On The Failure Of The Frankenstein Adaptation

Since its birth, Frankenstein has never lost its allure in adaptive possibilities. The novel was first adapted to the stage by Richard Brinsley Peake in 1823, just five years after the first edition of the novel was published in 1818. It’s widely known that Shelley herself attended a performance and was bemused by how he brought her masterpiece to life, even though she found it “not well managed.” Peake strips the Creature of voice and contributes the line, It lives!. The most contemporary image we have of the Creature is, of course, born of James Whale’s interpretation (I use that word loosely, as he renders the Creature nowhere close to what Shelley penned onto page) and Boris Karloff’s embodiment in Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein. It’s in this film we inherit, for all of eternity it seems, the bolts in the Creature’s neck. The voicelessness remains intact, continuing to refuse the eloquence of Shelley’s thoughtful abandoned creation.

Although I’ve engaged with Frankenstein textually for twenty years, culminating in my most recently published queer Asian Frankenstein retelling, Unwieldy Creatures, my first adaptation, Victor Frankenstein, was for the stage, a contemporary ballet dance theater adaptation I co-created with choreographer Dominic Walsh. Our adaptation didn’t just tell the story of Victor and the Creature, but also Shelley and Percy, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and how those relationships and losses informed her greatest work. Certainly there’s something the page can affect in a retelling that becomes more complicated in the embodied visualization on screen or stage, which must contend with how to successfully enact it, with limited funding, and with reliance on what the performer, design, or technological tool, can achieve. The reading experience is such an individualized act, and it doesn’t need to consider the flashiness of the gimmick, or the audience expectation of the spark. Our Victor Frankenstein received one review, by a reviewer who felt that whatever he wanted from a Frankenstein dance theater production, we didn’t quite deliver it.

As technological and reproductive advances open up questions around science, creation, and “nature,” Frankenstein continues to be a thriving laboratory for contemporary filmmakers. This past year, I encountered four different contemporary American films inspired by Frankenstein. I found myself considering the failure of these adaptations, a conclusion I’ve come to more often than its reverse, especially when helmed by white creators. It’s strange, isn’t it, to feel so protective over how a text is adapted by white creators, when it, itself, was brought into the world by one? Perhaps the difficulty of the Frankenstein adaptation is what also made my beloved so resonant as to stay attached to me through my entire life. 

I co-created Victor Frankenstein early in my understanding of the role race, and whiteness, can perform on stage or screen, particularly when thinking of the power of the other as inflicted onto the Creature. 

But in considering two of the four adaptations I saw this year, Poor Things and Birth/Rebirth, I was left wondering: Is a Creator ever able to see their Creation beyond their own biased need of greatness? Is it possible for a Creator to become both Creator and Creature all at once? When whiteness takes the wheel, how does the Creature (within the film as well as the film itself) suffer?

I first fell in love with Frankenstein at 19, the same age Shelley was when she penned my beloved into being. I was a young biracial Asian queer femme twin who’d just escaped the clutches of my dominant, narcissistic father—a Taiwanese NASA engineer by day who performed in Mandarin dramas by nights and on weekends—and an abandoning white mother who had just fled the state. It was the late 1990s, a time during which being biracial was stigmatized and made alien. If I wasn’t being exoticized—the mixed ones are always hotter, Asian women are tighter, you should meet my friend, he has yellow fever, “me love you long time”—I was asked what are you? No matter what answer I gave, I always felt creature, monstrous. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation, as I’d been treated like a specimen, a phenomenon, the uncanny, growing up as a mirror twin. Whatever fetishized experience I was forced to hold as a mixed race Asian teenage girl was doubled as one of twin mixed race Asian teenage girls. My relationship to my own identity apart from my twin was tenuous at best, a result of having an emotionally unstable and physically distant mother, a dominant and physically abusive father. We were kept from our American peers, surrounded by my father’s Taiwanese friends without any access to the language, sitting silently while we were ogled and referred to in a language we couldn’t understand. Beautiful and eerie, the world frightening yet familiar. Out of her own insecurity at her ability to be present with us as well as herself, my mother couldn’t get far enough away from us, or also became complicit in our exoticization—like the time she wanted us to audition in Miss Saigon at sixteen. My father’s unprocessed trauma with his own parents, complicated by having married and divorced a woman who saddled him with caring solely for children in a new country with no family support, was turned on us, raging when we made clear we were visible, independent bodies in the world, not merely there to support his own ego. 

From all of this confusion and pain, I met Frankenstein. It was through Frankenstein I learned about the narcissism of my father. I recognized the abandonment of my mother through the grief Victor experiences at his mother’s death. I navigated the duality with my twin as Victor and his creation orbited one another, as well as our complicated enmeshment that compels Victor towards and away from Elizabeth. It was in listening to the Creature’s literacy narrative I encountered a being who came to understand the world as I did—while watching my father enjoy his Mandarin-infused life to which I was relegated to the sidelines—watching and eavesdropping on others inhabiting a world he could not claim. Through the Creature’s heartbreaking plea for a companion I understood my own need to be connected to others on my own terms. As the Creature sang his devastating aria of rejection I, too, came to understand my own internalized monstrousness as a biracial person of color, a fetishized twin, seen only through the lens of others, rather than myself. 

I knew nothing about Poor Things when I went to see it during the holidays. Multiple friends urged me to see it because it’s so Frankenstein. I should have been more discerning, as I’ve come to understand there is the stan whose fandom is excited by any interaction with the source of their fandom, and then there is me, who wants only the best for their beloved. 

Poor Things is considered a feminist masterpiece and a journey of a woman’s female empowerment, through a fixed male gaze. It’s been disappointing how many in my community believe it is possible to create any story of female empowerment within that gaze. Is the wager still, even now, the same? If the gaze on women is composed from the eyes of men, then what is their empowerment made of? 

Poor Things is a film helmed entirely by white men. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the screenplay is written by Tony McNamara, based on a novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. At its heart, the film uses the science of Frankenstein and the magic of scientific acceleration to depict a pedophilic fantasy. This embodiment is made ever more troubling given the long history of predation established between young girls and women in Hollywood and older, more powerful men who have groomed them with the promise of career and safety. This embodiment is made ever more troubling given that the central plot device that allows for this fantasy wasn’t literalized in the original novel. 

Cinematically speaking, the film is stunning, in art direction and costuming, another trick of the hand to groom the watcher into a dopamine-fueled trance. This is also one of the ways we fall for Victorian dramas—the ruffles, the waistcoats, the coaches, the lavish countryside. We don’t question why there’s only one Black character who lasts just long enough to give our white protagonist some much needed wisdom and a check from her clueless position of privilege, because, hey, it’s the 1800s, only white people existed then! We don’t question why the heads of science are all white men. But regardless, no matter how critically aware a viewer might think they are, the conditioning of this sparkling white fantasy is still doing its part.

This is another way to make note of why Frankenstein adaptations so often fail—they focus more on the look of the thing, the science fiction of the dead body parts being brought to life, the technological magic to cinematically animate death, and less on how Frankenstein gives us the opportunity to reflect on what our creations say about our narcissistic exposures, how hidden our griefs on being rejected by those who create us. 

Poor Things reminds me of a lacquered violet plum, the shade glistens as if shot in technicolor, yet when you take a bite, the rot overwhelms the brain to horrid confusion.

Bella is a woman-child. Her father, the medical scientist God (short for Godwin, its namesake Shelley’s own family and maiden name) resurrected her shortly after she drowned herself in the river while pregnant—by replacing her dead brain with that of her unborn child. 

God’s father put science and progress over his safety and wellbeing by experimenting on his body in cruel and perturbing ways, such as taking out his oxyntic and pyloric juices so that he must use a contraption to make his own gastric juices (in order to discover that we need them ideally), pinned his thumbs into a small iron case to see whether he could retard the growth cycle of bones, and branded his genitals with hot irons. This is one of the first failures of this Frankenstein—using the white male lens to frame our white God as victim. Our God hires a young assistant, Max, to record his experiment Bella’s progress, who is progressing at an accelerated pace. Bella is a child in a woman’s body, waddling and speaking like a toddler, spitting out food she finds unpleasant, throwing tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, smashing dishes and important medical jars of equipment on the floor, and playing with the penis of a cadaver in God’s laboratory while stabbing its eyes out.

Max begins to fall in love with his subject. As Bella progresses, she becomes more independent and obstinate. She also begins to connect with sexual pleasure, but in her childlike state has no understanding of the complexities of desire and sexual connection. 

Poor Things is supposedly about Bella’s journey—but one which largely depicts her insatiable sexual need as that of a horny fourteen-year-old boy, a need gratified either by men whose only desire is to control her, or clients for whom she provides a need and service as a sex worker, the only employment Bella is offered. Sexual consent is impossible because she has the (albeit rapidly-progressing) brain of her infant child, a brain that, since Bella does not age considerably throughout the film, cannot have developed that extensively. Because we are seeing her through the guise of an actual adult, played by Emma Stone, it is easy to forget Bella is not a woman, but a child with an adult body. If one possibly imagines she is consenting to her position as a sex worker, one need only be reminded that when she asks her supervisor why the sex workers are not allowed to choose their clients (their clients are the ones who get to choose), her supervisor responds, Some men enjoy that you do not like it. 

In the original novel, Bella doesn’t have a child’s brain. It is a lie her husband tells to excuse her independent and free-spirited nature. The novel still refuses a story in which Bella speaks for herself, but at least she is a consenting adult. 

As a Frankenstein, a novel that addresses what it means when the thing you’ve created is a monster in your eyes, Bella is called a monster, a word flung at her synonymously with the word whore, one she claims herself, but only because it is thrown at her by men who seek to control and possess her. How noble is the young scientist Max who agrees to wed her even knowing she is a whore, who sees her as both specimen he was hired to study, as well as the object of his affections? How predictable is it that this film, made by three white men, is unable to provide what Shelley gives her Creature: an opportunity for us to see Bella, and her world, from her own point of view?

What makes my beloved so unique, so resonant, for so many of us is that we do not see Frankenstein’s Creature through Frankenstein’s eyes as much as we see him through his own. Aside from three moments—when the Creature comes to life, when he approaches Frankenstein to ask for a companion, and upon seeing Frankenstein’s dead body—we become most acquainted with the Creature through his own words, his own experience. It matters that the most significant and substantial origin story we’re offered is not that of the scientist about his deep feeling of failure but of a Creature who seeks companionship and love, for his existence to be acknowledged. We learn what makes him monstrous—when Felix DeLacey comes upon the Creature attempting to befriend his blind father and misunderstands that the Creature’s hideous form does not translate to his spirit, which sets off an internalization of the world’s monstrous view of him so that he begins to exact a strategic system of revenge against his creator who has abandoned him—not through the point of view of Victor or even of Felix but himself. 

In Poor Things, it is the Creator whose origin story of abuse is most centered, and it is the Creator and the Creator’s Assistant who we must witness in their grief of being abandoned by their child-woman experiment, left to sit in their loneliness and despair that their aims to control and study her have failed. Since the film is told through the eyes of men, Bella is never truly freed from their lens, never truly empowered to understand the world from her own eyes, and so neither are we. 

Because we never leave the gaze of the Creator—both the men who have made the film as well as the Creators within the film’s narrative—we never see Bella outside of the object/monster/whore construction they have placed on her. After all, it is when Shelley’s Creature gets to speak, when we see the Creation from his own point of view, rather than he who has made and rejected him, that we understand. 

How do we balance the cinematic titillation of the Frankenstein gimmick with the complexity of Shelley’s exchange around the maker and the made? How do we build a woman-child into a Creature without reducing her to a monstrous trope?  

In 2019, I wrote Unwieldy Creatures, my queer non-binary Asian retelling of Frankenstein, because I wanted a queer POC-centered Frankenstein to exist in American fiction that explored my beloved in all the ways I most sought to find in the world. 

IVF was on the rise and Georgia was beginning to restrict abortion. From the time I began therapy and came to terms with the toxic narcissism of my father and subsequently of so many people I would involve myself with in the mid-2000s up to that point, the word narcissist no longer held much meaning. We were having more thoughtful dialogue around how to write and publish stories by minoritized and marginalized writers that allowed for a complex range of characters, no longer relegated to caricatures of villainry or tragic sainthood. Since narcissism was almost exclusively considered the domain of men, I wanted to see what would happen if I created a Frankenstein who was a queer woman of color. How would it change the framework through which we see and understand our creator? How would the difference in power dynamic change their relationship if it were Ezra who now sought for Frankenstein’s wedding promise, instead of Elizabeth? If we made explicitly queer what many readers felt was a queer coded relationship between Victor and his dear friend Henry, what else would shift in its place? Finally, if the Creature, who has never been welcomed to participate in civilized society, was not assumed male (for isn’t it the case we accept, reject, and disrupt codes of gender because we are conditioned to live within these codes?), how would that change the way we view them? These were some of the larger ideological shifts I wanted to explore in a modern-day Frankenstein. I wanted to stitch together the heart of my beloved with my own blood, and see what would happen when I infused them with electricity.

Frankenstein is not really a horror film. It’s also not exactly science fiction, despite the fact that it’s often lauded as the first science fiction novel of the (Western) world. I have always seen Frankenstein as a film that addresses some of the most essential and complex ideas of humanity. In the capitalist mindfuck of 2024, I’m dying for a Frankenstein that addresses the ways we as marginalized bodies are used for the dominant structure’s egoist enterprise, the ways masculinity and power work hand in hand to disempower and abandon those most vulnerable. If filmmakers could mine all that Shelley gave us, we’re primed for a truly harrowing, complicated, and beautiful cinematic creation that takes into consideration that the point is not the stitching from dead body parts, the animation of electricity, the mad scientist. The point is not the Creature uncanny and awkward in their movements, soulless and cruel, seen only through the eyes of humans viewing a creature as experiment and progress. But in order to make such a creation, one needs to let go of the horror trope that has saddled Frankenstein’s Creature since the 1931 adaptation—the bolts in its head, the zombie walk, the non-verbal vocalizations. One needs to let go of the fixation on reanimation, electricity, it’s alive! One needs to let go of the film adaptation of Frankenstein as a cheap thrill, and instead consider how we might, as Frankenstein never could, see our Creature as multi-dimensional, rather than only through the eyes of voyeurism and commodification.

Just like Poor Things, the film Birth/Rebirth isn’t a Frankenstein stitched together with random dead body parts, but unlike Poor Things, Birth/Rebirth offers us a feminist lens. Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story of (white) men told by a (white) woman, during which all the women die. Poor Things is a story of a (white) woman told by (white) men (and does it hurt). Birth/Rebirth is a story of a white pathologist, a Black nurse, and her dead child, told by a (white) woman.

In Birth/Rebirth, two women unexpectedly join forces through their separate experiences with loss. Rose, a white pathologist, has been working on bringing the dead back to life using fetal tissue. She resembles our Victor more than most modern-day Frankensteins—emotionless and obsessive, seeking solitude over connection, torn between solving the problem of her mother’s death and her own egoist need for advancement. She becomes entangled with Celie, an Afro-Latinx maternity nurse who works at Rose’s hospital, when Lila, Celie’s eight-year-old daughter, dies from bacterial meningitis. Rose steals Lila’s body to attempt to revive it through her own scientific discoveries. When Celie discovers where Rose has kept her child, she’s so desperate to have Lila back she insists on helping bring her back to life. The pain that connects Rose and Celie is that of the grief tied to the loss of Rose’s mother and Celie’s daughter. 

In Frankenstein, Victor’s mother dies as a result of caring for Elizabeth after she contracts scarlet fever. Young Elizabeth survives, but his mother does not. Struck with grief and a grandiosity for his own ability to surpass the innovations of the scientists of his time, Victor becomes obsessed with curing death by reanimating the collaged bodies of the dead back to life. It’s this narrative thread that is the ghostly trail ribboning the room where Rose and Celie both need the experiment to work. 

Although more compassionately complex than Poor Things, the failure of this Frankenstein remains the same: Frankenstein works because the story itself is told from that of a marginalized Creature (Shelley as a woman in the 19^th century), rather than a Victor. Rose’s inability to connect emotionally to herself or others keeps Lila a specimen in her eyes, just like God’s Bella Baxter. The director’s unwillingness to bring Lila, the Creature to life—what pressure Whale has put on all Frankensteins for all of time!—means we never get to witness Lila outside of the experiment.

But, in this case, gender is only part of the story.

When I’m interviewed about Unwieldy Creatures, I often say toxic white masculinity is the true villain. I also say we learn through the novel what happens when a person reflects and examines the traumas of their own life so as not to perpetuate that harm onto others, and what happens when they don’t. In the case of Unwieldy Creatures, our narrator Plum, who replaces Frankenstein’s Captain Walton, comes to terms with her Taiwanese father’s abuse and leaves behind the glimmers of scientific achievement when she realizes how harmful Dr. Frank’s role in her life is and will become. Dr. Frank, on the other hand, never truly considers the deep mark her white father’s toxicity has imbued in her skin and in her life, which causes her to make decisions against those she claims to love, in the name of her own egoist need for success. It is this lack of examination that causes her to not only sabotage the only love she’s ever known and who enables her to make her creature, but also becomes the reason she never acknowledges her creation, left isolated and alone. 

Victor is never the murderer. It is through Victor’s refusal to acknowledge his Creation in any way, that causes the Creature to enact his revenge on all the people that matter to him. People do die, but Victor is safe in his position of privilege, having never laid a hand on anyone, but also having kept the danger of his creation in the world a secret.

Birth/Rebirth is directed by Laura Moss, a white female director, who also collaborated on the screenplay. Although whiteness is not directly indicted or addressed in the film—one could make a case that Celie’s Blackness is happenstance—whiteness does rear its ugly head.

In order to keep Lila alive long enough to become a fully realized human, Rose needs fetal tissue. Rose’s chooses Lila because they are, medically speaking, a perfect match, and Rose impregnates herself to acquire the fetal tissue needed to continue the experiment. Due to Celie’s connections as a maternity nurse, she’s tasked with stealing the necessary implements while Rose monitors Lila’s progress and injects her with her fetal tissue. Trouble abounds when Rose develops an infection causing her to miscarry, depriving them of the tissue needed to keep Lila alive. When they try to use Rose’s bone marrow, Lila loses the progress of her development—speech, motor skills, recognition of her favorite songs and television programs. Lila starts to share a likeness with our cultural image of Frankenstein’s monster—her language reduced to inarticulate sounds, soulless and violent, leading her to even kill Muriel, Rose’s pig and only successfully resurrected experiment, named after her mother. 

Rose and Celie find another match, a pregnant patient at the hospital, but to acquire the needed tissue, Celie must perform an amniocentesis monthly until she delivers, after which they can steal the placenta, providing enough tissue to bring Lila fully back to life. When the patient changes hospitals (stripping Celie and Rose of access to her material) as a result of the repeated, dangerous, tests, Lila dies again—this time in Celie’s arms. 

Under the guise of needing paperwork filled out, Celie visits the patient at her home, so that she can drug her, induce labor and steal her placenta. The patient unexpectedly seizures and dies. This sequence of events complicates the failure of Birth/Rebirth, but from a racialized lens, in which the only Black character in the film commits thievery, crime, harm, and murder to save her daughter, while Rose remains invisible, safe from scrutiny. The film ends just before Lila is brought back to life, hopefully for good. We never learn if their experiment succeeds, what will happen for Rose and Celie once the task has been achieved, or for Lila, knowing her birth is now burdened by death. 

This turn, irresponsibly inflicted on Celie by this white gaze, inevitably changes the frame of the monster. Through this gaze, the film begs the question: Is Celie made monstrous for coercing the white patient into trusting her, when her only interest is to sacrifice her health and life and that of her baby to save her own? Because our Creature—whether that of Celie or young Lila—is never given the opportunity to tell her story, the bodysnatcher Rose, protected by the gaze of her own white female creator, remains untouched, the Frankenstein tipping in the balance. 

Last week I began writing a stage adaptation of Unwieldy Creatures into being. As I consider these failures, I’m left sitting with my own failed stage adaptation, in which the Creators took centerstage. Although our Creature’s voice reverberated through voiceover of Shelley’s eloquence, his three-bodied presence clung to the Creator he wanted most to love him. Our story centered the tension of Shelley’s life—as a child who lost her mother, a wife entrenched in a turbulent marriage. I’m proud of our Victor Frankenstein as my first (collaborative) attempt at bringing these loves and ideas to life, my first opportunity to embark on fashioning a story in stage and movement, the beginning of the journey that would lead me to Unwieldy Creatures. But I recognize that I hadn’t yet come to an understanding of how to visualize the othering of the Creature, an undertaking more challenging than meets the eye. 

What these Frankensteins, and by that I mean the Creators of these adaptations, miss in the act of imbuing their own Creatures with life is that it was never the physical fact of them that made them monstrous. It was in the Creator’s refusal to contend with his own egoistic failure that caused him to spurn his own creation. It was in that spurning that caused him to leash his own monstrousness onto their creatures, and in that act of abandonment, onto the world. 

In contemporary American film, what monstrousness does that leash onto our world? What is the consequence of bringing to life a woman-child through the eyes of the men who make, desire, and study her? What is the consequence of bringing to life a Black child through the eyes of a white woman who protects the white Frankenstein and casts only the Black mother through acts of thievery, fraud, and white death? Without the counterbalance of the Creature’s tale of what his Creator’s narcissistic irresponsibility sets into motion, what lessons does it corroborate?

As for me and my love, I’ll hold out hope for a new Frankenstein, one stitched into being by an artist both Creator and Creature, yearning, just like Shelley’s Creature, to be seen as he was, rather than as he was projected upon.

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