re: Godplay, monstrosity, and freedom
“Only monsters play God” is the tagline for Guillermo del Toro’s new rendition of Frankenstein. Before I even saw this movie, this claim made me wonder what exactly we mean when we say “monster.” To answer this question, we could start by addressing the claim’s latter portion. What exactly is meant by “Godplay?”
Based on the themes of a film (in which a doctor brings a creature to life from the chopped up body parts of cadavers), Godplay seems in Frankenstein to be, in essence, messing with who gets to live and die. The character of Victor Frankenstein exhibits the traits of both a mad scientist and tyrant. His Godplay lies in his creation of a life and also the way he contains it. These characteristics are not unique to literary archetypes. We identify them in political actors as well. The most obvious (to some) are power-hungry state officials, or perhaps tech company CEOS, or even abusive family members. Other obvious actors are (to others) abortion doctors, “trans ideologists,” or drug users. All of these examples are sites of, we could say, an excess of human agency. The issue, in the eyes of those who cry “Godplay!”, is the human who wills creation and/or sets its terms, particularly when it comes to embodiment.
In the film, Frankenstein’s monster is subject to cruel bondage, first in the form of physical chains and cruel experimentation, but ultimately in the form of perpetual regeneration, unending life. This continuous resurrection, which follows ostracization and brutal suffering, creates a strong Christ narrative for the monster. This is perhaps most symbolically explicit in his generative birth event in which he is affixed to and raised up on a cruciform device. Del Torohas said previously that in his Catholic upbringing, it was not until he saw Boris Kelhoff on screen as Frankenstein’s monster that he understood the likeness of a saint or messiah. Even if del Toro is trying to suggest that the relationship between Frankenstein and monster is like that between God and Christ, let us assume for the purpose of this essay that Frankenstein is no God, and cannot “create” Christ. Even if that is so, can we say he creates a crucifixion?
Frankenstein is literally working with maimed flesh–notably that of executed prisoners or soldiers killed in battle–torn apart and gruesomely reconfigured. He requires death for his creative act. Harlander, his financier, upon witnessing an initial demonstration of a proto-creature before a hostile academic forum, tells Frankenstein that what he saw was a crucifixion. By “crucifixion,” was he referring to the boisterous criticism of the crowd (suggesting Frankenstein was the one crucified) or was he referring to the use of the stitched together creature for Frankenstein’s perverse demonstration (suggesting the creature was the one crucified)?
If Frankenstein’s creation act itself is a crucifixion, does crucifixion imply the creation of a monster? More specifically, is the resultant monster the creature–brought to immeasurable suffering–or is the monster he who does the bringing?
We return to the tagline: “only monsters play God.” What makes the monster so monstrous? What is so horrifying about he who plays God? It could be as simple as the intuitive sense of evil we perceive in human hubris. He who dares play with the terms of life and death makes a deal with the devil, and thus does the devil’s bidding. But I want to suggest that within the monstrous, there is something else that frightens us, something that has to do with the nature of creaturely agency, freedom itself.
We may despise the one who reaches toward God-like power, and rightly so. Much rests upon the maintenance of an all-powerful God who cannot be replaced or conjured on demand. But what’s at stake here is the preservation of a God over and above, whose agency is not only entirely greater than ours, but entirely different from ours. Who are we to mess with what God wills? Perhaps this means that we also carry an aversion to any closure of this gap–not just us reaching up towards God’s heights, but God reaching down to our depths. Why does this matter to us?
The biggest problem with a God whose power is close to ours, and is perhaps working together with our power or is coterminous with it, is the issue of human evil. Karen Kilby proposes that in much of modern thought, we take for granted that an action is either free or determined, but never both. If God determines my actions, I am not free; if I act freely, God allows my actions. But this assumption, she argues, confuses God with a created being. What if God is acting on a different plane? Even if that’s the case, the rebuttal of the modern thinker to such a proposal is as follows: “How can you possibly explain where sin comes from, if you say that God is so intimately involved in free human action?” A “non-competitive” view of God’s agency and our agency, says Kilby, “can only fall silent when confronted with how things have gone wrong.”1
When we use our agency to do evil, does that mean God has a hand in it? I will not endeavor to answer that question. Kilby argues that attempts to answer that question (aka theodicy) only create more problems by justifying evil. But it could be said that the very posing of that question is what makes monsters so monstrous in the first place.
A significant motif in Frankenstein is the presence of mirrors and reflections. The camera’s point of view is frequently mediated by mirrors. Early in the monster’s life, he insists on viewing himself in a mirror. This motif emphasizes an undercurrent in the film’s treatment of monstrosity: the monster lives in the eye of those who create it. The object of “monster” (be it a tyrant or a transsexual) is created by the subjectivity of the “non-monstrous.” Peril, from the “non-monstrous” vantage point, arises from the reflection of our potential, as God’s creatures, to do works of evil, but also to do works of good, or simply works at all—with God right in the middle of it all. The notion that God makes us free, the very possibility that God is among us as we exhibit heretofore inconceivable creative (and destructive) excess, is downright terrifying.
While I proclaim belief in “life everlasting” everyday in my prayers, del Toro’s film turns life everlasting into a monstrous ordeal of suffering. It hurt me to watch this movie simply because of how viscerally del Toro portrays the monster’s suffering. We are made to identify with it. But what makes this a horror film is the problem presented by the flip side of the coin: we identify with Frankenstein too. As creators and created, as evildoers and co-sufferers, as persons who are alive, we are in this film asked to confront the possibility of a God who wills simply that we live, and who lives with us.