caught in a kind of cultural echo chamber, amplifying through the years until, a hundred and sixty-four years later, we have a cereal called Frankenberry (closely related to those two other favorites of the breakfast table, Count Chocula and Booberry) ; an old TV series called The Munsters, which has apparently gone into terminal syndication; Aurora Frankenstein model kits, which, when completed, delight the happy young modelmaker with a glow-in-the-dark creature lurching through a glow-in-the-dark graveyard; and a saying such as "He looked like Frankenstein" as a kind of apotheosis of ugly?

The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies. The movies did it. And this is a true answer, as far as it goes. As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber . . . perhaps because, in terms of ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotion-the young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself-the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah's Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head . . . or run over by a train.

There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to A

But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema "new wave" that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965 ), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood "art house" with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it's easy to misread the success of Woody Allen's later films in this regard. In America's urban areas, his films-and films such as Cousin, Cousine-generate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George ( Night of the Lining Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls "good ink," but in the sticks-the quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire-these pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear. It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl.

Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want.

What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly ca

So when one asks who or what turned Mary Shelley's well-spoken monster with his education from The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost into a pop archetype, the movies are a perfectly good answer. God knows the movies have turned unlikelier subjects into archetypes-scuzzy mountain-men matted with dirt and crawling with lice become proud and handsome symbols of the frontier (Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, or pick the Su

But we're not discussing the War Hero or the Strong, Silent Peace Officer here; we are discussing that ever-popular archetype, the Thing Without a Name. For surely if any novel spans the entire period of book-into-film-into-myth, Frankenstein is that book. It was the subject of one of the first "story" films ever made, a one-reeler starring Charles Ogle as the creature. Ogle's conception of the monster caused him to tease his hair and to apparently cover his face with partially dried Bisquick. That film was produced by Thomas Edison. The same archetype is on view today as the subject of the CBS television series The Incredible Hulk, which has managed to combine two of the archetypes we are discussing here . . . and to do so with a fair amount of success ( The Incredible Hulk can be seen as a Werewolf story as well as a Thing story). Although I have to say that each transformation from David Ba

* "Ole greenskin is back," my seven-year-old son Joe is apt to say comfortably when David Ba

So we begin with the movies-but what has turned Frankenstein into a movie not just once but again and again and again? One possibility is that the storyline, although constantly changed (perverted, one is tempted to say) by the filmmakers who have used (and abused) it, usually contains the wonderful dichotomy that Mary Shelley built into her story: on one hand the horror writer is an agent of the norm, he or she wants us to watch for the mutant, and we feel Victor Frankenstein's horror and disgust at the relentless, charnel creature he has made.

But on the other hand, we grasp the fact of the creature's i

The monster strangles Henry Clerval and promises Frankenstein he will "be with him on his wedding night," but the monster is also a creature of childlike pleasure and wonder, who beholds the "radiant form" of the moon rising above the trees; he brings wood to the poor peasant family like a good spirit in the night; he seizes the hand of the old blind man, falls on his knees, and begs him: "Now is the time! Save and protect me! . . . Do not desert me in the hour of trial!" The creature who strangles snotty William is also the creature who saves a little girl from drowning . . . and is rewarded with a charge of buckshot in the ass for his pains.