“I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.” —Susan Stryker, 1994

Director Guillermo Del Toro has never hidden his affectations for El espíritu de la colmena ( dir. Victor Erice, 1973), a picture whose narrative centers upon a Franco-era Spanish village holding a screening of the beloved 1931 James Whale Frankenstein film, and so it should come as no surprise he has selected for adaptation Shelley’s classic novel, one that holds the mighty distinction of being named as a foundational text for both horror and science fiction literary genres. Indeed, I purchased the commemorative 200th anniversary issue of DePauw University’s Science Fiction Studies (Vol. 45, July 2018), which testified to its literary power at its bicentennial and proves surprisingly relevant to the film review at hand.

“I am… the child of a charnel house… I am obscene to you, but to myself I simply am.” -Creature

Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1994), this picture aspires towards hyper-fealty regarding the source novel. We are initially introduced to a Royal Dutch Naval expedition lodged on ice near the North Pole in 1857. The crew brings aboard the maimed Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaacs), who in turn is pursued by his artificial Creature (Jacob Elordi), the result of experiments in reanimating human cadavers. The two end up in the quarters of the ship’s hell-bent Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), narrating their respective sides of the story.

Let’s begin with the date: The original novel was published/set in 1818 while Del Toro’s film is set in 1855-1857, the immediate aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Considering the director made two movies set during and immediately after the Spanish Civil War, it is not hard to perceive the political ramifications that he desires to import into the film. As a Mexican national, 1855 for Del Toro means the final exile of Antonio López de Santa Anna and the beginning of La Reforma, the secularization and anticlerical measures taken to create Mexican liberal democracy. Likewise, the latter date in the diegetic film timeline is the year of the new Mexican Constitution, one that was denounced publicly by Rome. In March 1857, Archbishop José Lázaro de la Garza y Ballesteros proclaimed Catholic Mexicans who swore allegiance to La Constitución Política de la República Mexicana de 1857 risked excommunication. This was a response, in part, to a thirty-five article land reform package, the Lerdo Law, initially proposed on June 25, 1856. If we grant some leeway in the proposition that the director has selected this two-year diegetic film timeline to intentionally correlate with the Mexican Reforma, the confrontation with Modernity is only that much more obviated and it is delivered in bodily terms.

Here I would borrow from the Black Feminist Hortense Spillers, who described the body and its flesh as its own form of “text,” something unto which is inscribed various histories and legacies we call life. For Spillers, this “reading of the body” entails a deeper confrontation with the Triangle Trade and the history of slavery; Spillers reads the scars of the slaver’s whip upon the back of an African held captive as a slave and recognizes these marks connote an entire history, an entire narrative, of struggle against captivity. Stryker likewise reaches for this framework, writing “You, as much as I, are responsible for the monster that I am.” A trauma history is not solely a written document, it is a set of experiences that are permanently and irreversibly written into your neurological system. Stryker herself confirms in retrospective interviews that her initial work with the Shelley novel emerged simultaneous with her engagement with the San Francisco BDSM scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where the body is subjectively treated in a powerful manner pursuing pleasure, inscribed with objectification in an affirmative manner.

Del Toro utilizes a medical apparatus that includes life-sized cross sections of the lymphatic system, laid out on a slab of wood and regarded as an educational text by medical practitioners. Victor’s use of cadavers is unanimously denounced by his academic superiors, leading to the termination of his professorship, following a vivid demonstration of the technological marvel. The Creature narrates his half of the diegetic film narrative, a text in its own right. Throughout the film, Victor fills his notebook with explanations of his method. Bodies are objectified and “read” as texts that create narrative developments; the Creature returns to the site of his birth and comes upon Victor’s aforementioned notebook, enabling him to comprehend who and what he is as the Creature.

Like Mexican society, the premodern Frankenstein family exists in the post-Napoleonic world and this is about their confrontation with Modernity. The Creature symbolizes a level of collision with Modernity, insofar as the revulsion expressed by various humans towards the Creature demonstrates a distinctive reflex that is equivalent to the transgression of norms and boundaries such as the gender binary or, in the case of Mexico in 1855, a social contract privileging the Church.

To begin his half of the story, Victor Frankenstein’s saintly mother (Mia Goth) dies........

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