We saw the National Theatre broadcast of the Danny Boyle/Nick Dear staging of Frankenstein a few weeks ago. It was an exciting evening: the Downtown Independent was buzzing—totally sold out.
It must have been amazing to see live. The lighting alone would have been worth the price of admission, with a ceiling completely covered with an Annette Messager-ish assemblage of antique lights that throbbed patterns in response to the action.
It was amazing, and I’m glad I saw it (and it made me finally get around to reading the book!) but I kept getting tripped up by the contrast between the supersophisticated visual spectacle and the pedestrian language. Only at the very end, when Elizabeth talks to Victor and the Monster, did the dialog become interesting. And even then, instead of Mary Shelly’s nuanced arguments, Nick Dear telegraphed mythic talking points.
Boyle and Dear were right to dispense with the idea that it’s a myth about technology run amok, and focus more on the tragedy of a creature denied love. That emerged from the spectacle intermittently. But while turning it into a tragic love story is probably the one sure way to make it understandable today, it also dispensed with Mary Shelly’s nuanced dramatization of how different kinds of desire for different kinds of knowledge and power can be humanizing or dehumanizing. That didn’t quite make it through all the wham-bang-pow, about which Mary had clear opinions:
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
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