OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Feminist Frankensteins

This post is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards.

This is a dialogic piece between Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield that explores the three recent feminist re-tellings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Lisa Frankenstein (2024), The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023), and Oscar-nominated Poor Things (2023).

Henry Jenkins:

I saw and enjoyed Lisa Frankenstein recently, which is the third feminist retelling of the Frankenstein myth I’ve seen in the past six months. In one (The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster), the woman is the mad scientist. In the second (Poor Things), she’s the monster. And in Lisa Frankenstein, one could argue that she’s “the Bride.”  As we prepare for an Oscars where Poor Things looks to be a major contender for several top awards, most decisively Best Actress where Emma Stone is in contention with Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon), I thought it would be interesting to explore how each of these works re-storied the Frankenstein myth and why. This discussion started on Facebook, where I posed the question of what it meant that we were seeing so many female-centric versions in recent months—with at least one more in the works as Maggie Gyllenhaal is currently directing her own version of Bride of Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro also doing his own distinctive take.

If we go back to the source material, Frankenstein was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who has been celebrated in recent years as herself a proto-feminist writer. Shelly had suffered a miscarriage some months before she began to write the novel. She describes the monster at one point as an “abortion.” Many now think she wrote the novel in response to the harsh and indifferent treatment she received over the loss of her baby from her husband, Percy, and his close friend, Lord Byron. Shelly scholar Anne K. Mellor describes it as a story “about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman … [Frankenstein] is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction.”  Such a reading sees the story as centrally about the homosocial relationship between men – Dr. Frankenstein, his monster, and his various professors and assistants who imagined a “bold new world” where men could create life. What was monstrous was not the creature, whose innocence did not prepare him for the world, but the doctor, who abandons him with indifference almost as soon as he is brought into the world. Godwin Baxter in Poor Thingsis a more caring father who only reluctantly allows his creature to go out in the world.

There’s so much that can be said about the campy queerness in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. Elsa Lancaster is both the bride and the author in the film, and some have argued that the title refers to Elizabeth, the newly married wife of Victor, rather than the monster’s mate, who only appears in the film’s closing moments. Whale, though, mirrors an early scene with Percy and Lord Byron on either side of Mary Shelley with a later one where Victor and Dr. Septimus Pretorius hold hands with the Monster’s Mate in a similar fashion, further suggesting the collapsing of the two roles. Paul Morissey’s Flesh of Frankenstein and Kenneth Branaugh’s version, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both lean heavily into homoerotic imagery in depicting the “unnatural act” of creating the monster. And, of course, there’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where the role of the mad scientist is assumed by Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter, the “sweet transvestite,” who seems to queer everyone he encounters.

By centering women in these traditionally male roles, these newer Frankenstein films ask different kinds of questions, renewing the story by mapping alternative meanings onto its core figures. So far, I am seeing debates about gender, sexuality, and Poor Things which ignore the other films. When I raised the question on Facebook, Kris Longfield had some rich suggestions, so I asked her to join me for this dialogic post.

Kris Longfield:

Svengoolie just aired its Bride of Frankenstein episode this past Saturday, so Bride’s fresh in my mind again. It has some very weird resonance today, as it comes with a strong sense of coercive control – Dr. Frankenstein is forced to create the Bride at the behest of Dr. Pretorius and the Monster, due to Elizabeth having been kidnapped, with the strong suggestion that a female monster would solve the problem of the Monster’s loneliness, as she would be a natural mate for him. Instead, her rejection and fear of him makes the Monster even more frustrated and alone, leading to his choice to destroy the lab with himself, the Bride, and Dr. Pretorius inside. There are shades of incel in the entitlement to a mate.

All three films, Lisa Frankenstein, Poor Things, and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, take on different things to fix, but the question always centers on the idea of “what are we taking from the past and what are we taking from the present” in how we’re trying to solve problems (with a look at how female agency factors in).

Lisa Frankenstein is sewing specific modern body parts onto her chivalrous undead boyfriend; Poor Things plops a baby’s brain into a grown woman’s body; and Vicaria, in The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, discovers that raising the long dead isn’t an issue, but the recent dead are a different matter.

Lisa Frankenstein approaches the issue of a monster and his mate from the opposite direction. While he initially shows up and chases her around her house, he is a kind of sad and broken figure that she adopts as a friend and works a kind of nurturing magic on. Despite (quoting her stepsister) to say that “it’s a waste of time to fix a boy, it’s better just to accept a guy’s flaws,” she plays mad scientist herself – sewing her stepmother’s ear on him, luring her creepy lab partner so they can chop off his hand to attach, and finally, sewing on her crush’s genitals. It’s a very feminized version of a mad scientist, leveraging her sewing skills and the electrocution in her sister’s tanning bed, but the parts feel like they have symbolic resonance. While Lisa starts with the resurrected but damaged body of a chivalrous man from the past, she adds a woman’s ear, and the story then depicts a relationship that includes a lot of listening from him. While her lab partner felt her up nonconsensually, she’s very clear about promising to hold his hand (which she later does, albeit aloft), and this previews a turn in the story where Lisa and the monster have a greater sense of equality and being on the same level. And then the relationship can only be consummated once she’s sewn on modern genitals.

It’s interesting to me that once she’s able to consummate the relationship, she decides that due to the various people they’ve killed, she needs to die. The atrocities she’s committed in fixing him now make it impossible for her to remain without consequences. After her death, the monster, having fully recovered and being able to speak again, resurrects her as his Bride. So, in a sense, both have played mad scientist to the other.

It’s weirdly romantic, this idea that we don’t simply find a mate, we make them. No one starts as a perfect match. At the same time, the story’s also clear that Lisa’s ideal man only has a few modern male qualities (let’s sum them up as egalitarianism and sexuality), and she’s entirely grafted on the idea that he might listen to her the way a female friend would.

Poor Things also provides Bella the opportunity to play the mad scientist with one of the male characters, her abusive husband/father, whose life she saves after he shoots himself in the foot. However, she also switches his brain with that of a goat to minimize the harm he can do to her. Her outlook is much closer to the idea that one can’t fix someone but also that she shouldn’t have to. The men who are good or bad or ambivalent simply are the way they are; she has no ability to fix them, as Lisa Frankenstein does.

This is a conclusion that she comes to over the course of the story, after being an experiment herself, and, in turn, experimenting on everyone around her. At the end, a fully realized Bella decides that she wants to become a mad scientist like her creator/father. That’s her happy ending.

Both of these Brides are also mad scientists, a weird mix of naivete, trauma, and artistry. 

But this idea, relatively unexplored in Bride, that not being able to control or predict the female monster is the reason to bring the lab down around one’s ears, (when the same is true of the male monster) is where I would start in looking at Poor Things. A lack of control and unmet expectations is where the story of Poor Thingsstarts to go off the rails for Bella’s paramour, Duncan Wedderburn. He believes himself in control and takes advantage of Bella’s naivete in a villainous way. But when she begins to explore on her own, to eat what she wants, to have sex with who she wants, to dance when she wants – especially without regard to the propriety Duncan’s been socialized into expecting, he begins to see something villainous and evil in her. He tries to fix the situation by isolating her on the boat with him, only for her to give away his gambling winnings, forcing them back ashore. He expects her to put his needs and desires first, which she never does. It makes him both oddly attached to her – he can never be satisfied until she, specifically, fulfills his needs – but it’s also what drives him into an asylum, because she never will. There is something specific about a female monster that is very focused on romantic control.

Skipping back to Lisa Frankenstein for a moment – the happy ending there is very much created by her “Bride” version being reunited with the male monster at the end. And, in shades of the original Bride, she is the one who pulls the “lab” down around her own ears, demanding he set the tanning bed to “max bronze.” She’s become a monster of her own making, via the murders she participated in.

Bella, by contrast, is definitely created against her will to some degree but mostly in the sense that every baby is. When Godwin is asked why he wouldn’t reanimate her mother’s body with her mother’s brain, he has an odd respect for her mother’s autonomy and choice to die. He continues this respect for Bella’s autonomy, letting her make her own choices (though he does make the suggestion to McCandles to marry her, McCandles still has to ask Bella herself). Ultimately, Bella’s story comes full circle when she decides to become a doctor and make her own mutant experiments. Following in Godwin’s footsteps is a choice made of her own understanding and autonomy.

Vicaria’s story in Angry Black Girl carries the sense of autonomy even further because, at every step, she must fight for her choices. Her choices are continually critiqued in a way that the original Dr. Frankenstein isn’t subject to as a white, wealthy man. But this ultimately sets her up to push past the failure of her monster. She has less to lose and more training to resist the influence of others: this is why she’s ultimately successful.

Henry Jenkins:

I am intrigued by your reading of The Bride of Frankenstein as an incel narrative, though I am not sure I totally agree with it. As a child of the 1960s, who grew up reading Forest K. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, I was taught to understand the monsters in the Universal films as tragic figures, shaped by conditions not of their own making, and who were frequently social outcasts. Nowhere was this more true than Ackerman’s pretty convincing take on Frankenstein’s monster, who would seem to have much in common with Casper the Friendly Ghost. He seeks to make friends everywhere he goes, but his appearance produces only dread and horror and, in some cases, he doesn’t understand human ways. He picks flowers with a young girl, tossing them into the water, and ends up drowning her. He meets an old blind hermit in the woods (in Bride) who befriends him until others intrude and chase him away. And even the Bride he has made for him to be his “friend” – it’s not clear that sex was ever what was sought by him given his seeming “innocence” of adult sexuality – rejects him, and it is then that he does what any self-respecting emo might do and seeks death over further pain.

We might see the other male characters in the film in similar ways – Dr. Frankenstein is kicked out of college for being too smart, exploring forbidden knowledge, and Dr. Pretorious seeks Frankenstein’s approval for his own accomplishments only to be rejected also. Bride of Frankenstein figures in yet another Oscar-nominated film – the documentary short subject The Last Repair Shop – the story of the men and women who repair broken musical instruments for the LA schools. The man who fixes the string instruments shares the story of discovering the pleasures of playing the violin when he sees the scene of the monster and the blind hermit in Bride. What he takes from this is not the moment where the monster is rejected but the moment of intense sociality between the men, the emotional satisfaction they both take from the music, which the monster follows through the wood and thereby finds shelter in the cabin.

Reading these characters as outcasts helps us to understand why two of the three contemporary films we are discussing here tap teen drama tropes. The Angry Black Girl is a BLERD, a poster child in some senses for STEM Education. She is shut down by her teachers and classmates as weird and uncomfortable because she asks too many questions and on the wrong subjects, just like Victor in the original film.

And Lisa is a very gothy outcast who has lost her mother, doesn’t gain acceptance in her new family, and can’t even be embraced by the other weird kids on the literary magazine. Diablo Cody – the creator of Juno, Jennifer’s Body, Lisa Frankenstein, and other such films – is too nuanced a scriptwriter not to complicate some of the generic categories into which her characters seemingly fall – giving more depth to the popular kid step-sister, for example, who seems to care about her new sibling even if she cares more about herself, giving some tragic qualities to the passive father who doesn’t seem to belong in the family he is creating for himself, and so forth. For sure, Lisa and her beau butcher people who have it coming, but Lisa’s outcast status is at least partially of her own creation.

Part of what gave the Universal monster films their sense of pathos was the nuanced performances which Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. brought to their roles. For all of his outsized qualities, Karloff plays the monster with a degree of gentleness and awkwardness. He does this even when he is acting with his eyes underneath a ton of makeup. And Lon Chaney Jr. as Lawrence Talbot in The Wolfman has a sense of sadness which he also carries with his eyes and his voice.

In Lisa Frankenstein, I was especially impressed by Cole Sprouse as the 19th century guy whose resurrection makes him boyfriend material. He clearly cares about Lisa from the first, even if, as you suggest here, he acquires a mix of 19th century and contemporary traits as the story advances. Again, he must initially act with his eyes and his hands, learning to speak across the film. So much of the comedy comes from his nonverbal reactions to Lisa shoving him into the closet, dressing him up, and mapping her emotions onto him, before finally learning to appreciate who he is rather than dismissing him for the high school hunk.

Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things is a tour de force – no wonder she’s the front runner for Best Actress this year (even in the face of Lily Gladstone’s performance in Flowers of the Killer Moon and her historic status as the first Native woman nominated in this category). As an adult woman’s body animated with the spirit of a young child, she seems to lack any and all inhibitions. She jumps up on top of random visitors, she spits out her food in a polite restaurant, and, above all, she makes no attempt to cover her naked body or hide her sexual desire. She fits Freud’s description of the child as “polymorphously perverse.” As she develops more mature understanding, she rejects the pretenses of Victorian society and refuses to accept male limits on her pleasure. She doesn’t want to be controlled by men, for sure, and that’s what gives her a sense of agency, but as we see when she enters the brothel, she sees men, she understand what makes them tick, and, by this point in the story, she knows how to control them through giving them just enough of what they desire to get them to do what she wants.

If the original Frankenstein’s Monster seems a total outcast, she becomes popular in a circle of women who teach her what she needs to know to escape the control of men, and this sense of female solidarity is part of what makes this a feminist retelling. In a culture where women are often infantilized, her childlike innocence grants her the agency to disobey male rules, while she learns all she can from the women – libertines and whores for the most part – whose company she keeps.

Else Lancaster’s performance in Bride of Frankenstein seems to be slowed down in comparison to the high levels of energy that Stone brings to the screen. She seems to be struggling to figure out what’s happening to her; she turns her head slowly and then shrieks when she sees the monster who is looking at her with such eagerness. She has had no time to adjust to her circumstances, no period of gradual intellectual development, and no mentorship from other women, all of which allow Bella to resist male control without being destroyed by them.

Kris Longfield:  

I agree that the monster is more of a tragic outcast than what we might call an “incel,” and his overall innocence of the world is an excellent point. Bride is also sometimes read as having a metaphorical gay story at its center as well (two men make a baby). What’s most interesting to me is that the most successful relationship in the movie is actually the monster’s friendship with the blind hermit – there’s a specific sense of equality, as both are outcasts. This equality is arguably what the monster wishes he could recreate when the Bride is brought to life. But a key ingredient is missing – that of choice – the monster seeks the source of the violin music he hears, and the hermit is happy it led him to his door. If the monster had played an instrument, would he have fared better?

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In Lisa Frankenstein, the answer is yes – Lisa and the monster bond over music, as Lisa first mentions having The Cure, which she then has to explain can only heal you emotionally. The monster also plays the piano for her once he gains a second hand, which continues to step up their emotional connection.

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Bella Baxter dances wildly to music during her development, but this exuberance is specifically discouraged by Wedderburn – this is when we start to see how strained their connection really is, because while he joins her in the dance, he is trying to rein her in rather than matching her energy. We see Bella continue to search for genuine connection through the brothel scenes, as when she instructs one man to tell her a childhood memory and then she tells a joke, before they begin. But the strongest connection she forges seems to have been her father, confronting him for the truth before he dies, and noting that the lab is where she feels she is at home. This is an inverse of Frankenstein, since Victor rejects the monster. So perhaps the real difference in the outcome is more related to attachment theory. Vicaria’s monster has a similar problem – if not double, as both Vicaria and his father ultimately reject the revived Chris, leading to further massacre.

To be a bit glib, my overall conclusion is that if only every outcast took up an instrument, we could avoid a lot of pain and suffering. It certainly seems to work on TikTok. But to be serious, if we look at why Frankenstein stories seem to be rising lately, maybe what it really comes down to is a society exploring who and what we have to be to find genuine connection with others. As a response to the epidemic of loneliness, do we need to bring a new person to life or do we need to listen for the sound of other outcasts?

 

Biographies

Kris Longfield is a partner and head of Research and Innovation at Fanthropology, where she combines anthropology, fan studies, focus groups and quantitative research to guide marketing and development for all the studios and streaming platforms in Hollywood. She’s worked on projects for major franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, Jurassic World, Bond, Mission Impossible, Sonic the Hedgehog, and more; writes practical guides to genres and their audiences, studies the state of streaming, and published an industry guide on Building Universes in 2022, which she’s working on an update to in 2025.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.