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- [00:02]
A
This is a headgun podcast.
- [00:06]
B
Andrew Craig. I like my money and I don't like it going where I can't see it. I need it to be in front of my eyes. And unfortunately there are big wireless carriers out there carrying my money away from me.
- [00:21]
A
I worry about you because you lack object permanence and so you need all your money to be in front of you at all times or you forget that you have it.
- [00:27]
B
I'm permanently stuck with these crazy high wireless bills. Andrew, what am I gonna to do?
- [00:33]
A
You need to switch to Mint Mobile. Sounds like I switched to Mint Mobile. Did you know this about me? I switched to Mint Mobile and I'm saving a bunch of money compared to the service I was buying before.
- [00:43]
C
Good.
- [00:44]
A
And other than the the fact that I'm saving a lot of money, I don't notice anything different about it. They're here to rescue you with premium wireless plans starting at 15 bucks a month. You can bring your own number, activate with EIM in minutes and start saving immediately. No long term contracts, no hassle, Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month.
- [01:06]
B
If you like your money and you want it permanently in front of you, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.com overdue that's mintmobile.com overdue upfront payment of $45 for three months.
- [01:19]
C
Five gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month.
- [01:22]
B
New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plans available, taxes and fees extra. C Mint Mobile for details While Andrew
- [01:30]
A
and Craig believe the joy of discovery
- [01:32]
C
is crucial to enjoying any well told
- [01:34]
B
tale, they will not shy away from
- [01:36]
C
spoiling specific story beats when necessary. Plus, these are books you should have read by now.
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B
Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.
- [02:12]
A
My name is Andrew.
- [02:14]
B
Fire Bad.
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D
Fire is bad.
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A
Except in some contexts where it's yeah,
- [02:19]
B
trying to cook a hot dog.
- [02:21]
A
Try to cook a hot dog. You're going to need some fire. Every week, normally on our podcast, one of us reads a book that we've never read before and we tell you about it and we tell each other about it and it's a good time. But now, much like Dr. Frankenstein, we are welding together different pieces of things that were never meant to be in defiance of God so that we can so that we can have a lighter month than usual. So here you go. This is called an annotated edition. We are taking an Old episode of our show that did not have an author research section on it in the first place. Yeah, we're adding. We're adding one.
- [03:01]
B
Yes. So this is originally episode 18 from June 9, 2013. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. There are like maybe a few facts scattered throughout that episode that will make it into this here discussion up here. But we certainly had not zeroed in on what we really like to do now, which is kind of a dive into the author's background, a dive into the publication history and any relevant kind of legacy of the book.
- [03:39]
A
Because I feel like you listened to this and I didn't. Did we talk at all about, like the, the provenance of like the different editions of the book and like, what. What is. But not quite. Okay, are we gonna talk about that now?
- [03:51]
B
A little bit. See?
- [03:52]
A
Okay, a little bit.
- [03:53]
B
I have some. I don't do a lot, but why we're doing.
- [03:56]
A
I mean, I don't think there is a lot. I think you just kind of acknowledge the fact of it. And then you. Then you get to the part where a guy makes a monster out of different man parts.
- [04:04]
B
Well, and we talked a little bit about, hey, there was a movie that informed all of our opinions of Frankenstein, but we didn't really even talk about that movie that much. And I have some stuff on that.
- [04:14]
A
Yes, on the, on the film Young Frankenstein.
- [04:16]
B
Yes, yes, of course. So we've got Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
- [04:23]
A
Yeah, you're going to tell me about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley already.
- [04:26]
B
I will.
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A
Godwin. Come on.
- [04:29]
B
Mary Godwin, born in 1797, died in 1851. She's the only daughter of philosopher William Godwin. And Mary Wollstonecraft kind of displaced in her family after her mother's death, not long after her birth and her father's remarrying. Very kind of Cinderella esque. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft, her mom, Mary Shelley's mom was a well known author and women's rights advocate. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a founding feminist philosopher. And Godwin himself was a utilitarian philosopher. Even advocated for anarchism at times. Also wrote a biography of Wollstonecraft as well. And so Shelley, Mary Shelley. Despite not receiving a formal education, she did publish a story at the age of 11 through her father's publishing house because she's an EPO baby, I guess. And she meets Percy Shelley in the early 1810s. He's a bit of a bad boy. He had been expelled from Oxford because he Refused to admit that he had wrote a pamphlet on atheism. He did elope with someone else and then from that marriage, eloped with Mary Godwin. Mary Shelley. Anyway.
- [05:55]
A
Yeah, cool.
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B
And the two of them.
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A
Sounds like a sick dude.
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B
Yeah. He was on a motorcycle the whole time, wearing a leather jacket.
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A
He invented sunglasses so that he could keep sliding them down his face.
- [06:11]
B
They were tortoise shelly glasses. Anyway, January 1816, sunglasses. The two of them, their son and Claire, Claire Claremont, go hang out with Lord Byron, noted poet and raconteur. And this is where they spend a very chilly summer at his, you know, Geneva estate. This is part of the Year Without a Summer, which we talk about briefly at the end of the 2013 podcast. This was the result of an 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, which caused a lot of just kind of freak weather stuff and crop disasters and displacement of people. I would recommend.
- [07:01]
C
Sure.
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A
Everybody was super chill about it.
- [07:03]
B
Yes, I would recommend. I think it's episode.
- [07:07]
A
People invented sunglasses in, like, the 13th century.
- [07:10]
B
It turns out episode 45 of the podcast Imaginary Worlds called the Year Without a Summer talks a bit about this book and its relationship to refugees and the other. And how some of the, like, pressures that Shelley is writing about, whether or not she is, like, deliberately doing it, I don't know, kind of reflect some of the things going on at the time as a result of that freak storm thing that was happening across the planet.
- [07:44]
D
Sure.
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B
And we apparently have notes of their time at Lord Byron's house, because Lord Byron's physician was there ostensibly to take care of Lord Byron, but then he kind of had a big crush on Mary Shelley just wrote down notes about all the stuff that she did.
- [08:00]
A
Okay.
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B
Lord Byron challenges everyone to, like, a ghost story contest. A real cool guy move.
- [08:07]
D
Yeah.
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B
Because they're stuck inside. It's not a fun summer outside. Let's all tell spooky stories. And she mixes together a few ideas. A German short story collection called Phantasmagoriana,
- [08:22]
A
A night that sounds like the name of a. Of a 1950s sci fi magazine.
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B
Yeah, it does, doesn't it? A nightmare that she had about trying to wake her daughter up. And a nightmare that she had about a student horrified to vivisect body parts. And all of those go in to this story that she told at Byron's house. Then they all go home and she gets married to Percy Shelley in England and she's working on the novel. She had also co authored a travel book called History of a Six Weeks Tour, which I guess is just like hey, me and Percy Shelley eloped. Here's a cool book about all this stuff we did.
- [09:00]
A
Craig, that's not the title of the book.
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B
What is it called?
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A
It's called History of a six weeks tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. Semicolon with letters descriptive of a sail around the lake of Geneva and of the glaciers of Shamuni.
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B
Shamuni. Shamuni, Shamuni. The girl is Hard to Get to Geneva.
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D
It's a.
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A
It's got a longer title than that.
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B
That's fun is all I'm saying. Well, thank you for correcting me.
- [09:27]
A
Takes about six weeks to read it.
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C
Eight.
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B
My God. Eighteen. Eighteen. Publication of Frankenstein. I have that. There were about 500 copies printed pretty cheaply and anonymously.
- [09:39]
A
Now she still. She's still doing this through daddy's printing press, or is this.
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B
That.
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A
I don't think.
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B
No. But I do know that there was a preface from Percy Shelley and a dedication to her father, William Godwin. So initially, people thought that maybe one of them had written it. Okay. Percy had also made some changes to the text, which we know about from transcripts of her work and her journals. He dies in 1822. She goes on to edit and publish a bunch of his other work. And then in 1831, there's the third edition of the work that does have her edits and an intro where she lays out some of her inspiration. So she kind of takes it back to what it was supposed to be. So that's kind of what I have on the provenance of Frankenstein, the novel. You have some other stuff on Shelley's.
- [10:34]
A
Yeah, I just have other words on other work that she's. She's done you. I wonder who was the first person ever. Do you think it was. Mary Shelley herself was the first person ever to be like, sorry, it's Frankenstein's monster.
- [10:45]
D
Actually.
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A
Do you think she had to correct people like that?
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B
I don't think so.
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A
I think, like, Frankenstein hadn't become enough of a byword by the time.
- [10:56]
B
I don't think that. I don't think that happens. I don't think they both get called Frankenstein until, like, the 1920s. Like, there's like, a play or.
- [11:03]
D
Yeah, I know.
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A
There's like, what, like a 1910, like, silent film.
- [11:07]
B
Oh, my God. You gotta watch it. Yeah, we'll talk about the films in just a second. But everyone here, you have homework. You have to go. It's just streaming on Wikipedia.
- [11:16]
A
You just go watch the public domain, baby.
- [11:18]
B
12 minutes long. And it is something. Anyway.
- [11:23]
A
Mary Shelley, for many years was like Frankenstein was her calling card. And I mean, it still is. I mean, it would be to a certain extent. But, like, most of the other stuff that she wrote did not really get passed around or discussed a ton in the modern era. But I do have, you know, there has been renewed interest in it. There has been, you know, renewed interest in a couple of specific books. And so let's just talk about the other stuff, please. There's one called Valpurga in 1823, which is a historical novel set during a war in Italy between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, which I never. I've never heard of either of them. This is a.
- [12:05]
D
This.
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A
This book is originally received at the. At the time. It's, like, reviewed and talked about as a love story, even though it has explicitly political content. There's a book called the last man in 1826, which is an early example of dystopian fiction about, like, a world that's been ravaged by the bubonic plague and most people have died. And it's savaged in reviews at the time, partly because it is very dark and just people are like, yeah, this, this, this. Whoever wrote this has got a nasty brain.
- [12:39]
B
Every other book that's published now, that's not hockey. Romance is just like, everyone's dead.
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A
But it's. It's seen. This one in particular has seen a resurgence recently in the wake of, like, the COVID 19 pandemic and.
- [12:54]
C
Sure.
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A
Climate change and all the. The stuff that it's, you know.
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [12:59]
A
It's inflicting on the world. There's one in 1830 called the Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, which is another historical novel about a 15th century pretender to the English throne whose name is Perkin Warbeck. And I think that Shelley's perspective is that he actually was who he said he was. Was like a son of some king.
- [13:22]
B
Okay. That's a fun genre of story. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Return to Martin de Guerre or something like that.
- [13:30]
A
I don't know who that is.
- [13:31]
B
Return of Martin Guerre, it's a French story about a guy who, like, comes back to a village from a war, and he might not be the lady's husband, but he says he's the lady's husband. And it's like just a genre of story that is trickier to pull off in, you know, the modern day.
- [13:50]
A
Yeah, we got the original Don Draper over here.
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B
A little bit. A little bit.
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A
There's a book in 1833 called Lodore, which is also published as the Beautiful Widow. This is about a widow and a daughter who have to get by after the patriarch of the family dies.
- [14:07]
B
I lost Lidor.
- [14:08]
A
Yeah, yeah. Lidor and the next one, like Faulkner, are both sort of explicitly feminist books because they're dealing with, like, women who have to do stuff and then sometimes get their way in society.
- [14:19]
B
What a way to put it.
- [14:21]
A
That's feminism, baby. Is, like, when women do stuff. Faulkner is published in 1837. It's her penultimate book. It's about a young woman who is adopted by. The Wikipedia summary of this book is kind of garbled in the way that Wikipedia summaries sometimes get, but it is a. As far as I can tell, is a book about a young woman who's adopted by a man because she stops him from taking his own life. But then her adoptive father seems to be killing people who are associated with men she's in love with. Like, later.
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B
Oh, no.
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A
But then every. But then he's, like, cleared of that, but everybody's happy and fine at the end.
- [15:03]
B
Oh, yay.
- [15:04]
A
Yeah. And then there is Mathilda. Matilda. Mathilda.
- [15:09]
B
I think that's probably Matilda.
- [15:10]
A
Matilda, published in 1959. No, not the Roald doll book.
- [15:14]
B
1859.
- [15:15]
A
No, you're wrong.
- [15:18]
B
What?
- [15:19]
A
Yep. This is not the.
- [15:21]
B
Raised from the Dead, like Frankenstein.
- [15:23]
A
Like Frankenstein's monster. Thanks. This is not the Roald Dahl book that I started reading. Henry this Evening is a novella about incest and suicide that was written in 1819 or 1820. This is something that she's doing to help her, like, process her grief following the deaths of two of her young children in 1819.
- [15:43]
B
Yeah. They lost a lot of kids.
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A
I believe she sends it to her father, who reads it, who's like, all this incest stuff is not great, and he doesn't want to publish it. And then, you know, later, after.
- [15:58]
B
You sure you want to write about that later?
- [16:00]
A
After her husband dies and, like, she starts kind of seeing it as, like, a bad. Like a bad omen. She doesn't want to publish it herself. And then it's published posthumously over a century later, which is why it's coming out in 1959. Yeah. Weird. Interesting.
- [16:17]
B
When you mentioned the Gilfs and the Ghibellines, Andrew, something in my brain went, what? And I remembered that there's a bunch of those guys in Dante's Inferno. Oh, there's a bunch of Gilson ghibellines. I don't know if they're crying in their butts. Or what they're. I don't remember specifically what they're doing down there, but they're in there, I guess.
- [16:40]
D
Yeah.
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A
If you're talking about like Italian.
- [16:42]
B
You said stuff.
- [16:44]
A
Yeah, Italian guys in the Renaissance would have been thinking about. They probably would have been thinking about some Guelphs and Ghibelline.
- [16:50]
C
They would have been.
- [16:50]
A
She also worked. So she did that.
- [16:52]
B
Man, I could eat some Gilson Ghibli right now.
- [16:55]
A
I mean you got to get the. You only want to, you only want to eat the rye chips out of those though. Like those are the best part. The. His. The long titled history book that we talked about already is one of the, one of the other like non fiction books that she did. There's another, another travel book called Rambles in Germany. Germany, Germany, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843. And then she also works on several books in a series called the Cabinet Cyclopedia. Oh, this is a book series edited by a guy named Dionysus Larder.
- [17:32]
B
What a good name.
- [17:33]
A
Dionysus Lardner. And she was not usually credited for her. Like she was the only woman who I think contributed to the series. It ran for like 133 books.
- [17:46]
B
Wow.
- [17:48]
A
And it's not clear whether, you know, not using her name was her decision or decision, but she did write a bunch of these.
- [17:57]
B
All right.
- [17:59]
A
And yeah, that's, that's most of the other work by Mary Shelley. I think Mathilda Matilda in particular would be interesting to read.
- [18:08]
B
I'm kind of thinking about the Last man too.
- [18:10]
A
It's kind of thinking about the Last Man. I'm thinking about Perkin Warbeck.
- [18:13]
B
I think about that guy.
- [18:14]
A
That guy's. That guy's got a name like just put Perkin Warbeck into any like kids or ya like genre fiction. Like. Oh yeah, you know, the, like Lemony Snicket is a real Lemony Snicket kind of name.
- [18:31]
B
I'm also thinking like the Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck. Like that's like a, that's a Western. Yeah, you know, Western guy in over his head.
- [18:40]
A
He could be a Western or he could be a little kid who like lives under the stairs in a closet and he gets whisked off to be a wizard.
- [18:48]
B
He does.
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A
You're a wizard,
- [18:53]
B
stupid. Anyway, I have some notes on Frankenstein in film.
- [18:59]
A
Tell me about Frankenstein in film and then we'll listen to us talk about Frankenstein.
- [19:03]
B
You just gotta go watch the 1910 Edison Films silent movie version of Frankenstein. It's 12 minutes long. A big kooky monster comes out of a box and then is like.
- [19:17]
A
Did you say a Cookie Monster? Or a Cookie Monster? Because these are different kinds of monsters.
- [19:23]
B
I mean, he's got kind of Cookie Monster hands, which is kind of funny. But no, he's. He's a big creature, and everyone's making big silent movie faces. And then the creature is kind of horrified by his own face when he finally sees it in a mirror. And it just.
- [19:39]
C
I don't.
- [19:40]
B
I don't watch a lot of silent films, but whenever I do, I'm like, oh, that's just a play. They put a camera in front of and nobody was allowed to talk. It's really fun to watch. There are two German films from this era, the early 20th century, kind of riffing on similar themes. One is called the Golem. Another one is called Homunculus. The Golem is an adaptation of a Myrick novel, I think, which is riffing on Jewish folklore. My rink. Excuse me, Gustav. My rink. On Jewish folklore. And that kind of gets infused in the. Through that film into what would ultimately become the 1931 Frankenstein, where a guy is animating a creature that then goes on to cause harm beyond its control and beyond the creator's control. And then the community responds violently. So the 1931 Frankenstein, Universal Pictures, they are coming off of the success of Dracula. They had not been having a lot of success beforehand. Bela Lugosi wanted to be Victor Frankenstein. And they said, no, you got to be the monster.
- [20:57]
D
Yeah, you can't.
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A
You can't have Bela Lugosi and not have him be the monster.
- [21:02]
B
Well, he didn't want to, so he said, no, thank you. Fire bad. I'm out. It's directed by James Whale, Adapted from a 1927 play by Peggy Webling. Colin Clive plays Henry Frankenstein. Henry Frankenstein. And Boris Karloff is, of course, the monster. This is also where we get the, like, hunchbacked assistant trope in modern cinema. His name is Fitz. Couldn't have told you his name. Yeah, Fitz. And it was so popular. It's a pre Hays Code film, Andrew. I don't know if I don't know that I had realized that, but okay. It's so popular. Then when Universal wants to re release it after the Hays Code, they have to do some cuts in particular. You can go watch these. They're out on YouTube. You can go find them. When he reanimates the monster, Henry yells, in the name of God. Now I know what it's like to be God.
- [22:07]
C
And they were like, you can't say that.
- [22:09]
B
You can't say it. You can't talk about being God. Not allowed.
- [22:13]
A
I think you can't say because it's a really. Just a weird. Just a weird way to.
- [22:17]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, it is just
- [22:19]
A
a weird thing to say.
- [22:20]
B
It is, but they did cut that out. And another thing they cut.
- [22:25]
A
There's a scene.
- [22:27]
B
There's a scene. I've never watched this whole movie. There's a scene where Frankenstein is playing with a little girl near a lake.
- [22:33]
A
Okay.
- [22:33]
B
And they're floating flowers in the water. They're like putting, you know, the tops of flowers on water and letting them float and frankens. Like, this is fascinating. Floating. And in the haze code version, he just kind of like goes to reach to the girl and then there's a cut.
- [22:52]
A
Okay.
- [22:52]
B
And like, then later in the movie, she's found dead. Oh. In the actual.
- [22:59]
A
I can't imagine what the, what the in between on that actual version is solved for X. And I can't do it.
- [23:05]
B
Picks up like a nine year old girl and then just throws her in the lake. Presumably because. Floating.
- [23:13]
D
Yeah.
- [23:13]
A
Like, how else are you gonna find
- [23:15]
B
out he's just a baby. He doesn't know.
- [23:17]
A
He's just a big baby made out of parts.
- [23:20]
B
And she kind of bubbles and drowns and then he, like, runs away and cries. And they. They were like, we got to cut that. You can't have. You can't show Frankenstein killing a girl under the Hayes Code. It's weird to watch, I have to say. Yeah, it's not. It's very strange. And these do exist, though. There was a period of time where people thought that they had literally been destroyed because Universal had a practice of just going and cutting the negatives of the film when they were doing edits like that. But it's such. Such a popular idea and franchise that it spawns things like Bride of Frankenstein right away in 35, you get the Hammer films, you get Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
- [24:06]
A
Okay.
- [24:07]
D
We're getting.
- [24:07]
A
We're getting into the earnest movie tier of Frankenstein properties now.
- [24:12]
B
You, of course, get Young Frankenstein, you get Kenneth Branagh's 1990s film, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And then you join us here in 2026. And just last year we had Guillermo del Toro's version, which he had been working on in some way, shape or form since 2007. Yeah, because dude just loves a monster.
- [24:37]
A
He loves a monster.
- [24:38]
B
He loves the monster.
- [24:39]
A
Frankenstein's monster is one of the. One of the big ones.
- [24:42]
B
It's one of the big monsters, and he went through a number of fits and starts similar to his Cthulhu movie. That never happened.
- [24:52]
A
Hasn't happened yet.
- [24:53]
B
Good point.
- [24:55]
A
Frankenstein movie just came out like six months.
- [24:58]
B
That's true, that's true. But it was revived at Netflix in 2023, and it had Oscar Isaacs and some other Oscar Isaac. Did not have multiple Oscar Isaacs in it, but I think could have. Could have. I didn't watch it.
- [25:12]
A
You insist it's like Stephenie Meyer thing all over again. I know you like putting S's.
- [25:17]
B
I know, I know.
- [25:18]
A
People just seem like they could use an S. I'm just going to put one in there as a treat for them.
- [25:23]
B
It's mostly an S. Can't remember. I just never know.
- [25:26]
A
Oscar's Isaac is the appropriate plural.
- [25:30]
B
There you go for one, silly boy. So that's Frankenstein. That's Mary Shelley. We didn't think to do this 13
- [25:41]
A
years ago, and now think about how much value we we've added to your podcasting experience.
- [25:46]
B
You didn't know all that. You didn't know about Perkin Warbeck before.
- [25:49]
A
Yeah. You didn't know about him.
- [25:51]
B
These guys that you're going to listen to next don't know about Perkin Warbeck.
- [25:55]
A
They don't know. But I know if they heard the name Perkin Warbeck, it really would tickle them.
- [25:59]
B
Yeah. So, like, listen the whole episode and just like, say Perkin Warbeck.
- [26:04]
A
And see, I just think it's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be like 13 years before they learn about Perkin Warbeck, and they're gonna be really psyched about him.
- [26:14]
B
All right, Andrew, we'll see you on the other side.
- [26:36]
D
Tell me about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I think this is a book where most people kind of get this central conceit.
- [26:45]
C
Yes.
- [26:46]
D
And are familiar with one or another version of it. But this is the original book from whence the story comes, right?
- [26:53]
C
Yeah. This is the book from 1818 that when it was first written by Mary Shelley, it was not published under her name. I don't know what who is published under. But then five years later, it was published under her name in 1823, which I think is pretty good for female writer in 1823. You know, it's pretty good. And yeah, the elevator pitch is dude makes a creature, brings him to life, and it goes wrong. Like, that's if you know Frankenstein, there's a monster involved. You know, I think at this point, everyone understands that in the original, the name of the creature in the book is not Frankenstein. It's, you know. But that seems to be the, like, cultural shorthand. If you see a big green dude with bolts in his neck, like, it's
- [27:46]
D
just a Frankenstein, it's a Frankenstein.
- [27:49]
C
But that actually comes from the movie that was made in, like, the 19, early 1930s, I think. 1931, which has very little to do with the book.
- [27:59]
D
And is the monster actually named at any point in the book?
- [28:03]
C
Never. He is actually called the creature, or not even, but, like, not capital T, capital C. Like, he is just a creature. Or sometimes Frankenstein calls him a demon or he's a wretch or whatever. And it's funny, I was looking up because within five years of this being published, they actually made a play out of it. They made a stage play out of it. And there's a stage bill. It's like a playbill for it, where the guy who played the monster, it's just credited as, like, a bunch of dashes. Like, he doesn't have a name, which I think is really neat. But. Yeah. So he doesn't have a name. That's part of the point, I think.
- [28:41]
D
I guess plays were like the. The book to movie transition.
- [28:45]
C
Yeah.
- [28:46]
D
Of the 1800s.
- [28:47]
C
It was.
- [28:48]
B
It happened real fast.
- [28:49]
D
This is like Harry Potter was 200 years.
- [28:52]
C
Yeah, totally. And it's funny because the movie that was made in the 30s was based on a different play that was written in, like, the 1920s. And everyone said that play was really bad, and it took a bunch of liberties with the story. And then the movie came out and everyone really liked the movie, but it has. It's very different relationship to what's happening in the book.
- [29:18]
D
Sure. And I think different adaptations of the story have different narrative arcs. So let's switch into plot synopsis mode for a minute. Okay. Like, often in fiction, when a character brings another character back from the dead, like, they're doing it for a specific reason. So is. Is Frankenstein, you know, building this monster because he wants to bring some, like, deceased lover back to life, or is it purely scientific interest that's driving the experiments here?
- [29:51]
C
It is purely scientific motivation. His mother did die when he was younger, Victor Frankenstein's mother did. And then he goes off to school, so he's living in Geneva. That's where he's from. And then he goes off to this place called, like, Ingolstadt or something. I don't quite know, but he goes off and he's, like, really interested in these older books about alchemy and, you know, very, like, hundreds of hundreds and thousands of year old ideas about how the world works. And the language that they use is, like, natural philosophy, which is like the old school term for science. Like that, that had not been split yet, you know, and all of the dates. Like, the book is, to take a brief aside, the book is what's called an epistolary novel, which is the word I just learned, which is when it's like written in letters or diary entries or like newspaper clippings or something. Like, the whole book is a series of either letters or, like, recorded speech, if that makes sense.
- [30:57]
D
And is there a frame narrative that goes around that, like, is. Are the letters from anybody to anybody?
- [31:03]
C
So it starts with letters from a guy named Walton who is on a, like, voyage to the North Pole on a boat, and he's writing home to his sister. And then they see this big weird dude out on, like, a glacier or whatever. And then Frankenstein turns up in a separate boat and it's like, who's this weird guy out in the middle of nowhere hunting after this other guy? And then he starts telling Walton the whole story about what happened. And so then it's all from Frankenstein's perspective and Walton's supposedly writing it down. And then when Frankenstein eventually passes, just because he's old and exhausted, etcetera, it goes back to Walton's point of view for just a little bit, writing letters back to his sister. And then within that, in the Frankenstein story, there's a spot where it's all told first person from the creature, because he and Frankenstein meet up and he tells them all about, like, his first two years of life or whatever.
- [32:05]
D
But anyway, so is that like a frame within a frame?
- [32:09]
C
Yeah, in a way.
- [32:10]
D
Sailor telling Frankenstein telling the monster's story.
- [32:16]
C
Yes, definitely. And the way it's kind of laid out in the text is that, you know, it's a first person letter narrative for Walton. And then all of Frankenstein's chapters are just in the first person. And then all of the creatures chapters are, like, in first person, but in quotations, so that, like, Frankenstein can toss in asides if he needs to.
- [32:41]
D
Sure.
- [32:42]
C
But anyway, so Frankenstein goes off to school and he's reading all of these, like, really old books about the way the world works. And his teachers are like, you don't understand. This is all trash. We've discovered a lot. You can do a lot more with this. But the one teacher he asks like, oh, that's really great that you've kind of been interested in all this stuff. Let me show you all these new guys and what They've discovered, and you can learn a lot from them. And so the, like, central thing that happens is he kind of is very ambitious, and he wants to contribute to science. And the big thing that's bothering him is he says, you know, one of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame and indeed, any animal endued with life, whence I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed. So he's really interested in, like, what makes things alive and what gives animals motion and behavior and all that sorts of stuff. And it's actually interesting because the whole idea of electricity kind of functioning in Frankenstein, which gets carried over into the movies and stuff like that.
- [33:51]
D
Yeah, it's always like a big bolt of lightning.
- [33:53]
C
Yeah.
- [33:54]
D
That makes. It's like the catalyst for everything.
- [33:56]
C
And they talk about that kind of being involved. And as I was doing some research on it, like, something. You know, the word galvanized. You know, like, when you're, like, galvanized to do something, you know, galvanism is the word you use for, like, when a muscle contracts. And it was only in the 1780s and 1790s that this dude named Luigi Galvani discovered that that's what makes muscles move. There's, like, an elect electrical current that makes it move. And so, like, this is all pretty recent science when this book was being written, you know, and Benjamin Franklin had done his experiments only a couple decades before. So, like, electricity was, like, the hot topic at the time. It was not the store where you go buy skull T shirts.
- [34:41]
D
It was quite an electrifying subject.
- [34:48]
C
And it's really funny because when. So what he does is he, like, Frankenstein is then motivated to. I'm gonna do. I'm gonna make life happen. I'm gonna create a thing from death. Like, he was very interested in the idea that, like, we are alive and then we die and then we decompose and then, like, from this majestic form that is man, like, worms feed on us and create, you know, new other types of life, yada, yada, yada. So he's kind of interested in that interplay. And so he gathers up all these bits and pieces from, like, graves, essentially. And he doesn't tell Walton how he did it. He kind of intimates that electricity was involved and that there was, like, a spark of life that he put in there. But he very deliberately is like, why would I tell you? The whole point of this story is to tell you how this ruined my life. I'm not gonna tell you how I did it. Which is kind of a wonderful little literary technique to, like, skirt over the fantastical nature of it.
- [35:52]
D
Yeah, it's a pretty great cop out. And also there's that, you know, there's that device that. And I think we. I've mentioned it a couple times. I always bring up, like, Lovecraft, whenever somebody is, like, talking about something and, like, implying something and not filling in all of the gaps and just kind of letting the reader's imagination create something that's more. That's more, like, convincing than the author could ever actually come up with.
- [36:20]
C
Yeah, that's. It's the whole, like, don't show the monster. In a way, it's very similar to that, where it's like, whatever is going to be created in the reader's. In the reader's mind is much more powerful. There's. It's like 50 pages in. I think Frankenstein's talking about how he figured out how to do it. And he says, rather perfunctorily, I think he says, after days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life, nay, more. I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. That's it. Oh, I was able to do it.
- [36:57]
D
And I became God.
- [36:58]
C
Oh, I'm God. Don't worry about it.
- [37:00]
D
Stuff, it's cool.
- [37:01]
C
And then a couple lines later, he's like, but this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps which I'd been progressively led to it were obliterated. And I beheld only the result. Like, it's so cool. I forgot how to do it.
- [37:14]
D
That's the worst science ever. It's great, but I totally, like. I can totally sympathize because, like, in. In doing, like, I work with computers and stuff a lot, and sometimes I make something happen and then I have to go back and write down how I made it happen. And it becomes much harder than it was. Well, that was to just, like, instinctively make it happen, I'll say.
- [37:37]
C
Even as. Even as someone who works in theater, that happens too, where, like, sometimes in a room with people, like, we'll be working on a. On a. On a moment in a scene or in a play, and then it'll happen and it's great. And if I try to, like, explain it so that we can replicate it, it breaks because one. Because it's a kind of like, mad. Sounds goofy, but like a magical, like, every. Everything just fell into place and someone responded to something and it was great. And that's lovely, but if I talk about it, it's Going to be terrible.
- [38:06]
D
Yeah, that is goofy.
- [38:08]
A
You're right.
- [38:09]
C
Yeah, whatever. But anyway, so one of the things that's interesting about the creature itself that I didn't realize that, like, makes so much sense. It's like a little detail. So the creature's big, right? That's something that's in the book. It's not the big, like, flathead monster thing, but it is like a. It's larger than man.
- [38:32]
D
Now, he did. He just happened to make it out of a bunch of like, really big people or what happened to make it particularly big and monstrous.
- [38:40]
C
The. He says that he made it big because it was. It was very difficult to replicate the, the minuteness of the human body.
- [38:51]
A
Okay.
- [38:52]
C
So like, he basically scaled everything up because he couldn't replicate it in such tiny detail, which I think is an awesome explanation.
- [39:01]
D
Now, how did he. Is he not using, like a patchwork of. He is body parts? Like, how did he scale things up if he's using.
- [39:10]
C
Imagine he, like, he doesn't really say, but I imagine it's like, oh, I took this part of a skull and this part of a skull and like, jammed it together or something, you know, or took like, big specimens of everything, you know, it's weird. He doesn't really describe.
- [39:27]
B
He.
- [39:28]
C
He has a lot of kind of trepidation and resentment for how gross he did, how gross it was, what he had to do. And he kind of talks about how, like, the. The idea of really discovering something this new and potentially world changing will make up for how awful his job is.
- [39:52]
D
Sure.
- [39:53]
C
You know, so. Yeah, so that's why the creature is the way it is. And then he makes it. And what was I going to say?
- [40:05]
A
Where is it?
- [40:06]
C
So he. He makes it, right? And then he, like, shoots it with a bolt of electricity or whatever. And that happens. And that's great. And then when it wakes up, there's like this uncanny valley moment where he says he built it to be beautiful and be as beautiful as man is. And then the second it comes alive and it is all, like, awful and like, its eyes are alive, but it's totally like, you can see all of the sinews exposed. And like, throughout the book, many people, like, liken it to a mummy, you know.
- [40:39]
D
Okay.
- [40:40]
C
Because it's kind of a patchwork of different things and stuff. And he. He says that the, the. The luxuriances of the form only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, which to me is just that whole thing where, like, you build a robot that looks like a person and then the second it starts moving, it doesn't look like a person anymore, and that makes it worse, and you hate it. So even in 1818, the uncanny valley was a thing in Frankenstein.
- [41:14]
D
So, okay, the monster's reaction to being alive is what? Like, I know. I read this book myself, like, maybe freshman year of college, which is getting to be like, eight or nine years ago at this point.
- [41:28]
C
Think about that for a second.
- [41:29]
D
I know there's. There's the period that is told mostly from the monsters perspective. I know it starts, like he goes and is kind of shadowing this family or something. Right. Or. And the person who is around is, like, blind. Yeah.
- [41:47]
C
So what he does is he, like, gets up and Frankenstein thinks he's terrifying and, like, runs away from him. Then he sees him later. He sees the monster, like, in his house at one point, and then the monster, like, runs away because the monster has no idea what's going on. And then Frankenstein's little brother gets killed, so he has to go home and figure out that. And then he thinks the monster might be responsible. And then he, like, is so depressed by that whole thing that he. That Frankenstein. Excuse me, Frankenstein, not the monster, like, retreats into the mountains. Then the monster meets up with him, and the monster has a deal to make. But before that happens, he, like, tells him his whole story. That's how that happens. Like, skipping ahead. A whole bunch of stuff.
- [42:32]
A
Mm.
- [42:33]
C
So in the monster, what happened was he, like, ran out of Frankenstein's house or laboratory or whatever, and there's, like, a period where he's kind of like a baby, where he has, like, complete synesthesia. Like, he has no idea what his senses are or how they work. And he doesn't really understand the difference between day and night, which is really cool, like, to just go through the steps of a creature that was fully formed but didn't have the mind to express what it was experiencing. Like, Shelley does a really good job of kind of exploring how that might take place. Like, if a baby had words to describe, like, how it was learning to experience the world, that would be really interesting. And that's what this book does really well. But then he ends up in a town, and people chase him away because he's hideous, because he's a monster. And then he ends up, like, in the woods, like, in a little shelter that he built for himself outside of this cottage. And you're right, he starts observing this family that has a blind patriarch, like, older grandfather patriarch, and two younger kids, like, a. Probably in their 20s or something. Like, A guy and a girl, like a brother and a sister. And so as he's watching them, he learns language because they talk to each other. They have a whole history where they were like nobles in France, but then through a series of unfortunate events, you know, were exiled and ruined financially. So, like, the monster is learning about human nature through their experience at the same time. And then he knows that they're going to be frightened of him and hate him, so he tries to approach the old man, who's blind, and starts talking to him. And he's very well spoken, which is the exact opposite of the movie Frankenstein. Right? And by Frankenstein, I mean the monster. Like, he's like a fire bad.
- [44:29]
B
But,
- [44:31]
C
like, I think of that Phil Hartman sketch from Saturday Night Live, and this monster is, like, he's very eloquent, and he knows his voice is kind of bad, but that's fine. It's really just his appearance, which is so terrible. And he also doesn't know where he came from, and he doesn't have a name. And so there's that. All that, like, imagine being a completely intelligent being and not being able to relate to anyone and all that. Like, that's kind of what this book does really well. So then he goes and he tries to talk to the old guy, and the old guy's like, okay, what's going on? Like, you know, talk to me about what your problem is, and Frankenstein's not Frankenstein. The monster is saying, you know, I want to introduce myself to these. To these friends of mine, and they're gonna hate me because they don't really understand me. How do I get them to understand me? And as that's happening, the son and the daughter come home, and the son chases them away with a stick. And, like, then they get evicted for some reason, and the family leaves, and the monster is so upset that he burns the cottage down and then, like, runs away. And the whole time, he. He has. He stole, like, a coat or something from Frankenstein's house. And then he discovers all of the papers that were in Frankenstein's coat that had all the notes from the creation of the monster in it, because that's a convenient little thing that happened.
- [45:54]
D
Sure.
- [45:54]
C
And so the monster discovers, like, his true nature and that he has a creator who was repulsed and abandoned him. And so he decides to, like, wreak havoc on Frankenstein's life, essentially. And then the. The big thing that he tells him that he meets, when he meets him in the mountains is like, I will ruin your life unless you make me a companion. Is like, the Big offer he gives him. And through that section where Frankenstein is meeting the monster, you get a lot of the whole, like, not only is he this giant man, but he is incredibly limber. He's really fast, he's really smart. So he is the kind of antithesis of the monster in the films.
- [46:41]
D
Yeah. So Frankenstein did a pretty good job, really, except he's terrible looking. Like, he's smart, he's. He's well spoken. He is, you know, physically capable. He just is. He just is kind of hideous. So, you know, most. Mostly he did a good job.
- [47:05]
C
Yeah. I think what's. What's really interesting about it is that he doesn't even know there. There's kind of that nature versus nurture debate that kind of happens a little bit, too, where the whole time, Frankenstein knows that this monster, like, killed his little brother. Right. And he's like, you're a terrible. That you're a terrible thing, you horrid creature. How could you do this? And Frankenstein. And the monster's like, well, of course I'm terrible and awful. Humanity hates me. How could I ever be nice to humanity? And I know that humanity is bad to itself also. Like. And so there's this side, like, Frankenstein kind of blames the monster for being what it is, and the monster saying, well, I'm only a product of the system and the world that I'm in, and the world being unable, like, me not having a companion is also part of it. Like, by being alive, don't I have the right to be, you know, happy, etc. So he kind of tries to blackmail Frankenstein into making him a companion, which Frankenstein starts to do and then is like, screw this. How do I know that this companion isn't also going to be an awful monster that kills things? And so he trashes it, and then the monster goes nuts and ruins everything for Frankenstein and then runs away to the Arctic, and then Frankenstein pursues him there.
- [48:37]
D
That gets back to the nature versus nurture thing, too. It's just like, why. Why would you assume that it's automatically going to be a terrible monster that destroys everything? It seems like the only reason why the monster that exists is a terrifying thing that destroys everything is because, like, he has this. These physical defects that keep anybody from wanting to associate with him. Like, if he could. If he could somehow find a village of people who. Who could.
- [49:07]
C
If you just live with a bunch of blind people.
- [49:09]
B
Yes.
- [49:10]
C
Live with a bunch of blind people, he'd be fine.
- [49:12]
D
Cabal of blind people.
- [49:13]
C
Well, and one of the things that makes his journey with the cottage, so sad, is that he sees that they are struggling, like, they don't have a lot of money. It's hard for them to have food. They have to expend so much energy to, like, chop down wood for fires and stuff, that he'll spend time in the evening, like, chopping extra wood for them. And they kind of refer. The people in the cottage talk, oh, there's this spirit that's helping us out, you know? And so he's kind of. In a way, he's kind of engendered himself to them already. And then he knows he's been good to them. And from his perspective, they've been really good to him because they've taught him basically everything he knows through osmosis. You know, he. Once he learns that they can make sounds to one another to communicate ideas, he then learns when they start reading that there are correlating, like, word, like symbols on paper that express those ideas and yada, yada, yada. And then he reads a couple books and he reads, like, Paradise Lost with that. Which has all sorts of other, like, thematic overtones for the rest of this book.
- [50:17]
D
Sure.
- [50:17]
C
Like, because the monster kind of views himself as Lucifer, as, like, the fallen angel, but Frankenstein kind of views him as this failed Adam in a way that's kind of interesting. But. Yeah. And so he thinks that he's got along really great with this family and that he's helped them out, and then they repay him with awfulness. And there's a. There's another story where the monster, like, sees a girl drowning and he saves her, and then the. The girl's dad, like, shoots him and he's like, well, I can't do anything right. Like, no matter what he does, people just hate him. But there's this really interesting turn in the latter part of the book where, you know, Frankenstein's really run down. Victor Frankenstein is really run down, and he's up in the islands after he, like, refused to build the monster, his. The monster's companion. And he's, like, on this boat and he comes ashore and all these people look at him oddly and accuse him of murder, which he didn't commit. And there's this period where Frankenstein is starting to get the treatment that the monster got of the outsider, which I think is kind of part of the book as well, thematically. And Frankenstein starts referring to himself as a wretch and a horrible creature and stuff like that. So you can even see in the language that Shelley's choosing that Frankenstein's arc is One of kind of becoming a monster himself, or at least feeling like he is, because he blames himself for all of the terrible things that the monster did.
- [51:54]
A
Sure.
- [51:54]
C
Which is one of the reasons why he won't tell the. The guy, Walton, how he did what he did, because it's like, that's. No, I don't want that to happen to you.
- [52:05]
A
So
- [52:08]
D
obviously, there's some stuff going on here with, you know, about the relationship between the person who creates something and the thing that is created through that process and how, like, good intentions can go bad and how your actions can have unintended consequences. I don't know. Like. Like, give me. Just give me your thoughts.
- [52:36]
C
Well, I think it relates to a whole bunch of things. Like, on one level, it relates to, you know, a lot of religious stuff with, you know, just people's relationships to God and who they think their creator is. And that's like one whole rabbit hole you can go down. Or it's the man creating things that it doesn't understand. You know, there's. I love the moment where Frankenstein starts creating the companion monster, and then he's like, I don't. Okay, so the monster swore that he would run away to South America and never kill anyone ever again. But I don't know about this thing, and I don't know that this thing is going to behave like the other monster. I don't know that this thing is even going to like the other monster. And then I'm really screwed. So the idea, you know, look at it today, where people are exploring artificial intelligence, or even you can look at people just creating things for the web. And then the way it gets used is not the way that you intended because you've left it up to the hive mind in a way.
- [53:38]
D
Right. You can. You can say, like, this is my. This is why I'm doing this, and this is my intent. And these are, like, the ideals that I am. That I'm holding to by making this, but by. By, I guess, giving it life, like, giving it its own agency. And, like, in a way, when you create, like, software or. Or something, you were. You were giving life to it by releasing it to other people. Like, but by doing that, you effectively give up full control over it.
- [54:08]
C
And yet you still have to accept responsibility for it.
- [54:12]
D
Right.
- [54:12]
C
Or you should. Anyway, it seems to be. The book at least posits that that Frankenstein. Frankenstein claims culpability for everything that has happened.
- [54:22]
D
That's. That's kind of interesting because in a way, I think it's true, because the, like Obviously all the killing of people and all the stuff that the monster does, yes, technically would not have happened had, had, you know, Victor Frankenstein not created it. But at what point, and this goes for whenever anybody creates anything is like at what point is the monster responsible for what it does? Or at what point like when you take again using like software or some kind of, some kind of technology analog, at what point are the people who commandeer this stuff like responsible for, for what it does, you know.
- [55:05]
C
Yeah, well, and I think that goes back to the nature versus nurture argument for people, for kids or for you look at like the criminal justice system of like what creates repeat offenders. Is it the system or is it mankind's nature to just be a terrible person for some people? You know what I mean? I was actually, I was talking to a friend of a friend the other day who's like a parole officer and he, his job is to work with the people who are almost guaranteed to get arrested again, you know, like the really hard, hard people. And is it their fault that they're going to what happened in their life? That is probably not their fault. First, like what part of the poverty, like what part of socio economic problems created a system where it was easier for them to commit crime than go out and you know, live an honest life? And that's some of the questions that the monster raises in the, like his first experience with mankind was a village turning on him because he was different and scary looking. And then like how is he supposed to learn anything different, you know? Yeah, and you can see that in just also people's relationships to their kids too. Like if your kid is just a jerk, is that your fault, that your gene's fault? Is that your fault for raising them wrong? I don't know.
- [56:35]
D
Yeah, just like I think that and this is, this is just venturing into personal opinion and I will let you and the listeners know, like I'm thinking about this stuff and I'm seriously bumming. I'm bumming out.
- [56:49]
C
Are you bumming out right now?
- [56:50]
D
I'm kind of bummed out just by thinking about nature versus nurture. And like you get like, you don't even really notice that there's a problem until your monster kills somebody and then you're left with this monster that killed somebody and it's probably too late to make a difference. And so you're just left to think like, what could I have done? Could I have done anything? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I'm. Man, you brought me down.
- [57:23]
C
Sorry, I didn't mean to Bum you out. I mean, I think that's because that's one of the. One of the Twitter questions, or Twitter comment, actually, that we got a couple of days ago.
- [57:32]
D
Yeah, bring up the. Bring up the Twitter comment.
- [57:35]
C
A guy Ryan, who is not. Not specific to Frankenstein guy Ryan, was tweeting at us the other day, talking about. Wanting to know a bit more about what we thought about how the books kind of how their themes stand up. Like, if it is a classic, like, why is it still worth revisiting? Which I think we do. Sometimes we talk about that kind of. But we don't address that question, like, specifically. We don't distinctly say, like, why is this book still worth it?
- [57:59]
D
And I think we should. I really think that we should start trying to make that part of what we hit. And we've had a mixed level of success. We've tried to say, okay, let's start the show off by asking, why did you read this particular book? And that often falls, by the way.
- [58:18]
C
That often completely never happens.
- [58:20]
D
Yeah. With Frankenstein in particular, I feel like it feels. I mean, maybe the prose feels a little older.
- [58:28]
A
I haven't read it.
- [58:28]
C
It does. It feels, but feels kind of hard. It's a little dense sometimes, but the
- [58:32]
D
themes feel even more applicable than some of the newer stuff that we've read. Like, if you look at Turn of the Screw or something. Yeah, who knows what that's about? Like, the Frankenstein stuff, like, you know, tampering in God's domain, the relationship between creator and createe. Well, and I think nature versus nurture argument like this still, and I think this is why the Frankenstein stuff endures, is just that the questions that it raises are very relevant still.
- [59:05]
C
Something I wanted to talk about as we started talking about kind of like software and creations like that, but the whole realm of artificial intelligence. Like, I was immediately, as I was kind of researching a little bit for the podcast and getting my thoughts in order, I was reminded of the artificial intelligence character in the Ender's game series, which is like this kind of omniscient computer program that came out of a character's mind essentially right. And, like, the arc of those books is what's gonna happen when the rest of the world finds out that that thing exists, and are they gonna treat it like a sentient being, or are they gonna treat it like a wayward computer program that is worth destroying, you know, and that seems. That follows a similar arc that the monster does, because it's like the monster is physically superior to man in every way. And then also is at least as intellectually capable as man, if not better. Like, that's not really proven. And how mankind reacts to such an evolution that it probably created is very important. And I don't think that we have all the answers in our own world as we start, like, exploring, like, creating programs that can self teach and, you know, watching that Jeopardy. Computer answer all sorts of questions.
- [60:31]
D
Yeah.
- [60:31]
C
And when they, like, loaded Urban Dictionary into that Jeopardy. Computer and then they had to delete it because it was like, cursing all the time. Did you hear about that?
- [60:40]
D
No.
- [60:41]
C
It was great.
- [60:42]
D
But I am totally not surprised to hear that. Like, if you start feeding real, like, colloquialisms and stuff into a computer, of course it's gonna start swearing all.
- [60:52]
C
It's pretty great.
- [60:53]
D
What else would it do?
- [60:57]
C
Yeah. So I think it's definitely. It's definitely relevant. There was a. There's a stage adaptation that. What's his name, Danny Boyle, the guy who did slumdog and 28 days later. Okay. He did a stage adaptation in London a couple years ago that had, ironically enough, Benedict Cumberbatch and this other guy, John Miller, who. Who plays Sherlock on the American CBS show that, like, Watson show or whatever it's called.
- [61:23]
D
Sure.
- [61:24]
C
Elementary. Maybe that's what it's called with Lucy Lu. But they did a stage adaptation that apparently was excellent. And they. The two of them would switch between playing Frankenstein and playing the monster, like, throughout the run of the show, which sounds really cool, but, yeah, it's incredibly relevant and resonant as I think people are figuring out new things to create that get away from them in the age of, you know, online everything.
- [61:57]
D
Yeah.
- [61:57]
C
Where people can start taking ownership over things you create in about five minutes.
- [62:02]
D
What happens if you create a Frankenstein movie that then gets away from you?
- [62:07]
C
Oh, I don't know.
- [62:08]
D
What is. What is the thematic significance of that?
- [62:12]
C
I don't want to answer that question. Got more Twitter questions. I guess Corey Smock wanted to know. He wanted to know more about, like, the original book's influence on the movies, which we talked about a little bit, I think.
- [62:27]
D
I guess I'm not the Frankenstein movie that I'm the most familiar with, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Is Young Frankenstein.
- [62:36]
C
Okay, that's. That's not useful.
- [62:39]
D
So how does the book. How does the book inform Young Frankenstein?
- [62:44]
C
I don't think it does. I think. I think Frankenstein, the movie informs Young Frankenstein, and I haven't seen the original Frankenstein movie, so I can't really say,
- [62:54]
D
but I think I Don't even know when Putting on the Ritz was written. Like, I don't.
- [63:01]
C
It sounds like the original book.
- [63:03]
D
Is that in Mary Shelley's book?
- [63:04]
C
Yeah. I think there's a. There. There's a sequence where they just sing Putting on the Ritz. It's pretty great. I don't think the book has as much to do with the classic movie as people think. Some of the character names are the same, and the idea that he's gonna create this thing for the betterment of mankind, I think is there. And the idea that the monster gets away from them is there, but that's about it. I think it.
- [63:31]
D
Yeah.
- [63:33]
C
The fact that the monster is intelligent in the book adds a whole different layer to what's going on and to the idea of creating something that is just not present in that film.
- [63:44]
D
Yeah. Like I was just gonna say, it sounds kind of like the archetypical book to movie transition, as you take a lot of the plot elements and things, and I think this is gonna happen. It's gonna end up happening with World War Z 2 is you have this element in the book that works well in the book and is, like, thematically important in the book, but it's a little hard to show.
- [64:09]
C
Yeah. So it goes away.
- [64:10]
D
So you. You just make the monster wake up and be like, Frankenstein, smash. And it's.
- [64:18]
B
It's.
- [64:18]
D
It's oversimplified for the sake of, you know, ostensibly making something that's more interesting to look at, I guess.
- [64:27]
C
Well. And they made it. They. I want to go back now. And they made a Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the early to mid-90s. I don't remember if it was Robert De Niro or was. I might be misremembering that. That sounds like not the right person, but. But they did. It was more of a. Like, he's just a large dude who's very intelligent and, you know, it's much more Hughes. Much more in line with the book.
- [64:50]
D
Who's the guy who played Ray Romano's brother on.
- [64:54]
C
Oh, God, what's his name?
- [64:56]
A
Something.
- [64:56]
C
Garrett.
- [64:57]
D
Oh, Brad Garrett. He would be a great Frankenstein. Right?
- [65:02]
B
Sure. Sure.
- [65:03]
C
He would.
- [65:04]
D
Just. If we want to cast our own Frankenstein adaptation.
- [65:08]
C
Yeah. Great. I'll move on to the next Twitter question. And Dan M. Wanted to know why we think it's called the Modern Prometheus,
- [65:18]
B
which is the subtitle of the book.
- [65:21]
C
It's Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. And you're the one with the classics degree. So you want to tell us a little bit About Prometheus.
- [65:28]
D
Pause this for a sec.
- [65:29]
C
No, I'll tell you. We don't need to pause the podcast. Do you want me to tell you?
- [65:37]
D
No, I just have to remember which one is.
- [65:39]
C
I don't think we're gonna edit this out. I think we're gonna let this go.
- [65:42]
D
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I know who Prometheus was. Of course I do. Because he created man from clay.
- [65:49]
C
Yeah.
- [65:49]
D
And then. And then he took fire so that man could have it.
- [65:54]
C
And Zeus was like, what are you doing?
- [65:56]
D
Yeah. So it is. It's. It's a modern Prometheus in that. In that they created something that got away from them, and it. The act of doing that cut the creator off from the rest of. From the rest of, like, his society.
- [66:14]
C
That is exactly true. In that Prometheus was a titan, and then Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock and having birds eat his liver or whatever.
- [66:23]
D
Yeah. It doesn't sound fun.
- [66:24]
C
No. And that's the arc of the story, is that this kind of ambitious creation then causes tragedy. So that's why it's called Modern Prometheus. Ironically enough, Immanuel Kant called Benjamin Franklin a modern Prometheus after his. His work on electricity, which is kind of contemporaneous to the book. So I don't know if Mary Shelley knew that when she wrote the book or not, but. And then Dan also wanted to know if we had seen Prometheus or Alien, because that was an interesting name that they used for that prequel movie. I don't know. I didn't like Prometheus that much.
- [67:01]
D
I didn't see Prometheus, and I haven't seen Alien, but I have seen Aliens and Most of Alien 3. So make of that what you would.
- [67:09]
C
Great. I will say that they do. There is that really. There is an element of Frankenstein's monster, I guess, in the. Like, there was clearly, in the Prometheus movie, there was like, a race of things that created those awful alien monsters that then ended up destroying those things. And that's, like, how that all went down. And so, like, you created sentient life, and then that sentient life destroyed you. Yada, yada, Frankenstein. I think that's where that similarity begins and ends. I don't think that. I don't think that movie is as deep as it claims to be.
- [67:45]
D
Yada, yada, Frankenstein. All I remember from the trailer is that it made very liberal use of the Inception, like the blah, blah, blah.
- [67:54]
C
I think the beginning of that. Not that this podcast has to be about that movie. I think the beginning, that movie is beautiful. I think the score is great in the beginning of that movie. I think the scene where the main character gets like a C section from a robot cot is like, horrifying and awesome. But the rest, that movie doesn't make that much sense. So that's. There you go. That's that. That's that question answered.
- [68:22]
D
Thanks, Dan.
- [68:23]
C
And then thanks for.
- [68:24]
D
As we're writing in.
- [68:25]
C
No problem. And as we're wrapping up, I just kind of want a neat bit of trivia about the writing of the book. Was that, you know, it was published in 1818, but the apocryphal story for its genesis was that during the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley were hanging out with Lord Byron in Geneva like you do, but no big deal. It was. Have you ever heard of the year without summer, Andrew?
- [68:54]
D
No, I've not heard of that.
- [68:54]
C
So in 1815, this giant volcano in Indonesia erupted and it, like, spewed all this ash into like the stratosphere. And it messed up the seasons for like a year because it just created this crazy weather event. So they were hanging out in Geneva and all the weather was like, rainy and cold and terrible. So they ended up just hanging out inside talking all the time. And they came up with the like, we should write scary stories kind of contest like nerds do. And she.
- [69:29]
D
Even if that's not real, that's a really good, like, origin. Yeah, it's pretty good for the book. Yeah.
- [69:35]
C
And so she came. She claims that she came up with the main idea in like a dream or something, but who knows? But I thought that was neat.
- [69:43]
D
Yeah.
- [69:45]
C
So, yeah, it's. It's story about the other kind of parallel stories that it reminded me of. It reminds me of Jekyll and Hyde. It reminds me of Dr. Faust, actually. Dr. Faustus, like this kind of scientific ambition leading you into terrible things that you don't have any control over.
- [70:03]
D
Because, you know, that's kind of an interesting through line. A lot of this fiction is. It's about. And maybe it's just like. Maybe it's about like the. The rapidity, like the relative rapidity with which these big scientific, like these. These scientific breakthroughs that we take for granted now that were just being made is like when you look at Frankenstein and you look at Jekyll and Hyde, it's all about, like, scientists getting in over their head and then bad stuff is happening. So, like, that's a whole nother. I don't even know if we need to talk about it or if we have anything to say about it, it's
- [70:40]
C
just like, no, I'm sure we'll read other. Other books that fall into this time period, so we'll come back to it. But I think part of it is also that, like, science as we understand it, is still very new while this stuff is happening. And so there's that kind of distrust for new ways of thinking, which is that that distrust in and of itself is as old as time. You know, new things are happening and we don't understand why they're happening or how they're happening, so we hate them. But that seems to be part of that. We'll revisit that, I'm sure, in future episodes. So I've technically.
- [71:15]
D
I think I've technically read an abridged version of Jekyll and Hyde, but I've never read it. I've seen, oh, I think the proper version. I think it counts as unread enough that it fits the show's premise. So, yeah, maybe I'll add that to my pie.
- [71:29]
C
I have seen the musical Jekyll and Hyde, which I like some of the music.
- [71:34]
B
Okay.
- [71:35]
C
It's not a bad show, but I haven't seen it live. I saw it on hbo and it was a production starring David Hasselhoff.
- [71:45]
D
Yikes.
- [71:46]
C
It was really entertaining. I don't know if I would use the word good, but it was really entertaining.
- [71:52]
D
Okay. That's something, certainly.
- [71:55]
C
So hopefully we've been really entertaining this week.
- [72:06]
B
Thank you, Andrew.
- [72:07]
A
Thank you, Craig.
- [72:09]
B
Thank you, Shadow Andrew.
- [72:11]
A
Thank you, Shadow Craig.
- [72:13]
B
Thank you, listeners.
- [72:15]
D
We do. Thank you.
- [72:17]
A
Old lady whispering Hush. What are we doing?
- [72:21]
B
Just thanking everybody for tuning in to this annotated edition of Frankenstein. If you have Frankenstein monsters that you want to tell us about that we didn't talk about on this week's episode or last decade's episode, honestly, I want
- [72:36]
A
to know more if you know a Dr. Frankenstein, because those people need to be reported to the authorities.
- [72:43]
B
Which authorities? Who can say, Send us an email.
- [72:46]
A
If you know a Frankenstein's monster, please reach out to him with, like, understanding and love in your heart. And if you know a Dr. Frankenstein, like, report him to the medical board because he's doing unscrupulous stuff.
- [72:57]
B
Check his electricity bills.
- [72:59]
C
Yeah.
- [73:00]
B
Bring him to court. Send us an email overdupod gmail.com we will help you report these Frankenstein doctors. Find us on social media at Overdue Pod. Our theme song is composed by Nick Laurengis. Andrew, Folks want to know more about the show. Where do they go?
- [73:14]
A
Overdue Podcast.com's the Internet website. Up there we have links to the books that we have read and the ones that we are going to read, including all of this month's annotated editions and the special collections episode about the movie Twilight that we posted to start the month. Getting started. Right. With more Twilight.
- [73:33]
B
Always, always. Monsters Baby.
- [73:35]
A
Yeah, Monsters. There's also Patreon. Patreon.com overdue pod. Go there and give us a little bit of cash and you support the show directly, which is a thing that literally makes it possible to keep making it. And you get access to our Discord community, access to Dusty Bookshelves, our monthly newsletter ad free version of the feed, our current long read project, which right now is still Akira.
- [74:02]
C
Yeah.
- [74:02]
A
The manga.
- [74:03]
B
Yeah. But halfway through right now.
- [74:05]
A
Yeah. There are also episodes of the Silly Merlin and some other things that have not gone up on the. On the main feed yet. And then the other special collections episodes including stuff about the Boss Baby and other stuff.
- [74:17]
B
I just remembered we talked about the boss.
- [74:20]
A
We talked about the Boss Baby for like an hour and a half. It was a really long one.
- [74:27]
B
Okay, Patreon, that one. When, when the end comes, how much time I spent on the Boss Baby,
- [74:36]
A
I wish I'd spent. I wish we'd done an episode about Boss Baby two is what you're going to be thinking on your.
- [74:41]
B
That's what we're thinking about.
- [74:42]
A
No, absolutely not. That movie sucks. Patreon.com overdubot if you want to hear our thoughts about Boss Baby and other other great cinematic monsters, next week we're going to be returning to the Strange Case. The Curious Case.
- [74:58]
B
Strange Case.
- [74:59]
A
The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I think time has rendered it less strange because we all know what their deal is.
- [75:07]
B
That's a great point.
- [75:11]
A
The regular case of Dr. Jekyll.
- [75:14]
B
The very common genre case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
- [75:19]
A
The oft discussed case of Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde. All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. Craig, are we good? You good? Do you have anything else?
- [75:26]
B
I'm great. No.
- [75:27]
A
All right. Until we come at you next time with another monster of an episode, please try to be happy. That was a Headgum podcast.
- [76:07]
C
Hi, I am Mandy Moore.
- [76:08]
A
Sterling K. Brown.
- [76:10]
C
And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast that was Us now on Headgum. Each episode we're gonna go into a deep dive from our show. This is us.
- [76:18]
A
That's right.
- [76:19]
B
We're gonna go episode by episode.
- [76:21]
C
We're also gonna pepper in episodes with different gu and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes, a little bit. Are we going to laugh A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man.
- [76:33]
A
Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app. Or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify.
- [76:40]
D
New episodes every Tuesday.