Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film

James A. W. Heffernan

Abstract

Heffernan explores the popularity of the motif of Frankenstein in culture. Heffernan says the habit of treating the cinema chiefly as a visual medium causes academic critics of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein to show little interest in its film versions. Heffernan admits that they ignore the monster’s inner life or speak of it less than a long autobiographical narration in the novel but at the same time disclose what the novel hides. They force the public to face the monster’s horrific physicality that cannot be denied, that cannot be escaped and which deprives him of any hope for compassion. Spectators are encouraged to reflect on his monstrous character in the categories of visibility: how we perceive it? what it perceives and in what way it wants to be perceived? To answer the questions, Heffernan analyzes James Whale’s Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Kenneth Branagh and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein.

• The text is a translation of an article Looking at the Monster: “Frankenstein” and Film by James A. W. Heffernan, Critical Inquiry 1997, v. 24, no. 1, pp. 133-158 © 1997 by The University of Chicago Press.

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