Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' gets the monster right for the age of AI
Too bad he lets the founders off easy.
Greetings from soggy Los Angeles -
I had big plans for this week, including writing a dispatch on the New Luddism conference at Columbia and an excellent tech-smashing tribunal in Brooklyn. I’d also hoped to finish an essay on the scourge of AI companions but that went long, and events I’ll discuss at greater length in the future intervened. So, I’m a bit behind schedule. I did, however, catch Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein film, and had some thoughts I wanted to share on that before it exited the Discourse. (For a brief interview I did with El Pais about the subject, see here.)
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Victor Frankenstein is the ur-tech bro. In Shelley’s 1818 novel, he’s ambitious, preening, naive, and reckless. He’s conspicuously into science. He reads some books and thinks he can reorder the universe for the benefit of his own ego. He does the Gothic version of move fast and break things. Then he ditches his failed startup, moves on, and refuses to take responsibility for the mess.
His creation, meanwhile, is dangerous and complex. He’s intelligent, lost, and demands companionship and acceptance above all. One way to read the story is as an expression of Mary Shelley’s (somewhat patronizing) view of the relationship between the 19th century industrialist and the working people at his whim; the bold, rash, and cruel Victor standing in for the capitalists, and the beseeching monster asking only for the necessary support to get by. There’s some speculation that, given that Shelley’s crew (Lord Byron and Percy Shelley) at the time of its authorship were fans, Frankenstein was inspired by Luddism.
In this read of Frankenstein, that working class is intelligent and justifiably aggrieved; it wages a campaign of violence only when out of all other options. Victor, meanwhile, is obsessed with ambition and personal profit, and oblivious to those whom his actions might hurt.
When I was researching and writing Blood in the Machine: The Book, which includes chapters on Shelley and Byron, I reread the original novel and watched a bunch of Frankenstein and Frankenstein-inspired films. I was honestly a little surprised by how cutting the novel remained deep into the 21st century. Especially in its rendering of Victor, through which Shelley diagnosed and skewered an enduring strain of male ego, one inclined to turn to technology to seek and sublimate power.
I was also a little struck by how dumbed-down subsequent depictions of Frankenstein had become. Starting with Boris Karloff’s depiction of the monster in 1931, he’s been etched in pop culture as brutish and dull; a simple giant spurned by his creator who knows not what destruction he wreaks. The cautionary tale element is still omnipresent, but the critique is dulled.
I couldn’t help but notice that the hollowing out of the original critique inherent in Frankenstein—the monster was not a dangerous moron or a horrible mistake, but an intelligent entity Victor could have chosen to acknowledge, assist, and coexist with; even love—mirrored to a degree the dumbing down of the meaning of ‘Luddite’. The real Luddites were feared by power in their day, not mocked, were quite morally justified in their grievances against industrialists and elites. Like the monster, they were strategic in their campaign against their malefactor, not brutish and reactionary.
So! Needless to say, I was curious to see what Guillermo del Toro would do with his much-anticipated and apparently very long gestating depiction. Honestly, I didn’t expect to love his Frankenstein. As much as I admire his originality and visual composition, del Toro’s films can veer a bit too far towards the sentimental for my tastes. And the new Frankenstein is plenty sentimental. Despite this, I’m pleased to say it whips. I think it’s officially my favorite del Toro film—yes, over Pan’s Labyrinth, even—and it centers a beautifully melodramatic critique of the charismatic but morally bankrupt innovator at its core. It’s not perfect; there are a few key shortcomings, which we’ll get to in a minute. But it does effectively render the feckless, pathetic founder as an enduring and enduringly dangerous archetype. It’s a gothic Frankenstein ripe for the age of AI.
The film opens, as Shelley’s book does, in the Arctic. I can’t recall any other film adaptation borrowing the same framing device, in which Victor relays his tale to an Arctic sea captain who’s indulging his own headstrong ambitions by driving his vessel deeper into deadly frostbitten conditions, putting his men at risk for the sake of vainglory. The framing works nicely, both as a plot device and with its stark, frozen visuals that remind us that this struggle—inaugurated by men with reckless ambition, influence, and capital, and waged by those they oppress—risks leading us somewhere resembling the end of the world.
Guillermo del Toro has moved the setting from the original of 1818 forward a half century or so, apparently to incorporate more fully steampunk tech aesthetics and the Crimean War, and he embellishes a Freudian backstory about Victor’s upbringing—he’s obsessed with his beloved ill-fated mother and abused by his stern physician father—and a b-plot about his infatuation with his brother’s fiancé, but the story remains anchored by Shelley’s vision.
[Some spoilers incoming from here on out, so heads up.]
There’s a great scene early on where Victor, played by Oscar Isaac in brooding startup pitch mode, shows off his progress in animating a corpse before an academic court. He’s at a hearing to defend his controversial academic activities, and he delights in the blasphemy and the provocation, but can’t really articulate a sound reason for why he’s doing any of this, except, of course, because he can. He drops out, naturally, (expelled, really) and is promised limitless funding by, in a nice touch from del Toro, a war profiteer who wants to live forever. (Frankenstein’s answer to Peter Thiel, if you will.)
Victor sets out gathering corpses, not, as in Shelley’s version, from graveyards, but battlefields littered with the newly dead, and from the gallows, where—another great touch here—he assesses potential body part donors before they’ve even been hung. These scenes can’t help but evince del Toro’s attitude towards such men, callously willing to cut the living down or disregard their humanity entirely for the sake of their ambition. It’s easy to see parallels here to the current crop of Frankensteins; AI executives willing to harvest the works of the living and the dead, uncaring as to the creators’ concern or consent, to serve their ends. It’s perhaps hardly surprising to see such a critique from a director who uttered “Fuck AI” into a live mic at a press event for the film, but it works.
The making-the-monster scenes that follow are some of the most gruesome fun in the film; the set design is great, and the lightning harvesting technology feels like a nod to the “It’s Alive” stuff from the pulpier movies. When del Toro’s Victor finally conjures the monster, he doesn’t immediately flee in terror, as Shelley’s Victor does. Instead, he treats it cruelly (as his father treated him), whipping it, berating it, and dismissing it as a failure before attempting to destroy it altogether. This section, and the following, in which the monster, played with shambling grace by Jacob Elordi, escapes and discovers the human world for himself, are the heart of the film.
If we’re following the materialist interpretation of Frankenstein, instead of fleeing in disgust the working classes shaped by his creation, the new Victor attempts to punish it, even destroy it outright. If you really wanted to go ham on the AI metaphor, you could slot in Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, or Elon Musk here, promising the rise of AGI that will replace labor altogether.
The last act can’t quite manage to keep up the highs of the first two. The monster’s entreaty for a companion, Victor’s denial, and the vows of vengeance are cycled through quickly enough to feel rushed, especially given that those events take up the bulk of the book. (This is the rare two and a half hour film I would have gladly watched another half hour of.) And, as Defector’s Kelsey McKinney points out, the film’s omission of some crucial plot points—when the monster vengefully kills everyone Victor loves, for instance—sands the monster down into a more unambiguously sympathetic character. (Victor’s brother, who’s accidentally killed by the monster in del Toro’s film, does, in another blunt but effective scene, get to underscore the point that Victor is the real monster.)
But the only real letdown for me was the end. Shelley’s final chapter is savage. Victor Frankenstein is egoistic and headstrong to the very end; he encourages the sea captain to plow on heedlessly through the ice, crew be damned, and vows to hunt the monster to the death. He dies permanently curdled and scarred by ambition. del Toro somewhat inexplicably lets Victor off the hook; he questions the motives of the headstrong sea captain, and, when faced with the monster, apologizes and repents. The monster forgives him, uttering “Perhaps now, we can both be human.” Victor hasn’t earned this at all. He’s beaten his creation, attempted to murder it, abandoned it, scorned it, and accidentally killed the only living human who showed it any understanding.
I understand the urge to end the film on a redemptive note, to perhaps show the Altmans and Musks that hope for grace is still out there. But for someone who told NPR he’d “rather die” than use generative AI, for a film whose tagline, “Only Monsters Play God” is broadcast all over the place, it feels a bit like a copout. Still, it’s a knives sharp Frankenstein fit for the OpenAI era, and its inherent, genre-defining tech criticism is very much intact.
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