Horror! “Bride of Frankenstein” as a portal to thinking about the Genre from a Psychoanalytic Perspective.

Matt Bennett is the president of our local Association of Psychoanalytic Thought (APT).  He is also a professor who teaches about film and film interpretation from a psychoanalytic perspective.  What a treat it was to have him teach us about film interpretation in a recent APT meeting during which, in part since Halloween is approaching, we screened a seminal 1935 film “Bride of Frankenstein”.

“Bride of Frankenstein” seminal?  Horror as a genre worthy of study?  Perhaps in part in response to the second question – and because our beloved psychoanalytic library is being refurbished and there weren’t books surrounding us as there usually are when we screen films – Matt passed around a stack of books that interpret Horror films from a psychoanalytic perspective.

I never would have thought.  Matt began the conversation by asking us to think about horror films and what leads us to categorize them as that.  We named a number of films –Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, Alien and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  And suddenly there are subgenres – slasher films, suspense, science fiction, and camp/parody films.  Subgenres!  Of Horror!  Oh, the horror…

Matt clarified that some people object to classifying any film as a horror film.  The whole idea, for these people, is that horror is transgressive and so putting boundaries around what is and is not a horror film flies in the face of the transgressive nature of horror.  He noted, though, the large overlap between science fiction and horror, and went on to say that both Frankenstein (Mary Shelley’s novel and the movie), and Bride of Frankenstein, (again the novel and the movie), are warnings to us – warnings that have been around since at least the Greeks and the myths of Icarus and Prometheus – warnings that too much technical knowledge can lead to a very bad end.  One of the audience members took this all the way back to Genesis and the eating of the tree of knowledge.

Matt asked us to think about what horror is and what makes a film evoke horror.  We agreed that horror is a bodily feeling – it is corporeal.  This led us to think about our hair standing on end.  It is also related to terror, to the feeling of the uncanny (about which Freud had a lot to say), and with some help from a quote from Stephen King – to disgust based on being grossed out.  But we also noted that horror – especially in horror films – is right next to the ridiculous.  We find many of the horror situations ludicrous – and horror audiences are notoriously garrulous – saying out loud, “Don’t open the coffin!”

Horror films have tropes that help us to experience horror.  It is not just the plot and the dialogue, but the lighting, the use of frame (when the horizon is at an angle, we feel unbalanced), music, lighting (lighting faces from underneath, as with a flashlight when telling scary stories, distorts the features of the characters), and also the physicality of the actors – the quality of the make-up.  Frankenstein’s monster – though the film was in black and white – is often portrayed on posters with green skin. 

This lead into a discussion of the monster – and for the first time I thought of Joker, a film that I we saw recently and that I just posted on, as a horror film.  And as I was thinking this, we talked about the identification of the audience – that it can be with the people being victimized, but it can also be with the monster, and that we may feel both kinship with being traumatized, but we may also master that through what is glibly called identification with the aggressor – we find the monster more interesting – something that is certainly the case in Joker, but then showed up in unexpected ways with Bride of Frankenstein.

So we watched the film with a few tools in our pockets.  It is a brief film – 1 hour and 9 minutes running time – but it was the longest 69 minutes of my life.  It reminded me of watching Monty Python episodes when I was in High School – those were the longest half hours of my life.  I think both Monty Python and Bride of Frankenstein cram a lot into a relatively few minutes – but I also think that neither of them follows a linear narrative path.  Indeed, Bride of Frankenstein, the Movie, seems to be made in much the way the monster is – with bits and pieces of this and that all mashed together – and there is a strange coherence to the whole – but it is, not just in the content, but in the jangliness of the whole thing,  unsettling.  It feels like a dream that takes random bits and pieces and projects them one after the other and says, in effect, “Here – this is the dream.”  And you, as the one who have watched the dream, have to say, “Oh, OK, that’s it then.  Huh…”

The movie begins with Mary Shelley telling her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that there is more to her tale of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.  As they gather round her, we are reminded of the highlights of the original tale, with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster running amok through the countryside, but coming to his apparent end, along with Dr. Frankenstein, on Dr. Frankenstein’s wedding night in a great fire in a windmill.  As we pick up the story, neither the monster, nor Dr. Frankenstein is actually dead.  Dr. Frankenstein is revived when he is brought to his home, and the monster comes to life and starts killing people wantonly again.  Dr. Frankenstein is nursed back to health by his future bride, while his monster goes looking for help in the world – but finds that people have decided he is a monster so they try to hurt and kill him. 

The monster saves a little girl from drowning, but is discovered by hunters and shot at. He tries to get help from gypsies, but is burned  Then he is captured by police and hauled off to a dungeon which he promptly escapes from.  Ultimately he finds brief solace with a blind man in the forest – his savageness is tamed by the blind man’s violin playing.  The blind man also teaches him some rudimentary words – including, quite poignantly, the word friend. 

Dr. Frankenstein, meanwhile, is pursued by his friend and mentor Dr. Pretorius who wants his help in crafting a bride for the monster.  In one of those odd, dream-like moments, Dr. Pretorius shows off his ability to create life – four or five miniature human beings he has grown from some kind of basic organic matter.  This is an entertaining and odd kind of side moment.  And somehow Pretorius views the monster that Dr. Frankenstein has created as greater than his little dolls – and he works to convince Dr. Frankenstein to return to his building of monsters – something that Dr. Frankenstein is loath to do.

While collecting a corpse to bring to life, Dr. Pretorius and the monster, who has been fleeing a mob, discover each other.  Dr. Pretorius lets the monster know that he wants to create a mate for him, and the monster becomes his ally against Dr. Frankenstein, first threatening Dr. Frankenstein directly to get to work, then kidnapping his wife, whom Dr. Pretorius assures Dr. Frankenstein will be unharmed as long as Frankenstein works with him to create the bride.

So, create the bride they do.  Igor secures a heart from a living person, they add that to a corpse and to the brain that Pretorius has grown and, right on time, a storm kicks up, lightning starts, the bed is raised into the air, lightning strikes the kite – and Frankenstein has his bride.  There’s just one hitch.  When she – played by the same woman who played Mary Shelley at the beginning of the film, but now with iconic hair with white streaks – sees the monster, she, instead of swooning, screams. 

The heartbroken monster goes on a rampage, destroying the laboratory – but he decides to release Dr. Frankenstein and his wife – telling them that they should live – while he keeps Dr. Pretorius and his mate/monster in the tower with him – and destroys the castle, condemning the three of them to death.

So this film is part horror, part melodrama, and, thanks in no small part to a character I haven’t mentioned – one of Dr. Frankenstein’s household servants – an hysterical woman who swoons and screams and preaches – a comedy.  It is a bit of all over the place.

Matt described a number of interpretations of the film, but the one that I liked the best was one that is based in queer theory.  From this perspective, the director, who was an openly gay man in the queer embracing Hollywood of the thirties, tells a story of two men – Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius – who want to make a baby without having to bother to include a woman in their scheme.  They do this bit of alchemy with the intent of starting their own race – but it goes wildly wrong – and they pay the price. 

The problem with this interpretation, as one of the audience members repeatedly pointed out, is that the book, which the movie is faithful to, was written by a woman.  But it is interesting to me that this woman is portrayed, in the opening scene, as someone who is being courted by both her husband and his friend – as if the boys want to connect with each other through this female go between – supporting the queer reading.  More centrally, though, Mary Shelley is a woman in a man’s world – a world where men have all the power – except the power to make life.  Wouldn’t it be nice, she might think, if, from their perspective, the woman – that envied and secretly powerful other – could be eliminated from the mix?  And wouldn’t that square with a larger, societal queerness – that we envy each other’s different capacities rather than admiring them – and that we are looking not for diversity, but for sameness – for mates who mirror rather than compliment us?

Whether we read this as a queer film or not, it does contain some other important attributes of “otherness” that are part and parcel of later films and also of our lives more generally.   In particular, the monster’s mates scream when she sees the monster.  What is that about?   Is she afraid of him?  Or is she afraid that, in looking at him, she is seeing herself?  Is there some kind of recognition of our own monstrousness in the other?  In this reading, is Mary Shelley as guilty of wanting to create a world in which procreation is mechanical, not organic, just as the men around her my wish to be able to do?  Wouldn’t a woman want to avoid the harrowing difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth, but also feel guilty about not wanting to use her superpowers?

Even before we get to the final scene, the monster, who has been so monstrous through the first film, becomes much more sympathetic.  He really seems to be reaching out to the people, trying to connect with them, but isn’t he, like Christ (and the images are there in the film to support this reading) rejected by the people who, instead of welcoming him, want to crucify him?  How do we understand our rejection of the message of love that comes from a figure like Jesus?  How do we justify turning that, in the myriad ways that we do, into a call for violence and aggression?

Despite, or maybe because of the primitive means that movie makers had available to portray this material – it gets at some deep and profound aspects of our existence – all the while feeling campy and unreal.  Matt reminded us that the gaze of the camera is a masculine gaze – seeing things as objects and appealing to men who come to the theater to look at stuff while being safely protecting by viewing that stuff from behind the lens – so that they are able to see objects – not subjects.  And horror invites us to become subjects – to feel afraid – to be scared.  To live inside our creeping skin.  No wonder it has to be ludicrous – we can’t stand being confronted by the inner gushy guts that we stick our hands into in haunted houses – and at the movies when we go, seemingly against our wills, to be titillated by horror.

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