Alone: Bad. Friend: Good!

There are a few things I do when I'm waiting to go out, when, like, I have enough time to do something but not enough time to do something productive. Usually, when a friend tells me a time, I'm ready beforehand, and I time the getting-ready part just right. (If I've been late to meeting up with you, it's only because I committed to ride the party straight to hell and called an uberpool so as to save money on parking for drinks. It's not that I wasn't ready on time.)

Anyway, there are two things that I do when I have extra, unprecedented time after getting ready. One thing I do is get ready.

Let me restate that. No, let me overstate that. Public Service Announcement: If you text me that you are running late before we are about to go out, I DO NOT STOP GETTING READY. I'm not mad, I just continue doing what I was doing. So by the time you show up, I have on too much makeup, my hair is too big, and I have become aesthetically unloveable. See?

Oh. You thought I was joking. That's cute. 

The other thing I do, and this is generally only when I can fit no more makeup on my whoreish face, is that I watch a scary movie. Back over the summer I bought the 6-pack of Universal Classic Monster Movies--this, after that fucking monstrosity that was The Mummy, and I mean monstrosity in the bad way, not the fun way--and I had yet to watch a single one of them because I am an ingrate.

So when my friend was like, let's do drinks instead of dinner, I was like, Yeah girl. And popped Bride of Frankenstein into the DVD drive on my emergency-purchase HP laptop hahaha nailed it.

But wait, let me back up. So I have a few brilliant friends, and a few more who, like, GET me as a human. These are the ones who text me that Zac Efron was cast to play Ted Bundy (Maegannnn), and then I get an immediate follow up text, "How do we feel about this?" and then I get the ellipsis for twenty minutes followed by a five-paragraph essay anticipating my counterargument that is "OH GIVE THE BEAUTIFUL BOY A CHANCE, Matthew McConaughey finally delivered when you gave him a challenge! #truedetective am I right?" Or do I just love a tough guy with a heart of gold? Slash a twisted soul with good manners? I DON'T KNOW, okay, this isn't ABOUT me. Kind of.

Anyway, so over the summer, one such friend texted me, "Did you see they cast Javier Bardem as Frankenstein's monster in the new Bride of F?" 

Let me be honest. That meme is a little tame. I think my exact words were, "Fuck. Me. To death. ARE YOU SERIOUS." Turns out it is an unconfirmed rumor, which is my favorite kind, of course, but SO? AND? That casting decision gives me liiiiiife and I am here. for. that. (Side bar: From what I understand after reading the MANY celebrity interviews with Bardem, he's a decent human man who listens to metal music and loves his beautiful wife. But what I know about him, from all the villains he's played, is that he is my one true love.)

So, naturally, in preparation for supporting my make-believe boyfriend, I had to rewatch the original.

Let me tell you. I did not expect to feel this much. 

I was watching the boring-ass prelude of Mary Shelley's character being like, "Be a dear, Percy, and shut the window. I'm so afraid of storms." And he all like, "Bitch, you can't be spooked by thunder when you've terrified millions with that imagination," and she's like, "Listen, motherfucker, I do what I want because I'm a outlive you through posterity so can you please shut the damn window like I asked you--I mean shit, can I live?" (She doesn't say that. It's subtext. What she really says with a hopeful smile is, "It will be published. I think." Understatement.) That whole part with them is just for lazy viewers who aren't familiar with the original/novel. Or it's just to underestimate women who have cleavage like Elsa Lanchester's because you can't be smart AND hot. [side-eye]

But yeah, I digressed because this is when I was still putting on my makeup and half-watching. 

SPOILERS START HERE.

Anyway, so, while this is happening, boring. All the stuff with HENRY Frankenstein--because they condensed the characters of him and his BFF? IDK--and his beautiful little fool wife, boring. The maid being all jumpy, boring. Even Dr. Praetorius was kind of boring until he pulled out those bell jars.

Turns out that Praetorius is essentially our catalyst character, your basic shit-stirrer, your saboteur, if you will. He's jealous of Frankenstein so he takes his idea and improves on it, making life from life instead of life from death. More accurately, he's jealous of Frankenstein's success, so he's like, "How can I fuck this up for everyone. I know. Let's make the monster FALL IN LOVE."

Maybe I shouldn't--wait. I shouldn't be, but I am always more fascinated in the villain. Not because I want to be them, but because... well, don't you want to know how they got that way?

For Frankenstein's creature, it's pretty clear.

Imagine this: cool, quiet darkness. Like, maybe a sensory deprivation tank. Just total peace.

And then, ELECTRODED TO LIFE SCREAMING. 

There's the creature's first trauma, right? Resurrection. 

The story picks up when the creature breaks out of the shitty jail that the angry mob nailed him into. In all fairness, he has been killing women because he gets social anxiety when they scream at his appearance, which is, I don't know, probably a pretty natural reaction considering he has a childlike mentality but the strength of ten men, and you know how babies get frustrated when you talk too much.

And then, everyone runs from you because your appearance is terrifying. Even though all you want to do is ask them, "Why is this happening to me?" no one will even let you get close. No one will even let you talk, which you can't, not really, because even though you can understand language, this mouth is different from the one that you used to have, so you can't really form words. And you get so fucking frustrated with all this screaming that you put your hand over their mouths because JUST LISTEN PLEASE, and then they die. But hey, when the shepherd girl falls into the river trying to run from you screaming because your face is so fugly-unsightly, you still try to fish her out, because after all, YOU'RE NOT A MONSTER.

So you spend your undead life just wandering around, trying to steal food from gypsies when you can, but you can't because they want to kill you or maybe just set you on fire again. Generally your existence is just, you know, being exiled from place to place, wandering meaninglessly and indefinitely through the telephone pole forest.

And then the hand of God guides you to the home of a blind hermit. If that's not divine intervention.... The hermit is SO LONELY and SO GRATEFUL for company, and because he can't see, he doesn't know that the creature is the monster. 

This is when I realized that I had seen the movie before. Back when I was a kid, maybe seven years old, watching Turner Classic Movies channel, waiting for my dad to get home from the gym in the house that had a couch and a TV and two beds and ketchup only in the fridge. And I remember being SO sad that when my dad came home and said, "Oh, Frankenstein! Cool! Baby, what's wrong?" I was just like, "Why is everyone so mean to him? Why is he all alone? He just wants friends!"

I didn't remember the horrific parts, the parts of the creature murdering people on accident. I remembered him staggering through that barren forest, hiding in a tomb from the angry mob, trying to survive because that's what humans are programmed to do: survive--and he is human, okay? HE IS. He might have been manmade, but for all intents and purposes, the creature is just a human in an anomalous body. Essentially your monstrosity in this story comes ONLY from looks--or at least that's where it starts, and then it snowballs because of course, anyone who looks different is a monster.

Let me say that again for the people in the back: your monstrosity comes only from looks. And then it snowballs because, of course, anyone who looks different is a monster.

Did you hear me? According to this, anyone who looks different is a monster. 

That means lonely forever. And that shit ain't fair.

Also, I'm not an expert on freakery scholarship, but the thematics of Bride seem REAL similar to those of anomalous-bodied people in the 19th century, which is (I think?) when this movie is set. For example, your original Beast, Petrus Gonsalvus. The difference being, of course, that Frankenstein's creature is the alleged blasphemy incarnate and by extension, pure evil, God's lightning rod of punishment. How do we know that? Mary Shelley says it in the beginning of the movie:

"The publishers did not see that my purpose was to write a morrral lesson, the punishment that befell a morrrtal man who dared to emulate God." (Ridiculously over-rolled Rrrrrs in original)

I'm just gonna go ahead and say that might not be why she wrote it, and if it was, she missed the mark. (In the book, BTW, the creature is the one we empathize with, not Victor--I mean "Henry.")

If you didn't want me to feel for the creature, why is there this part of him befriending the amazingly understanding blind hermit? Why do we get the tear-jerking violin-playing? The prayers of thanks that they send up together? During the friendship of this hermit, the creature learns language. He's not GREAT at it, but he can get his ideas across. Some of his first and favorite words are "Good," "Food," "Drink," and, tragically, "Friend."

In fact, that's how Dr. Praetorius sells him on the idea of pressing Frankenstein for a wife. He says she would be the creature's friend. And look how fucking happy just her presence makes him:

And yet. She's terrified of him, too. They made the bride beautiful. She's totally inarticulate and can't even render human facial expression like the creature can, but she still gets to reject him because she's cute. 

But you know, at least she got to act on her own free will. Which is a thing that humans have--see my above argument in favor of the humanity of the monsters. For four and a half minutes of the movie she gets to exercise that free will, but still. The creature tries twice to just talk to the bride, but both times she runs screaming from him.

And then, in the undeniable and unending loneliness that the creature feels just beginning at his own undead kind rejecting him, he goes to pull the Destruct the Tower lever. (Which is a thing that exists. I don't know, just go with it.)

Here is the part that made me literally cry for real, both at seven years old and again at twenty-nine. Elizabeth shows up to save Frankenstein. He tells her to go away. But then the creature says to them, "Go! You live." But then to Dr. Praetorius and his bride he says, "You stay. We belong dead."

Y'all. At the risk of being either too sentimental or too insensitive, here's why that makes me cry even just thinking about it. The creature wanted love--or really just to have a friend. A. Friend. Singular. And people who didn't think he deserved that (because he was an abomination or whatever) drove the only guy who was cool with him totally away--the hermit tries to defend him, and even as they're ushering him away, he says, "Why do you do this?" because it leaves him alone again, too, and for the next few scenes, the creature wanders the woods saying, "Friend? Friend?" it's fucking horrible and insufferable to watch. Especially because he's alone for stupid reason: his appearance. Especially because BECAUSE of his appearance, and it causing him to be literally chased from multiple premises, he NEEDS a support system.

So he's the Hamlet that Hamlet thought he was: the creature once did not exist. He remembers not existing. He liked it better. He decides at the end that it is better not to be, and while he weeps, he pulls the lever.

That's terrible. It's the worst. It is in fact my worst nightmare, and probably the worst nightmare of most people, even though many people have no idea what it is like to be alone, and so they don't realize they're scared of it. All any human really wants at the heart of everything is connection to other humans. And this fucking guy, this Henry Von Frankenstein (which is a fucked-up and all-over-the-place name), this fucking guy shocks life into a human cadaver, and then, GASP, because it's UGLY (and really only because his body is in various states of decomposition), he just lets the creature go, just planned-ignores all the repercussions of his own actions.

Why does this fucking guy get to "Go! Live!??" He's THE WORST.

All I can think of is that during his brief existence, the creature was taught to hate himself. Even the only one like him hates him, and we know he knows this because he says, in the most heartbreaking flake of offscreen dialogue in the whole depressing film, "She hate me, like others." Oh, come to my bosom. Let me put you in my pocket and protect you from the world!

So the closing image in this movie is Frankenstein and Elizabeth holding each other as the tower explodes and falls. Triumphant music plays in the background. For WHY? Are you proud of this shit? Are you proud of your behavior, you sick fuck?

I kind of don't know what to do with this movie anymore. I thought I was going to love it, and in a sense, I do: I love that the bride is the most iconic woman figure in all of horror, and I love that this movie was better than the first, which I watched but don't remember, and I love that a horror movie can make us feel, and I love that even though this movie came out in the 1930s, everyone still knows it, but in a deeper, truer sense, Fuck all that. And fuck this poster:

Oh really, bitch? He DEMANDS a mate? Did you see the picture of him trying to hold her hand? He's not pushy at all! He didn't do nothing gross AT ALL. He was trying to be her friend first--it was Dr. Praetorius who insisted that he needed a mate! It was the doctors who put this tragic romance into motion, and y'all should hold those alleged geniuses accountable, not the creature who keeps just having shit happen at it.

In conclusion, don't be an asshole. And if you need to cry when you rewatch this movie, let me know and I'll bring you some cheap candy and my makeup bag.