中文版：https://movie.douban.com/review/15629766

In the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to the 1931 film Frankenstein, the Creature, an entity composed of dead bodies by scientist Henry Frankenstein, encounters an elderly, blind male hermit in a hut on the hill (00:34:55-00:44:34). He befriends the Creature and teaches the Creature English (Bride 00:36:40-00:43:15). However when lost villagers come to the hut, they recognize the Creature as the monster in the country (Bride 00:43:15-00:43:57). Eventually, they shoot the Creature, burn the hut down, and purportedly save the blind man from the Creature’s keep (Bride 00:43:59-00:44:34). Why do able-bodied people treat the blind hermit man with kindness and pity while they disrespect and hunt the mute Creature with a monstrous figure of stitches and an abnormal brain in this sequence? To answer it, this essay will analyze the representation of disabilities and queerness in horror films, utilizing research about the novel Frankenstein and works inspired by it including the film series, and introducing crip theory, an intersection of disability studies and queer theory. Through the lens of crip theory, the essay argues that the Creature and the blind hermit man are treated differently, because they fall into two different stereotypical narratives that respectively link disability with inner depravity and angelic morality, and the Creature’s non-binary identity including but not limited to gender challenges heteronormativity.

In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Robert McRuer introduces crip theory that connects disability studies and queer theory with the shared pathologized history and the silent unspoken categories of normality in both cases, ability and heterosexuality (McRuer 1). The unspoken categories interweave with each other, generating the compulsory able-bodied heteronormativity (McRuer 1). Able-bodiedness, “the opposite of disability” in the dictionary, refers to a compulsory concept “in the emergent industrial capitalist system” that considers one’s flexibility in work as a norm (McRuer 7-8, 16). Heteronormativity refers to the compulsory assumption that “nearly everyone” should be in the so-called “normal relations of the sexes” that require consistency in sex and gender, known as cisgender, and the pursuit of the opposite sex, known as heterosexual (McRuer 8-9). In this essay, queer/queerness is used as an umbrella word that refers to all identities, communities, and concepts that are not heterosexual or cisgender. As a result, these two categories produce disability and queerness respectively yet mutually. In the films, the Creature is disabled and non-binary disrupting the able cis-hetero norms in every facet.

The Creature is represented as disabled in various respects such as cognitive disability, skin disorders, and muteness through makeup design and the narrative. In the first film, the brain is literally labeled as “abnormal” for its degeneration causing the original owner’s violent brutality according to the medical professor (Frankenstein 00:07:19-00:07:45). In Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Classic Horror Films, Stephaine Brown Clark, Professor Emerita in the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester, points out that the makeup design of the Creature’s scar on the skull visually cues people to the abnormal brain inside, the pieced-together body and their disability (Clark 136-137). The Creature’s stitched-togetherness furthers visible physical disabilities (Clark 137).1 When the blind feels the stitches as he invites the Creature into the hut through physical interactions, he states, “You are hurt, my friend”, acknowledging the Creature’s skin deformity (Bride 00:37:28-00:37:35). Additionally, the Creature’s muteness is another sign of disability. After the physical interactions, the hermit asks about the Creature’s name only to receive noises rather than utterances in reply (Bride 00:38:00-00:38:12). He sighs, “Perhaps you are afflicted too. I cannot see and you cannot speak”, implying that muteness is similar to blindness in disability (Bride 00:38:15-00:38:23).

The blind’s resonation with the Creature, in dialogue as well as mise-en-scene, proposes the Creature’s disability in a general sense, particularly the unifying sentiment of isolation among the disabled community. For the purposes of this essay, disability will be defined under the parameters of (in)visibility, as is commonly seen in crip theory. To think about the non-normative identity, one must think in line with the politics of visibility (McRuer 2). Media Arts scholar Travis Sutton identifies one of the common stereotypical representations of disabled people as isolated from able-bodied people and each other in both narrative and frame in Avenging the Body: Disability in the Horror Film (76). The sequence starts with a long shot of the Creature climbing up the hill to approach the hut where the diegetic music comes from (Bride 00:35:15-00:35:30). The mise-en-scene underscores the distance of the uncultivated hill where the hut is located, revealing the isolation of the two from able-bodied people. The desolation is directly stressed in the line of the hut’s owner, let alone in the film credits where the elderly blind man is dubbed the uniquely fitting title of “Hermit”, “It’s very lonely here, and it’s been a long time since any human being came into this hut” (Bride 00:39:09-00:39:15, 01:14:14). In another long shot, the blind man inside plays the violin alone while the Creature looks through the window to observe the hut's interior (Bride 00:35:26). The Creature’s head is positioned solely in the tiny window frame. With one inside and the other outside individually, the scene depicts the two disabled characters separated from each other, whereas the able-bodied villagers debut as a pair (Bride 00:43:15). Hence the hermit thanks God for bringing “lonely children together”, again implying their shared disability (Bride 00:39:52-00:40:15). The man and the Creature are socially rendered undesirable, and therefore invisible, literally alone in the woods.

Although both the Creature and the hermit are portrayed as lonely disabled characters, they fall into two different stereotypes of disabled characters that tie disability to inner depravity and angelic morality respectively. The Creature’s disability is associated with inner depravity. In the film, the professor in the medical school teaches Frankenstein that “only evil can come from” a criminal’s abnormal brain (Frankenstein 00:29:56-00:29:58). From the professor’s institutional scientific judgment, the brain is abnormal so a creature with the brain will be evil. The underlying meaning of this claim is the equivalence of the psyche and brain failing to distinguish their independence from each other (Clark 135). Furthermore, the monster’s piece-together body is deployed to infer the monster’s soul “lacking the unity of composition that marks it as beautiful” (Clark 137). On the other hand, the blind elder is prominently shown as Saintly Sage. Saintly Sage is usually an old character whose disability, mostly blindness, “allegedly grants this character access to higher levels of wisdom, foresight, and morality” (Sutton 78). In the film, blindness prevents him from seeing the monstrosity of the Creature, contributing to his realization of their communal loneliness, so he feels for, accommodates, and makes friends with the Creature (Sutton 78-79). The stereotypes are presented to the audience as well as to the villagers. The villagers are surprised that the hermit introduces the Creature as his friend, exclaiming, “Friend? This is the fiend that’s been murdering half the countryside. Good heavens, man, can’t you see? Oh, he’s blind” (Bride 00:43:45-00:43:52). At last, they perceive the man’s visual impairment directly, indirectly cognizing the Creature’s disability and in effect monstrifying it. The able-bodied people admit the mutual disability of the Creature and the hermit while segregating them from each other by stereotypical narratives.

All disability stereotypes should be criticized because they objectify disabled people and deny their full moral agency. The distance and isolation are stereotypically exhibited due to the discomfort and intrigue raised in able-bodied people when they encounter disability (Sutton 76). Specifically for the intrigue, it leads to able-bodied people’s objectification of disability as spectacles (Sutton 76). Viewed as innocent sages, the characters are denied any other desires than the hope of collective support within the disabled community and protection from abled-bodied people (Sutton 78). In the film, the blind hermit is simply portrayed as a giver to the Creature craving for a reciprocal companion and an inferior rescued by the able-bodied villagers. On the other hand, if viewed as monsters, their morality and souls are constrained by their appearance. In other words, their souls are cracked and trapped in their broken bodies. In the films, able-bodied people monstrify the Creature for the image, namely stitches and cognitive disability. In this comparison, disabled people are superficially ranked for different types of disability. In plain words, they are either extremely good because of their physical disability or extremely bad on account of their mental and cognitive disability. Characterized as one of two moral extremes, they are objectified by virtue of their divergence to normativity and denied the complexity of character and the character arc permitted of able-bodied individuals.

Besides the transgression in the able/disabled binary, the Creature has a non-binary identity including but not limited to gender, such as life/death and human/non-human. American academic Jack Halberstam introduces the term trans* in Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability “unfolding categories of being organized around but not confined to forms of gender variance” (4). The “asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity” (Halberstam 4). Concerning gender, for instance, it means that being trans* rejects a transition that aims to end up in the existing male/female gender model. Trans* is used as an umbrella word that covers all non-cisgender identities, including but not limited to transgender and non-binary (Halberstam 1, 5).2 Along the “non-telic definitional lines” of Halberstam’s trans*, Chris Washington, associate professor of English at Francis Marion University, contends the non-binary identity of the Creature in Non-Binary Frankenstein? (71).3 Especially, the ontology of the Creature’s identity is trans* that escalates and is escalating without “any telos or desire for telos” (Washington 71). Thus, it is improper to impose a binary on the non-binary with(out) a meta-dichotomy of binary/non-binary.

Many seemingly paradoxical lines in the films insinuate the concession of the human characters on the Creature’s non-binary identity. In Frankenstein (1931), the scientist recommends his experiment as the “brain of a dead man to live again” in the body he made from corpses while he affirms that the “body is not dead” given that “it has never lived” (00:16:11-00:16:18, 00:22:09-00:22:13). The underlying meaning of the two lines is that the Creature is not simply a living collage of dead tissues. To put it another way, the goal of the experiment then blurs the inherent existence of the border in bilateral life-death relations. Moreover, the argument that the body made from cadavers is not dead for the absence of living beforehand illustrates Frankenstein’s non-binary recognition of life/death in his project. As Washington analyzes, the Creature is “created from bits and pieces of the living and the dead and the human and nonhuman, merging what cannot be merged into a blurring of non-binaristic boundaries” (69). In the sequel, the scientist revisits his plan “to create a man” remarking that he “could have bred a [new] race” (Bride 00:13:34-00:13:51). A race commonly refers to a species that is other than the human form that man refers to. The retrospective commentary also suggests that Frankenstein senses the Creature outsteps the human/non-human binary. Reintroducing the lines of the villagers, “he isn’t human. Frankenstein made him out of dead bodies”, we can draw a similar inference (Bride 00:43:53-00:43:57). They realize that the Creature is a presence that transcends the binary logic. Therefore, the Creature is ontologically ambiguous without an end considering that the cis-hetero normative framework is insufficient for it.

The Creature carries a non-binary in both sex and gender, concepts dictated to it by human society because the Creature does not fit into the ideology of the heteronormative society by birth. Resulting in “a species of one”, the origin of the Creature is not a result of a two-sex union but one male instead, which already challenges the cis-hetero fantasy (Washington 68, 80). In Non-Binary Frankenstein?, the author again contends the Creature as

a monster, according to its very (no)name, has no gender, has no name, and is simply something unfathomable, a namelessness that can never be named since naming it would mean it was no longer a monster but something more recognizably like a person complete with a gender identity normatively implied by whatever signifying name it takes. (Washington 66)

This statement on the Creature’s lack of identity ontologically supplements the non-binary gender identity without a telos with the absence of an arche, an originary point. By arguing this, Washington alludes to the deficit of a starting point, namely sex, to the Creature’s sex/gender. It is parallel to the trans* rejection of an established gender “destination” within the Creature non-binary covered in the previous context (Halberstam 4; Washington 71). That is, transgender, conventionally referring to people whose gender identity differs from their assigned sex, should have a (binary) sex allocated first to be deviant from but the Creature being “a species of one” is a creature without assigned sex, a species of androgyny. Thereefore, the Creature disrupts the sex-gender dualism. As an epicene species without binary sex designated to begin with, the Creature’s next request for a female companion is to appropriate the civilized two-sex norm and gender identity in human society.

The divergence between humans and the Creature in the intentions to create a bride demonstrates the conflicts between the Creature’s non-binary and socially structured heteronormativity.4 Doctor Pretorius articulates that his potential innovation of a feminine creature “follow[s] the lead of nature” of the male-female norm to “multiply” and completes the dream of “a man-made race” that is “only half realized” (Bride 00:24:50-00:25:08). In the doctor’s heteronormative assertion, the presence of a female is to fulfill the reproduction function of a species. However, the Creature’s demand for a female is for the sake of companionship. Acculturated by the blind hermit, the Creature enunciates word by word, “Alone. Bad. Friend. Good” (Bride 00:42:00-00:42:10). Later, learning that Doctor Pretorius makes “woman, a friend of [the Creature]”, the Creature says “Woman? Friend. Yes. I want friend. Like me” (Bride 00:50:05-00:50:24). The creature wishes for a woman to resemble the friendship he once had. It is a pursuit for companionship not for the reproductive norm in heteronormativity.

The Creature unites disability with queerness as crip theory does. In the films, the Creature’s disabled body stitched up with dead tissues causes the non-binary identity to transpire. Inversely, the non-binary identity, especially life/death with the dead criminal’s abnormal brain, also influences the disability of the Creature. Rather, the villagers’ saying “Good heavens, man, can’t you see?” in a dismissive tone are ramified by the compulsory able-bodied heteronormativity for the presumption that the hermit is male and he should be able to see (Bride 00:43:48-00:43:50). However, the Creature outgrows the ideology of normalcy constitutionally.

By criticizing the norms, crip theory extends beyond the bounds of the disabled and queer community, engaging everyone in all periods and regions, so as the Creature. For instance, McRuer reminds people that “everyone is virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied norms are ‘intrinsically impossible to embody’ fully and in the sense that able-bodied status is always temporary, disability being the one identity category that all people will embody if they live long enough” (McRuer 30). In other terms, crip theory advocates that we are all disabled to a certain degree both in the manner that we could never fulfill the abled-bodied ideal fully and disability could befall anyone anywhere at any time. The Creature deepens the doubt on normative standards. Being a non-binary disabled figure, it transgressively queers everyone. For example, since fear usually relates to feminity, the visually-abled cishet-men’s fright as they meet the Creature contends with their manhood, shedding light on their womanhood. It reveals the co-existence of masculinity and femininity in everyone like the co-existence of androgen and estrogen. There is always a part of us that is not manly or womanly. On that account, able-bodied heteronormativity is a myth that no one can achieve completely. Given the oxymoron of impossible perfection, is everyone then disabled and queer to some extent?

Notes

1Even though Clark states that it was Kenneth Branagh who emphasized the creature’s skin in his film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1996) as opposed to the emphasis on the skull in the 1930s series, the stitches in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein as part of the makeup design are recognizable visually even if that is not the main focus of the makeup design (Clark 137). Therefore, the analysis of the stitches in the 1996 version could be translated to the 1930s series.

2This essay acknowledges that there are differences between transgender and non-binary identities. While arguing the Creature transcends all kinds of sex and gender norms, for the purpose of this essay the terms can be used interchangeably.

3The article focused on the body in Mary Shelley’s novel instead of the film series and engaged it with transgender and trans* theory. The analysis is mostly concentrated on how the creature is created and exists. Since the origin story of the Creature in the films is similar to that in the novel, the analysis could be appropriated with the shared setting of “a monster created from cadavers out of rifled graves” (Bride 00:03:20-00:03:23).

4The assumption that only cisgender males can have a bride is an obvious example of heteronormativity— assuming people’s gender by the partner— as anyone with any gender identity can have a bride as long as their partner’s gender is female. Identity is not, or at least not only, constructed by others’ perceptions or assumptions. It should take the self-awareness of the subject into account. Not to mention that it is dubious about the idea of treating the Creature’s Bride as female, similar to identifying the Creature as male.

Works Cited

Bride of Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, performances by Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Elsa Lanchester, and Ernest Thesiger, Universal Pictures, 1935.

Clark, Stephanie. “Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Classic Horror Films.” Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media, edited by Lester D. Friedman, Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 129-148.

Frankenstein. Directed by James Whale, performances by Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Boris Karloff, and Dwight Frye, Universal Pictures, 1931.

Halberstam, Jack. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, University of California Press, 2018.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York University Press, 2006.

Sutton, Travis. “Avenging the Body: Disability in the Horror Film.” A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, John Wiley & Sons, 2014, pp. 73-89.

Washington, Chris. “Non-Binary Frankenstein?.” Frankenstein in Theory: A Critical Anatomy, edited by Orrin N. C. Wang, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2021, pp. 65-83.

本文原為2023秋季學期《人文視野：動物與機器（人）》的期末小論文。由于平台限制，部分内容或許不符格式規範，還望海涵。