"FAKE"ENSTEIN NEWS

I spent my lunch break at work the other day reading that week's issue of The New Yorker, a magazine I enjoy for many reasons. The writing is usually of a stellar quality, the film reviews are first rate, and the political leaning is definitely to the left. And oh, those wonderful cartoons!

One of the articles that I read was entitled The Strange And Twisted Life Of "Frankenstein" by Jill Lepore. In the article, Lepore gives us a glimpse into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley who began writing "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus" when she was only eighteen years old. The biographical details are well done as is the publication history of the groundbreaking novel and it's place in our collective imaginations. Lepore brings a new reading of the novel and it's numerous adaptations (especially for the stage and on film), in which she sees the monster as a slave figure.

To support this, in my opinion, somewhat questionable thesis, Lepore asserts the following: "In later nineteenth-century stage productions, the creature was explicitly dressed as an African. Even the 1931 James Whale film, in which Karloff wore green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as black: he is, in the film's climactic scene, lynched."

Um, no Miss Lepore, he's not as the image above quite clearly shows otherwise. During the climax of the film, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and the monster (Boris Karloff), are pursued by an angry mob of frightened villagers carrying pitchforks and torches. The chase moves from back lot real-life locations into that wonderful fantasy landscape that I call "Earth Universal". The chase ends at the foot an immense, expressionistic windmill. Henry and the monster enter and engage in a duel to the death. The monster throws Henry from the burning windmill (his broken body is seen hitting one of the blades of the mill, before falling to the ground). The monster, now surrounded by flames (the thing he hates and fears the most, a point explicitly expressed earlier in the film), is trapped. He rages about helplessly until a huge beam falls upon him, pinning him to the floor where he is trapped and soon roasted to death.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't fit any definition of the term "lynched". In fact, the only time a "lynching" of any kind appears in the film, is early on when Henry and his demented assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye), cut down the body of an executed criminal from a gallows, a body which will soon house a criminal brain. The fact that the monster meets his death by fire (and not at the end of a rope), provides the material for the opening sequence in Whale's masterpiece of a sequel BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), in which the horribly burned and scarred monster arises from the ruins of the scorched windmill, an action that takes place mere minutes after the end of the first film.

In short Miss Lepore, liar, liar, pants on fire. I don't know if you've ever even seen the film you write about (it doesn't appear that you have) or that you saw some mysterious alternative print that you and you alone have seen in the last eighty-seven years. Miss Lepore incorrectly states an easily provable fact in order to fit her pre-conceived argument in which the monster must, at all costs, be made to be seen as a slave.

Even if that means inventing a "lynching" that never occurred. Shame on you Miss Lepore because up until you made that damning statement towards the end of the piece, I was willing to go along with your argument. Now, the entire piece is forced into question because if you got this one point so horribly wrong, I can only wonder, what else did you lie about in this essay?