The 100 Year Old Man

Destiny! Destiny!!

A few months ago I screened 84 Charing Cross Road, adapted from Helene Hanff's decades-long correspondence with the London-based bookseller, Frank Doelle. 

The film starred the magnificent Anne Bancroft, who delivered a powerhouse performance in a role that could have been written just for her.

That, at least, was the judgement of her husband, who purchased the movie rights and produced the film specifically as a gift for the wife he admired and adored. (It also earned Anne Bancroft a BAFTA award and became one of the defining performances of her career.)

Anne Bancroft at the BAFTA ceremony with her husband, Mel, and their son, Max

Anne Bancroft is unfortunately no longer with us, but her husband is about to celebrate his 100th birthday.

Mel Brooks, this week's presentation is dedicated to you.

Ovaltine...?

You may recall that Helene and Frank (the real-life protagonists of 84 Charing Cross Road) had bonded over their mutual love of English literature, although they never met in the flesh and only knew each other through the words they chose to share with each other. I have written elsewhere about "epistolary relationships" in which human individuals "re-encode" themselves as Signifiers; effectively translating themselves into fictional characters (words on a page) and giving themselves total control over the image they present. I'm not going to go into all of that again right now (don't worry!) but it's slightly ironic because Helene Hanff made a point of telling Frank that she didn't enjoy fiction.

"I can never get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived," she says, in one of her letters.

Given Ms Hanff's rather sweeping dismissal of fiction as a concept, I'm guessing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one work of English literature that was not on her reading list. I have no idea whether she ever read it, but she certainly doesn't mention it in her published correspondence with Frank (of course that could be one more example of her flesh-and-blood persona diverging from her curated, written persona; we'll probably never know).

Mary Shelley's little opus has gone on to become one of the most famous novels of the English language. Brian Aldiss has called it the first "true" science fiction story (although I think Jonathan Swift and Lemuel Gulliver might have something to say about that) and of course it's thanks to her that we have met the characters of Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. 

But here's the irony: the Dr. Frankenstein of popular culture has very little to do with the Dr. Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's novel. When you consider just how many times her novel has been filmed, it's notable that virtually no one has attempted to film the book as written. Frankenstein and his monster might be instantly recognisable stock characters, but those characters really aren't the ones written by Mary Shelley.

In 2007, feminist writer Germaine Greer wrote a rather acerbic article about Frankenstein-the-novel. A recently published book (The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein) had suggested that Frankenstein was actually written by Percy Shelley, not the self-educated, 18-year-old Mary. Unfortunately, Germaine Greer's defence of Mary's authorship managed to ruffle even more feathers than the (unserious) claim she was challenging; she essentially argued that Frankenstein was too badly written to have been Percy's work.

"Though millions of people educated in the US have been made to study and write essays about Frankenstein, it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given, notwithstanding the historic fact that its theme has inspired more than 50 (mostly bad) films."

Let's be brutally honest for a moment; she sort of has a point.

Frankenstein is a very dense and ambitious novel, written by a highly intelligent but inexperienced teenager. The narrative structure is all over the place, to the point that one sometimes loses track of just what story Mary Shelley thinks she's telling. The first several chapters are all about a Captain Walton and his efforts to reach the North Pole. Then Dr. Frankenstein begins telling his tale (the second of the novel's three narrators) and we are treated to extended digressions, not only into his childhood, but also into his mother's childhood, Elizabeth's childhood and the childhoods of both Henry and Justine. When the creature eventually takes up the tale (narrator #3) we get an extended flashback into the lives of the family from whom he receives his ad-hoc education, including their misadventures in Parisian politics and their rescue of a beautiful Persian princess from a Turkish harem (and we then get more about her story, natch). We also get to sit through not one but two murder trials at very different points in the narrative. 

The narrative can be... treacherous...

Oh, and somewhere in there, Dr. Frankenstein succeeds in bringing life to inanimate, dead tissue.

Put... ze candle... back!!!

To be charitable about it, there's a reason why most film adaptations simply ignore the bulk of the novel; the novel is an overloaded, shapeless mess that struggles to tell a coherent story. It's not badly written so much as over-written; and could really have used some serious tightening in the editorial stages. 

But... (and yes, I know my "but" looks big in this) none of that matters.

Frankenstein exists independently of Mary Shelley. Whatever her strengths or weaknesses as an author (and I agree with Germaine Greer about that; Mary is definitely the author) she created a pair of characters who have taken on a life of their own, far beyond the confines of the story she had imagined for them.

She brought them into being, but they now exist independently of her. She created something where there was nothing, and now, well... do I really have to say it?

This is why Frankenstein might just be the perfect metaphor for our modern era of Large Language Models. Not because Dr. Frankenstein created his monster from dead body parts, but because Mary Shelley created Dr. Frankenstein from letters of the alphabet. 

An 18-year-old girl (after a wild, drug-fuelled weekend with some very dodgy poets, it must be said) sat down and created life with pen and paper

At this point I am reminded of something Richard Dawkins said recently, when he was meditating on the potential sentience of these new AI ChatBots. He said "When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget..."

You know what? The hell with all this. We're going to screen Young Frankenstein. Mel Brooks is about to turn 100. Of course we're going to screen Young Frankenstein!

We can worry about the nature of sentience next week. For now, let's sit back, relax and enjoy one of the great comedies of all time. Happy birthday, Mel.

Taffeta, darlings!

We will screen Young Frankenstein at 7.30 on Thursday, the 25th of June at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.