Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - The Film

Although the original character of Walton is sacrificed, this adaptation nevertheless is used to support a theme which is original and fundamental to the text. In altering Walton’s character to create a more dynamic and cinematic figure, Walton loses any empathy the audience. Shelley’s figure of Walton is presented as being an almost likable, though naive character. Branagh, although retaining the idea of an unrecognizable evil within ourselves through the character of Frankenstein, further creates a more sinister figure of Walton, to whom the audience direct their suspicion.

Branagh counterbalances the sinister character of Walton with a more human Frankenstein. Instead of Frankenstein’s experiments stemming from a fundamental need to discover, or a thirst for fame, the scientist’s drive to create life arises from the death of his mother. Beside her grave he reveals the promise that forms the foundation of his ambition:

“No one need ever die. I will stop this. I will stop this. I promise.”

In this way Frankenstein is made to appear more humane. This, in turn, modify the tone of the story, depicting a more sentimental viewing of the events which unravel. By presenting Frankenstein as having a more personal motive to create, the director uses the novel as a springboard to explore and present the author’s original ideas within the context of his own generation. By slightly adapting Shelley’s original idea, Branagh, employing a more thematic function allows the audience a slightly more sympathetic reaction towards Frankenstein’s ambition.

A noticeable difference between the film and the novel is that the use of the three narrators is sacrificed in order to create a more chronological viewing of the events. However, the use of narrators is not a primary requirement in film making. The absence of narrators assists in conveying the original themes of the novel in various ways. In presenting individual characters telling their own stories, there is a tendency to forget the context of each character, the single voice becoming absorbed in his own story. While, as a literary technique this can prove successful in drawing the reader into the mind of the character, it nevertheless is undeniably subjective, as is witnessed in the example of Walton’s letters. Film allows a viewer to recognize Doctor Frankenstein within a much larger context. For example, in the film, there is a scene which takes place within the university auditorium. Frankenstein, new to the university, is standing looking over the balcony, and as the camera pulls away from the actor, we see Frankenstein as being one face within hundreds. This effect, which is difficult to construct within the written word, prevents the viewer from recognizing Frankenstein as unique. Branagh allows the viewer to see the destructive thirst for knowledge as being part of wider picture. Frankenstein then refrains from purely being a representation of a single character as in the novel, but as a symbol of humanity, which although is not visually described in the original text, nevertheless remains loyal to the original themes presented by Shelly.

A film can use cinematic techniques to emphasise important issues which may be forgotten in reading. The director of “Frankenstein” allows the audience to witness the full extent of a cholera epidemic that is sweeping through the city in which Doctor Frankenstein lives. This allows the audience to recognize that, as a doctor, Frankenstein’s efforts could be better placed elsewhere. Although the epidemic is absent from the novel, Shelly includes similar instances such as Elizabeth’s illness prior to Frankenstein departure that encourages the reader to contemplate the doctor’s misplaced efforts. However, these contemplations cannot be retained in the mind as the reader as successfully as in the viewer because of the transient nature of the instances described. Also, during the film, we see Frankenstein obtaining his “raw materials” to create his monsters. As Frankenstein prepares to dismantle a human body, the camera slowly moves towards the corpse’s face, and we are reminded that he is using human remains, which can be difficult to remember when Frankenstein narrates his experiments so clinically in the novel.

The different techniques applied by an author and a director to highlight important scenes sometimes, but not always differ. Mary Shelly applies the technique of repetition in order to emphasize important themes throughout the novel. Shelly tends to use the same type of language, and there is little subtly in her repetition, as evident in chapter ten, and again in chapter seventeen:

I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complain of his wickedness.

did I not as his maker owe him all the happiness that it was in my power to bestow?

Although, certain scenes can be emphasized through the use of lighting and music, Branagh exercises the original technique of repetition used by Shelly. However, this technique is not demonstrated through speech, but through visual imagery, which becomes a more subtle, and more effective use of repetition. During the scenes of Frankenstein as a child, he shakes hands with his new adopted sister, Elizabeth. The camera focuses solely on their handshake. Again, when Frankenstein leaves his fiancée, the two actors shake hands, and the camera focuses again on this image. This handshake provides the viewer with a lasting image, that serves as a visual reminder for an audience when Frankenstein abandons his family and Elizabeth in pursuit of science.

One of the most effective scenes within the film, is one in which after the monster has murdered Elizabeth, Frankenstein brings her back to life, using the same techniques and procedures used in creating his original monster. Elizabeth’s newly demolished features are grotesque in the face of her former beauty, which were visually enhanced on screen. Frankenstein embracing his wife’s body, then dances with her limp, though living corpse, the scene becoming a sinister and sickening parody of their former romance. The discordancy of the music, and the sinister lighting depicts the distorted morality the drives man’s ambition to create life. Frankenstein tries to create a being that is better than man. This scene cinematically conveys the sick and perverted realities of Frankenstein’s ambitions, and although the scene is absent from the original text, it nevertheless succeeds, more successfully than the novel, in conveying the same physical repulsion that Shelly intended to provoke from the reader. The amalgamation of music, lighting and hideous makeup combine to create an effect which is almost impossible to achieve through the written word.

In Branagh’s “Frankenstein”, the director makes artistic decisions which adapt Shelley’s original text, characters and plot. Many critics find the manipulation, of an original text destructive and exploitative. However, it would seem that the more a literary text if altered, exploited, diluted and changed by a commercial culture, the more effective its impact on contemporary society, and surely it is this impact that Shelly ultimately intended when writing the novel. There still remains a clear intention to remain faithful to the themes and ideas that arose from the original literary text, and although it may be true that only a detailed reading of the novel can fully bring to light the themes and ideas of a story, the film allows the viewer a more sensory reaction to the events within the gothic tale, and whether this be brought about by a true and unadulterated representation of a text, or whether the director has exercised his own artistic interpretation ultimately proves irrelevant. As Micheal Carreras, a producer of an earlier Frankenstein film bluntly states, “Our job is to entertain and promote something that is really exploitable. Exploitation is the thing” It would seem that Branagh in effect has created his own monster, cutting up, copying and manipulating an original text in producing a replica of the original. Indeed like Frankenstein himself, Branagh perhaps had ambitions to improve upon the prototype created before him, but as we have seen with both Frankenstein’s own experiences, and I think in the film itself, it is proven that disaster often succeeds ambition.