Abomination!

We watched two movies in my science fiction film class this week, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein. Both movies have the same, clear-cut message.

There's the moment at the end of The Invisible Man when said man lies in a hospital bed, dying, as his beloved Flora holds his hand. He tells her something along the lines of "I meddled in things Man is not supposed to know," and dies. The chemical mixture which turned him invisible, you see, also turned him mad, and he went about most of the movie murdering and causing mayhem.

But here's the thing... Another scientist character had read an article in an obscure German journal about the dye on which the invisibility chemical was based. In that experiment, the dye was injected under the skin of a dog. The dog went raving mad. So if the Invisible Man had, while still a Visible Man, either asked his supervisor for advice on his experiment or decided to try it on a hamster first, everything would have been fine.

In The Bride of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstencraft Shelley explains to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron (seriously) that "The publishers did not see that my purpose was to write a moral lesson. The punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God." Later, Henry Frankenstein lies in a bed after nearly dying, while his beloved Elizabeth holds his hand. He muses to her that perhaps he could find the secret to eternal life. She exclaims "Henry, don't say those things. Don't think them. It's blashpemous and wicked. We are not meant to know those things."

But elsewhere in the movie the monster meets an old, blind man and becomes his friend. This man teaches the monster to talk in a stunted, Tarzan-like way, showing that the monster is intelligent and self-aware. He only goes on the rampage again when some hunters show up and are, like, "Agh, the monster! Kill!"

In the original book, Frankenstein, the moral was even more clear. Mary Shelley subtitled the book Modern Prometheus, and she clearly didn't like Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. And yet even in that book, the monster only starts getting all rampage-murder-y to get his revenge on his creator, who rejected him because of his hideousness. And he even learns to talk well and clearly. The monster in the book is outright articulate.

So if everyone had just been nice to the monster, everything would have been fine!

To me, the moral is less "Don't meddle in things man is not meant to know" than "Don't meddle incompetently."