How Guillermo del Toro Set The Monster Free
“Excuse me, ‘Frankenstein’ is the name of the doctor, not the monster.”
If you’ve ever had the…let’s call it ‘pleasure’ of dealing with a specific sort of person, online or in the real world, no doubt you’ve had the above line dropped on you at some point. Not always by a pedantic, nasally sort who pushed his glasses up on a face that just seems so naked without a toilet bowl underneath it, but let’s be honest: that’s the guy you’re picturing.
It was such a well-worn gotcha that 1987’s Monster Squad could trot that little nugget out as a short-hand for monster movie trivia shared amongst its prepubescent creature combatants. And since then, “didyouknowthatfrankensteinisactuallythedoctornotthemonster” has continued to be a kind of spike pit waiting beneath any discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and it’s endless number of adaptations (including, you know, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein).
And, look, part of what makes the line so annoying is the simple fact that it’s correct. Shelley’s creature gets saddled with any number of descriptors and labels, “wretch” being a popular one, but never bears any true moniker at any point in the book. The modern Prometheus being identified by the title is, in fact, the doomed doctor who brings the creature to life.
But all the self-satisfied corrections in the world cannot stop overwhelming cultural memory. There is just no stopping people from associating “Frankenstein” with the lumbering living dead man with green skin, bolts in his neck, and a head so flat you could serve afternoon tea on it.
Different adaptations take different approaches as to how to address the issue. Some, like the aforementioned Monster Squad or the similarly kid-centric Hotel Transylvania movies, embrace the short-hand and call their incarnation of the big lug “Frank” or “Frankie”. On the Showtime series Penny Dreadful, the creature (played by Rory Kinnear) dubbed himself ‘Caliban’. The most popular unofficial name might be Adam, riffing on both the creature’s nature as a new man and a line from the book in which the creature says, “I ought to have been thy Adam…”
Maybe it’s because of this century-plus of consternation over what to call the damn thing that it feels so pointed for Guillermo del Toro to have foregrounded the issue of names and naming in his masterful reinvention of the Frankenstein story. As in Shelley’s book, this version of the monster, played by Jacob Elordi, never gets a name. This time, though, his nameless nature conveys not wretchedness but freedom, the final grace note in del Toro’s effort to turn Shelley’s tragedy of masculine overreach into a parable of hard-won peace between fathers and sons.
The importance of names is introduced to us simultaneously with our introduction to Frankenstein himself. No sooner has Victor (Oscar Isaac) said his name than his rescuer (Lars Mikkelsen) notes that it means “conqueror. One who wins it all.”
“It was my father who gave me that name,” a bitter (and bitterly cold) Victor says, practically spitting out the reference to his imposing progenitor.
Whereas the Baron Frankenstein of the book is a benevolent old soul, del Toro has reimagined the character more along the lines of the fascist and proto-fascist figures of macho dread across his filmography. Like Captain Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth, this Baron is a fixed point of cold austerity, polished and precise but without an ounce of human compassion to offset his domineering nature and his lapses into outright abuse.
Early in the film, a young Victor declares his intention to surpass his father’s achievements, and you can look at the adult Victor’s libertine lifestyle, bohemian fashions, and punk rock defiance towards the medical establishment as deliberate efforts to spit in the face of the life his father laid out for him. But if your whole existence is predicated around spiting someone, especially a dead someone, doesn’t that mean that person has won? That even in their absence, they are still at the epicenter of your life?
Once he has created the monster and entered into a twisted form of paternity, Victor quickly begins unwittingly reenacting his father’s abuses, becoming the same cold, commanding figure the Baron had been to him. The more his child will not conform to Victor’s preconceptions for him, the more Victor lashes out.
Here again, the matter of Victor’s name is the vessel through which del Toro articulates his theme. For a time, the creature’s only spoken word is “Victor”, initially said with purest love and adoration. But of course it drives Victor crazy to be defined only by the name his father gave him. That his name is the only thing his seemingly broken child can say only reinforces that self-loathing instilled into Victor from his earliest age, a reminder of all the ways in which he himself was made to feel broken by a father he could never live up to.
While initially billed as a more faithful adaptation of Shelley’s text, del Toro ultimately plays extremely fast and loose with the story. His most pointed departure comes with the tale’s conclusion, which in the book is an all-encompassing tragedy that finds Victor dead and the creature pledging to finally destroy himself in the Arctic wastes. In del Toro’s film, a last confrontation between dying father and immortal son finds a repentant Victor striving to make peace before the cold dark takes him.
He does this by returning, of course, to the matter of his name.
“My father gave me that name,” he says. “And it meant nothing. Now I ask you to give it back to me. One last time. The way you said it at the beginning, when it meant the world to you.”
Within this framing, denying the monster a name becomes the greatest kindness that Victor can provide for his son. As Elordi’s monster embraces an endless, shining horizon, he is free of any impositions as to who he should be or what sort of life he is now meant to live. What identity he makes for himself will be his own to choose, and form, and claim.
Guillermo del Toro’s films have always been concerned with the tension between defiance and obedience, going back to his debut Cronos and that film’s vampire having to choose between submitting to his bloodlust or dying as the good man he was before infection. Martyrs like Conchita in Devil’s Backbone or Dr. Ferreiro in Pan’s Labyrinth choose defiance at the cost of their own lives, and that’s often the greatest liberation a del Toro character can hope for, to achieve in death a freedom that life itself does not allow.
His Frankenstein, then, is the rejoinder to those films. For all the gallons of gore and bone-breaking brutality, this Frankenstein is a prayer that cycles of inherited hurt might at last be broken. That our sons and daughters might make names for themselves and write new stories far more beautiful than any we could have imagined for them.
