TI05 Frankenstein: Man Made Man

Sometime between the hours of 2 and 3 AM on 16th of June 1816, a teenage girl on a wet holiday, unable to sleep, was disturbed by a waking dream.

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together," she later wrote. "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, parfum vital motion.

It's alive, it's alive, it's alive!

The 18-year-old was staying at a villa on Lake Geneva in the Swiss Alps with her married lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Also in the company was another famous Romantic poet, Lord Byron. Several days before, Byron had suggested that, as the weather was unusually crap, by way of entertainment they should all write ghost stories. So she took that waking nightmare and turned it into a story that grew into a novel that, on its publication 2 years later, gave the world a uniquely resonant vision of the horror we feel when technology goes murderously wrong.

Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world.

Her name was Mary Shelley, and the stupendous mechanism she created was called Frankenstein. What kind of creature is that? My name, it's pronounced Frankenstein. Welcome to the Tech Imaginarium. Join us as we explore how science fiction made the modern world. Hi there, my name's John Helmer and I'm here as usual with my good friend Esri Karlapak.

Hello.

Mary Shelley created on that wet holiday at Villa Diodati was not only the most influential horror novel in the language, but also arguably the first science fiction novel. I say arguably, I've already had an argument about this on Facebook, and I'm, to be honest, I'm not really going to argue anymore about it. So we're going to be delving this time into the blessing that is Frankenstein, the curse that is Frankenstein, the world it came from, the family Mary Shelley came from, the science that prompted such nightmarish visions, and most importantly, what they did for science and science fiction. But first, here's some facts about Mary. Hack facts.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born Mary Godwin in London on the 30th of August, 1797. She was the daughter of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died 11 days after her birth, and the political philosopher William Godwin. At 16, she eloped to the continent with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She began her novel Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, aged 18, and married Shelley later that year, after the death of his first wife. Frankenstein was published anonymously 2 years later. Mary's name first appeared on the 1823 edition, and she revised the text in 1831. Widowed at 24, she outlived 3 of her 4 children and died in London on the 1st of February, 1851, aged 53.

Mary Shelley's parents were 2 of the most notorious, infamous, and celebrated as well radicals of the age. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecroft, wrote one of the foundational texts of modern feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as featured in our sister podcast, Great Lives on Learning. Her father, William Godwin, was a philosopher, novelist, and journalist, and one one of the forefathers of philosophical anarchism. Enthused by the ideas of the French Revolution, initially at least, Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to Paris like other radically minded people of the age. William Wordsworth was one of them. Bliss was it in that hour to be alive and to be young were very heaven, etc., etc., only to become disillusioned when the Jacobins started lopping off people's heads. It was a common trajectory for the artists and intellectuals of the time. It was an age of dramatic reversions, in fact, of revolutions, not only the French Revolution, but the American Revolution of the United States. We're also in the throes of the Industrial Revolution and everywhere Enlightenment values of reason and rationality were triumphing. However, that old world of alchemy, occultism, and superstition that modern science replaced was not giving up without a fight. Goya's famous aquatint, 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,' summed up a prevalent unease about the shortcomings of a purely rationalist mindset that haunted the Romantic imagination. If we turn our backs entirely on the domain of feeling and the so-called primitive world of our forebears, do we open ourselves to attack from the very things we're trying so hard to suppress? Not just in the external world, but in our own nature. Does the drive for scientific discovery itself perhaps contain elements of an atavistic evil, a malevolent will to dominate and destroy? And if we attempt to fashion a creature in our own image, is there not a danger that it could turn out to be every bit as monstrous as we secretly fear ourselves to be, down at the unreasoning core of our unevolved animal being? Mary Shelley's book was clearly the right book at the right time. But what leads an educated 18-year-old woman from a privileged background, albeit a rather eccentric background, to write something so extremely and frankly horrible as Frankenstein? What could she know of death and despair and the horrors in that novel? Well, quite a lot. Mary's mother died of septicemia 11 days after giving birth to her. Mary grew up motherless with a cold and distant father. In the year before that holiday on Lake Geneva, Mary and Shelley had lost a daughter. Died only days after being born. When Mary was only months into writing Frankenstein, her half-sister committed suicide. Two months later, Percy Shelley's first wife was found drowned and pregnant. The death toll of babies just mounts up in this story. She would go on to lose a further three children, and Percy Shelley himself drowned in 1822. So perhaps it's not so surprising but she authored this tale. The book was published in 1818. Here's the story, the original story, which has changed a lot over the years. Victor Frankenstein, or Frankenstein, a young Genevan studying natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, discovers the secret of generating life and assembles a creature from dead matter. Repelled by its appearance the moment it wakes, he abandons it. The creature teaches himself to speak and read while secretly observing a peasant family, but is met with horror and violence wherever he appears. Embittered, he murders Victor's young brother William. The family servant Justine is framed and executed for the crime. The creature demands a female companion, a bride. Victor begins one, then destroys it because it's just too disgusting to do it again. He's scared that they'll produce a race of monsters. In revenge, the creature kills Victor's friend, Henry Clerval, and on the wedding night, as he had threatened to do, Victor's bride, Elizabeth. Victor pursues him to the Arctic, where dying, he tells his story to the explorer Robert Walton. There's a framing device in the novel. It begins with Robert Walton discovering Victor Frankenstein. The creature, finding his maker dead, departs across the ice. Vowing to end his own life. So a very different ending to the ones we see in subsequent versions. Esri, I must admit that rereading the novel, going back to the original novel after many years, I was surprised to find how viscerally disgusting it is and how it still has the power to shock. It did cast a pall over my mood when I was reading it, I have to say. And there are a couple of times I had to stop because I thought, this stuff is really still alarmingly potent. But I have to say, I was really impressed by it as a piece of writing. But then I'm interested to know how you react to it, primarily as a foundational work of science fiction.

Mm. It's a novel I love as well and have reread several times. And it does still somehow have the ability to shock even in the 21st century. So it's not surprising that it elicited strong responses when it first appeared. I don't know whether these were instantly whether these were connected to the reputation of her parents or not, or just, you know, critiques of the book. But one critic called it an uncouth story leading to no conclusion, either moral or philosophical. And another said it was a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity. But that concept is really important now. Today, the idea of absurdity we view from the perspective of existentialist philosophy as a kind of, if you like, a metaphor for the meaning of life. It is absurd. And that's where the value of Frankenstein can be found, certainly for some philosophers. Mark Rowlands, in his 2003 book The Philosopher at the End of the Universe, says the idea of absurdity and the problem of the meaning of life both have their roots in the fact that there are two stories that can be told about each of us, and these stories just don't seem to mesh or cohere. So it's like the— in the story of Frankenstein, you know, the creator and the created, as Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Miller did on stage, they kind of are interchangeable in some way. So we're both Frankenstein and the creature in the way that we're both the central figure in our own personal narrative and a bit part player with little significance in the narratives of others. So Rowlands compares individual people to the constituent elements of a river. You know, we are each one of us, he says, swept up in the tide of history as the vortex is swept up in the tide of the river. You can't separate the bits of a, of a river, which links us back quite nicely to psychohistory in Asimov's Foundation Saga, where the fate of an individual is unknowable, but the fate of everyone, the human conglomerate, to use Asimov's phrase, can be predicted. But I think one of the most shocking things for the 19th century reader was that Shelley made the demon, as Frankenstein calls his creature a sympathetic figure despite the terrible crimes that it commits. And according to Harold Bloom, the literary critic, the greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley's novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This is hard enough to process at face value, but there's an underlying implication that we take from this making of new life out of dead body parts, and I think it's even more profound, and that's through science and technology we might actually overcome death itself. There's a further extrapolation from that which I'm not going to reveal until the end of this show, so stay tuned.

Okay.

Um, by challenging death and collapsing this distinction between human and creature, or alien as we like to say now, Shelley really tested the boundaries of bourgeois morality. The shockwaves are still being felt. Um, and that brings us to the question of its status as the first great SF novel. So I did a quick and pretty unscientific survey of the literature on this, and every study of science fiction I picked up includes at least some mention of Frankenstein. And I think that makes it important to science fiction, you know, regardless of anything else. But there is a debate about whether Frankenstein actually is science fiction. Um, I'll give a couple of indicative arguments, uh, starting with Brian Aldiss. Author of a history of SF called Billion Year Spree, first published in 1973 and revised in 1986 as Trillion Year Spree.

Inflation.

Inflation and the sheer volume of SF that had been published in the interval. But Aldiss wrote a lot of science fiction himself, of course, and was obviously a big fan of Frankenstein. One of his best novels, I think, is Frankenstein Unbound, and it's a wonderful mashup of time travel and alternate history in which a scientist from our future builds a time machine and goes back to Lake Geneva at the point where Mary and her Bohemian gang were there. But the time machine then fails, so he's stuck there and decides to infiltrate the Shelley household to see if the story we all know took form in the way the history books suggest. But what he discovers is that not only is there a real Dr. Frankenstein, but he actually has created another human from body parts. It's a great read. Uh, but, uh, Aldiss was convinced that Shelley's work does represent the origin of science fiction, um, and in that work he includes her other science fiction novel The Last Man, which is, if not the first, then one of the first, you know, plague wipes out everybody except one person sort of scenario. Um, and in Billion Year Spree, Aldiss highlights the influence of Shelley's father William Godwin who we heard about, and particularly his novel Caleb Williams, which Godwin described as exploring the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man. So, you know, you mentioned the Industrial Revolution was going on. Mary Shelley was aware of the technologies coming out of that, particularly the experiments of, um, Louis— sorry, Luigi Galvani at the end of the 18th century. You know, the guy who put electrical current through the legs of a dead frog and then observed them twitching with life, as well as the English physician Erasmus Darwin, who Percy Shelley mentions in the preface to the 1818 edition of Frankenstein. So what we've got here is Mary Shelley combining social and scientific issues in Frankenstein, along with a big dollop of Greek mythology, of course. Um, therefore, Aldiss concludes, Shelley was working with new scientific ideas and combining them with social criticism in exactly the same way as later science fiction writers like H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and so on. And therefore Frankenstein is science fiction. Um, but on the other hand, we get celebrated SF author Thomas Dish who wrote in 1988— sorry, 1998— a book called The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. Um, and he disagrees with all this. He sees Mary Shelley as the one significant rival to Edgar Allan Poe as the genre's founding genius, but he describes Frankenstein as a Model T melodrama with philosophic interludes. For the great majority who know it only in its simplified and distorted film versions, Frankenstein is science fictional only in the reductive and pejorative sense that it concerns a monster who runs amok and poses a danger to defenseless women. Um, and actually this view is shared by another science fiction author turned critic, Sam Lundwall, who wrote in 1969 Science Fiction: What It's All About. He acknowledges that Frankenstein is a moving tragedy with contemporary significance but rejects the idea that it's truly science fiction. He says Shelley's novel only seldom manages to climb over the level of the then-current 10-cent romance or penny dreadful. I think he's being slightly anachronistic there. The Penny Dreadful didn't appear until the 1830s, um, 2 years after Frankenstein. But anyway, um, so if we turn to contemporary academic views, um, Roger Luckhurst, one of today's most respected experts on the historical and literary development of science fiction, edited a really fine collection of essays for a special British Library publication, Science Fiction: A Literary History, in 2017. And in a chapter entitled The Beginnings: Early Forms of Science Fiction, um, the American academic and journal editor Arthur B. Evans describes Frankenstein as a novel at the crossroads of Gothic horror, mythical— mythological fantasy, and science fiction. Um, and he makes the important point that Frankenstein is actually the first place in Western literature in which the use of modern science and technology rather than magic or the supernatural is derived for creating human life. So we also have Cheryl Vint, distinguished professor of media and cultural studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside. Cheryl Vint has written several books on science fiction and contributed to numerous others, including Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, which was the companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at London Science Museum in 2022. I went to that and it was a very fine exhibition. And then it points out that Frankenstein pioneered the notion of this meshing of human biology with technology. And that leads us to everything from robots to cyborgs and other types of technologically enhanced humans. And even if it is, strictly speaking, a Gothic horror story itself, it still provides that departure point from that form towards science fiction. Personally, I think what really seals it, though, is the role that Frankenstein plays as the first fictional what-if, which is a, you know, defining characteristic of SF, to openly challenge the assumption that scientific progress is necessarily good or indeed always necessary. And I think that's what good SF does. And I'll just finish off with a paper called The Internet and Analogical Myths of Science Fiction by Kirk Hampton and Carol Mackay. Because they point out that systemic malfunction may be science fiction's ur-myth, you know, the founding definitive myth of the genre emerging in the grandmother of all science fiction novels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, wherein the creature hacked together from downloaded parts becomes the first android romantic hero. So on balance, I would say yes, it is absolutely the founding work of science fiction.

Well, thanks for that, Esri. That's really interesting. Just a note on Aldous's story, which I haven't read and hadn't heard of before. Very interesting. Some people say that one of the roots of the novel is a visit that Mary Shelley, Mary and Percy Shelley made to the Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt in 1814, which would have been a year before all this, a year before she started writing it. And there was an alchemist called Johann Conrad Dippel who had apparently experimented with human bodies, and it's reasoned that Mary suppressed that because she wanted it to appear more original. But it was interesting that Perhaps the forebear of Frankenstein was an alchemist. And we've mentioned that there was this kind of crossover between alchemism and chemistry and proper science. In the universities, there were still chairs of alchemy in the beginning of the 19th century. So the name Frankenstein has kind of spread over Central Europe. There are other places as well. There's a town of Frankenstein in Silesia. So anyway, she wrote the book and it became a huge success even within her lifetime. 5 years after the publication, the first recorded stage adaptation opened at the Lyceum in London, or what's now the Lyceum in London, and it was called Presumption— interesting there— or The Fate of Frankenstein. It introduced a couple of changes that have stuck. Where Shelley's creature is eloquent and philosophical, the stage version gives us a wordless, grunting monster. There was now a comic lab assistant as well. And Mary Shelley attended it, the performance. Nevertheless, despite the changes, was delighted because it had made her famous. By the late 1820s, there are at least 14 English and French dramatizations of the Frankenstein story. So we get to the turn of the century. The first film version appears in 1910. Edison Studios made a film called Frankenstein, a 15-minute silent short in which the creature is conjured up in a vat. And obviously, as we— you're going to see there a link to robots, which were in the original kind of RUR. Is it? Yes, grown in vats. Where they were grown in vats. Yeah. And in 1931, James Whale's Frankenstein appeared, giving us the image of the creature that is one of the most recognizable images on Earth. Fat head, heavy brow, sunken eyes, neck bolts, which I thought were inexplicable, but apparently could have been electrodes during the reanimation or the animation process. And that lumbering walk and the kind of monosyllabic grunting that come in with the stage plays. So as James Whale's 1931 film did more than anything that came before to fix the image, that image of Frankenstein in our heads, it was the thing that led to the monster being called Frankenstein rather than the creator. And there again, there's a kind of collision of the two, which is interesting. Whale himself is an interesting figure. He was a Brit, openly gay at a time when that was very unusual, from a poor background in the Black Country, in England. He saw the horrors of the trenches in World War I firsthand, captured by the Germans. He was an officer. He began directing plays in the prison camp where he was interned, went back to England, became a play director, you know, and later moved to Hollywood and started directing films. So tell us more about that film, Ez, because I know you think it's really significant.

Yeah, the making of Whale's movie is quite a story in itself. There's probably a screenplay waiting to be written there. Although it does get touched on in the 1998 biopic of James Whale, Gods and Monsters. And there have been a few documentaries on the subject. But to start with, Whale only came on board as director when the original hire, Robert Florey, quit the project. And he didn't agree with Florey's choice to cast Bela Lugosi as the creature, even though the studio Universal Pictures wanted him so they could capitalize on his very recent success in the movie Dracula. But luckily for Whale, Lugosi hated the idea of a non-speaking monster part, um, and happily backed out. So Whale went looking for a replacement and spotted 44-year-old journeyman actor William Henry Pratt sitting alone in the studio between takes of one of the many silent movies he had appeared in. According to an article on the Victoria and Albert Museum website, Whale admired Pratt's chiseled features and serious expression, so he took him off for a screen test, and the rest is history. Oh, and of course Pratt had a stage name, Boris Karloff. I'm not sure why a Peckham boy like Pratt would choose that name, but there it is. Um, we should also give mention, I think, to the makeup artist Jack Pierce, because he came up with that classic Frankenstein look. Even though gluing those heavy bolts Dr. Karloff's neck left him with permanent scars, apparently. Um, and so some of, but not all of, the subsequent Frankenstein clichés were born in Wales' movie. We got, as you said, the square head, the bolts in the neck, the lack of intelligence, the result of, um, the movie version of Dr. Frankenstein having an assistant called Fritz originally, only became Igor later, um, who stole an abnormal brain for his master's experiment after accidentally smashing the jar with the normal brain in it. It is such a comedy moment. You can see why Mel Brooks went back to that bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and we got the definitive mad scientist's lab with the big slab and the electrical pylons and the sparks and everything. Um, and that set they built for Whale's movie was rediscovered years later and reused by Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein. So it's actually the same set, yeah, that, um, that was used for the James Whale film. And ironically, it was Bela Lugosi who added the iconic outstretched arms to Karloff's famous lumbering gait, because Lugosi did eventually play the creature in Son of Frankenstein in 1939 and in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, in which during the course of the action, Frankenstein's creature gets blinded by something, by a fire, I think. So thereafter walks around like this. You can't see where he's going. And that, you know, but it's now absolutely fixed in people's minds. I think that it's part of the Frankenstein story. But I think the importance of Whale's film is its role as the kind of progenitor of this immense cultural phenomenon. Universal's Frankenstein, says Sir Christopher Frayling in Frankenstein: The First 200 Years, fused a domesticated form of expressionism overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualizers, and the American carnival tradition to create an American genre. So that was written in 2017 because the book was published a year later, uh, for Frankenstein's bicentennial. And at that point, Freiling noted over 90 direct adaptations for stage and screen, along with obviously hundreds of others in which core Frankenstein tropes about mad scientists and their creations appear. And there are even more now. I mean, it would be interesting to do a count and see how many. But people in the SF world actually have mixed feelings about this. And I think Brian Aldiss typically summed it up when he said, "Cinema has helped enormously to disseminate the myth while destroying its significance." I think one thing that Frayling leaves out there, of course, is that Karloff has started off as a silent film actor.

And when you look at the 1931 film now, you see that it's at that moment when Hollywood is moving into the talkies. It's a talkie film, but it come out of the silent era. Karloff's acting is silent film acting. And you particularly see this, you know, there's something rather kind of beautiful and balletic about his movements, the way that he conveys the feelings of the monster completely through movement. And the scene with the little girl, which is beautiful and touching and incredibly horrific when it kind of turns around at the end. You know, he meets this little girl. The monster is very gentle and docile at this point. And she doesn't run away from him. She's not scared of him. She's a child, so she doesn't know, you know. And they're kind of looking at the little flowers and he's touched by the flowers. All this becomes comic later on, but at the time it And it's really in a tradition of kind of silent film emotion. They throw the flowers into the water. And then as part of the game, the monster picks the girl up and throws her into the water, not realizing, because she's a pretty little flower, not realizing that this would be bad for her. Then he realizes, there's the double take, he goes to try and get someone. And then from then on, it's kind of all downhill. He's sort of terribly blotted his copybook.

There's a big influence on the style that Karloff adopted and that James Well wanted from a 1920 film called The Golem by Paul Wegener. It's one of the classics of German Expressionism. And the way Wegener actually plays the Golem as well as directs— directing the movie. And he is very much like that. I mean, he's made out of clay that has been hardened, so he walks in a kind of similar manner. And he has very, very little facial expression. And there's even a scene with where a little girl runs up and gives him a flower. Um, so it's, it's kind of, yeah, the influences. But obviously that is a silent movie, so yeah, that silent movie influence and the expressionist lighting and expressionist camera work, etc., is, is very much present in Whale's film as well.

Yeah. So of course numerous sequels followed up. You mentioned The Bride of Frankenstein, which some people think is the best film than the original. And the Elsa Lancaster performance is quite extraordinary in that. Curse of Frankenstein, Frankenstein meets Dracula, Frankenstein meets Godzilla. Not sure if that exists, but it really should. And the whole thing gets increasingly camp. What was really chilling and horrible becomes funny. Camp using Susan Sontag's definition of failed seriousness. And so Frankenstein post-Whale, the sequels, the spin-offs, and you get more and more comedic versions after that. It's really interesting. A film I loved when I was a kid was Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant and Daniel Massey playing his brother who's gone off and had some pretty bad facial surgery, courtesy of Peter Lorre, and now resembles Boris Karloff. And there are a lot of jokes about how he looks like Frankenstein's monsters and monster is a big part of the film. And then you get, of course, things like The Munsters, which I used to watch as a kid. And I think there's a Frankenstein monster-like character in The Addams Family as well. Getting closer to our own era, Rocky Horror Show, it gets even more camp. And then of course you get Mel Brooks' Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein. My name, it's pronounced Frankenstein. Frankenstein. Which I think is amazing. Some people think it's the best comedy film of all time. And I really think it's brilliant. And you see clips of it all over TikTok nowadays. And you get action figures and everything else. And then we move into the world of merch, you know, and I remember making an Airfix model of the monster when I was a kid and this whole series of them with Dracula and so on and enjoying the smell of the glue. It becomes a prefix, Franken. You know, in our own time we get Frankenfood. You get children's spinoffs like Frankenweenies, Franken-this, Franken-that. And I think you've got more to say about that, haven't you? With a rock and roll kind of vibe.

Yeah, before we get to the rock and roll vibe though, I think there's an important point about the way that the myth of Frankenstein is so powerful, it continues to have very significant real-world effects. And the GMO controversies, genetically modified organisms, of the 1990s, which led to the term Frankenfoods being used as a scare tactic, actually forced a change in government policy and funding decisions, as a result of which UK scientists who worked in, in related areas left the country, um, and Britain fell behind in, in bioscience innovation, um, because of the stigma of Frankenfoods. Um, it's, it is you know, it does have real, real-world significance at times. I do want to quote Jane Metcalfe though. She's the co-founder of the bioscience innovation community Neo.life.

Yeah.

And she wrote about, and I don't know if you remember this, in 2022, a man in Maryland received the organs of a genetically modified pig, which saved his life. Otherwise, he had an otherwise terminal condition and would've died. And Jane Metcalfe at the time said, said nothing screams neobiological revolution like a successful pig-to-human organ transplant. But you can't— it's, you know, it's hard not to see this shadow of Frankenstein, uh, falling across that kind of thing. However good the outcomes are, it's, it's going to generate that fear, uh, and become a Franken— Franken-transplant, probably.

It becomes this kind of all-purpose very powerful metaphor for anything where kind of science goes a bit wrong, runs amok, has effects beyond the intentions of its creator. And anything that is in a way that is kind of part human, part science, part organic, part inorganic and so on.

Yes. And anything that's made up of different parts, that's the—

Yes.

You know, as you mentioned, the rock and roll connection, Eddie Van Halen, had a guitar he called a Frankenstrat. Yeah, because he used bits of different guitars to, to make it. Um, but actually, staying with the rock and roll theme, I absolutely love this. The Edgar Winter Group had one number one hit in their entire career, and it was called Frankenstein. Um, and I don't know if it was because of the title or obviously the merits of the composition, um, but it was their biggest hit, and it is absolutely fabulous. Um, and extra fun fact, he was— Edgar Winter was the first person to put a strap on a keyboard and play it like a guitar at the front of the stage.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, kudos to Edgar for that. Um, and then of course there's the, the all-time classic, the Monster Mash. You can't leave that out. Oh yeah, it was written by Bobby Pickett specifically as a tribute to Boris Karloff.

But, but Boris Pickett and the Crip Kickers, was it?

Bobby Pickett.

Bobby Pickett and the Crip Kickers, I think it was.

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, a seminal moment in Western culture.

Definitely.

Of course. So coming up to our own time, we recently had a kind of big movie by the director El Toro of Frankenstein. I'm interested to hear what you thought of that. Is I thought it was stunningly beautiful, really beautiful art direction, wonderful. But it kind of, while it was sort of saying it, it was a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, but it became too hot. While it was saying that this is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which we hear happening again and again, I think there was a Christopher Isherwood written version for TV with, yeah, with Rowland Narrow.

As the monster.

Oh yes. And a very kind of attractive male actor as Victor Frankenstein, Michael Sarrazin. And it definitely had kind of gay overtones, obviously Christopher Isherwood being famously gay. Sorry, to get back to the El Toro film, I thought it was beautifully art directed and really had the same framing device of the explorer coming across the pair of them, Victor and the monster in the Arctic. But as it progressed, you know, there are more and more kind of differences in the plot, which sort of work, I think. But then the ending, it just kind of turns into The Lighthouse, you know, two hefty American males slugging it out to the death, which, you know, it's like every American film either ends in a court case or a big fight. And this one, it ended in a big fight. And, you know, that isn't anything like the book, isn't even like the James Whale film. And I thought kind of let it down. So I found that a bit disappointing.

It's the paradox of doing it now, however you do it. The more faithful you are to Mary Shelley's novel, the less interesting the audience is going to find it. And the more interesting you make it to the audience, the less you stick to Mary Shelley's original novel. And that's the problem. They're two different art forms, and you have to accept that it's been adapted for the cinema. And, you know, to use the cliché, go with the willing suspension of disbelief. In its own right, judged on its merits, yeah, I thought it was a very good film. I love Guillermo del Toro's work. I thought— I've forgotten the name of it. The Labyrinth was fantastic.

Oh yeah. Pan's Labyrinth.

Pan's Labyrinth. Thank you. So yeah, I enjoyed it, but it didn't really resonate for much time after I'd seen it, you know, and that's a sure sign that it was trying to do too much, I think.

Yeah. I think we shouldn't be too purist about it in a way because, you know, it's a resonant myth of our culture now, the whole story. And and as happens with those myths, it is reinterpreted by every generation, or every generation finds something new relating to their own time to sort of bring to it. And its repercussions right throughout culture comes up again and again in discussions about AI, of course, because the idea of a kind of runaway creation, the existential threat the existential threat. So moving towards summing up here, um, we've looked at in this series a lot is how these stories give us ways to think about the impact of science and technology on our lives. The Frankenstein myth seems to be a central, hugely significant one. It was already a cliché for Asimov in the 1940s, but where many clichés fade with time and fall into disuse purely through overuse. This one just doesn't seem to be going away. Esri, what do you attribute that to?

It is everywhere. It's just, you know, as the American historian David Skoll says, it's part of the very air that we breathe. The Karloff interpretation of Frankenstein's creature is one of the most, if not the most recognizable movie character. And 2015, a survey of United States of America schoolchildren found that more of them knew the name Frankenstein than the name of the then-president, Barack Obama. You know, it is— I think what Christopher Freiling says in Frankenstein: The First 200 Years gets to the heart of it. It's enduring importance, though. He says, even though the book is almost certainly more talked about than read, which I'm sure is true, it lives in our imagination in a unique way. It doesn't go away. Because it has become the modern creation myth, and it's as much part of our cultural inheritance now as the biblical creation story and Darwinian evolution. And those things get rehearsed time and time again in, you know, the tellings of core myths as whatever form they take. So yeah, it's just absolutely part of the air we breathe.

Thanks so much for that, Esri. I really enjoyed listening to this as a podcast listener for your contributions.

You're very kind.

So, as we reach the last episode of this 6-part series next week, what should people expect from the last episode?

Mm.

Where's my crystal ball? I don't have one.

Ah, I see what you did there.

Yeah, we're going to tackle the thorny question of science fiction's predictive power, or lack thereof. We'll be looking at some things SF writers have got spot on, and others where they've been wide of the mark. I will argue that prediction isn't the point. It's a kind of side effect of SF. But I'll leave you with a couple of things that Frankenstein definitely predicted, kind of. First, a young doctor named Gene Rosenbaum was watching the lab scene in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein and began to wonder if a human heart really could be electrically stimulated. He went on to invent the cardiac pacemaker in 1955. So you can put him up there with Robert Goddard as a scientist who has come up with a technological innovation directly because of science fiction. But as I hinted earlier, there is a major development which Mary Shelley's story predicted. Beyond the shock of a creature being brought to life by human hands, beyond the terror of science overcoming death, Frankenstein predicted the death of God.

Da da da!

Exactly.

So you've been listening to The Tech Imaginarium, how science fiction made the modern world. If you've enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe on your platform of choice. And it really helps other people to find us if you leave a positive review. Tell your friends, tell your enemies too. The Tech Imaginarium is a learning hack podcast produced and hosted by Jon Helmer. Written by John Helmer and Esri Karlabak. Music is by Nick Dwyer, recording as Flintet.