And now everything has raisins 'cause you fell for a raisin-crazy fool

[sovay]

I had a very nice time this evening reading Charon and listening to everyone else in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997) on the Scintillation Discord, notably featuring nineweaving and rushthatspeaks as the older and younger Housman, and then as I was driving home from dropping off Rush-That-Speaks I turned on WGBH and found myself in the middle of a jauntily jaundiced jazz un-standard that sounded like a lost Rodgers and Hart and turned out to be Rachael and Vilray's "Hate Is the Basis of Love" and now it's stuck in my head and so is some Anakreon, so after all this has been a pretty good night.

P.S. I completely forgot to mention the turkey that approached me at a stop sign earlier in the afternoon. I hope it was able to catch the next cab.

Comments

[alexxkay]

The wife and I were on a rare outing yesterday. On returning home, we found the front yard occupied by four territorial turkeys. We made it inside, but things looked a bit iffy there!

[sovay]

On returning home, we found the front yard occupied by four territorial turkeys. We made it inside, but things looked a bit iffy there!

I am glad you were unscathed! Where did you out to?

[alexxkay]

Some friends bought us tickets to Manual Cinema's production of Frankenstein. It was... ok. They had a very interesting way of telling the story, and some interesting changes on the basic story, but I felt that those two aspects of the production fought against each other.

[sovay]

They had a very interesting way of telling the story, and some interesting changes on the basic story, but I felt that those two aspects of the production fought against each other.

Say more? Sorry it didn't work, regardless.

[alexxkay]

In terms of story, they had clearly done their research, but made many changes. They went with the outermost frame of telling Mary Shelly's own story (in very brief), drawing a connection between her dead child and the Creature. This was mildly interesting, but as an old hand with the Frankenstein mythos, I didn't find it terribly original. The one really effective image (for me) was the final one, of Mary cooing over a child-scale Creature in her arms. Despite including a line from Victor along the lines of "I designed my creature to be beautiful!", the Creature was massively deformed, and had one ominous eye that seemed lifted directly from "The Tell-Tale Heart". They included the family that the Creature hides out around, an oft-overlooked element, which was nice. But they lost that goodwill with me when, not only does the Creature never learn speech, but when the family turns on him, the Creature massacres them. Weirdly, Elizabeth is not killed by the Creature. A paranoid Victor, expecting an attack by the Creature at any moment, accidentally shoots her! On the plus side, Victor gave some extremely good MAD Scientist, German Expressionist style.

About 10 feet over the stage was a large projection screen. The stage itself contained musicians, actors, video cameras, shadow puppets, marionettes, miniature backdrops, and props. A complex bustle of activity onstage went towards creating a mostly silent-era-aesthetic film of Frankenstein, in real time, with no pre-recorded elements. Characters moved from being actors to puppets and back again seamlessly. Scenes were composited from multiple layers of reality in a single shot. It was a virtuoso piece of work, technically speaking. But if you were paying attention to the artistry, it distracted from the story, and if paying attention to the story, missed the artistry.

Ultimately, the whole exercise seemed rather pointless. It was possible to use this style to tell this story, but I couldn't see any reason for it. "The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all." I would really like to see this storytelling style applied to something where the technology worked with the story. I think an adaptation of Metropolis, with its motif of the huge (literally) under-class of workers that make everything above function, could be fruitful.

[sovay]

A complex bustle of activity onstage went towards creating a mostly silent-era-aesthetic film of Frankenstein, in real time, with no pre-recorded elements.

That sounds absolutely fascinating (and makes me think of Liz Hand's Pandora's Bride (2007), which resets the characters of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) in Weimar Berlin). Do you think it would have been less distracting if the changes to the story had not been so out of character? I agree with you that Metropolis sounds like an ideal application.

[alexxkay]

Do you think it would have been less distracting if the changes to the story had not been so out of character?

No, on two counts. One, the only way (I could see) to make it less distracting would be to really integrate form and function. And while there is certainly precedent for trying to make Frankenstein be a story about complex technology, I've never found those attempts very successful.

Secondly, I wouldn't necessarily categorize the changes as "out of character". This was only an adaptation of the novel in the simplest of senses. It was far more a conscious installment of the ongoing cultural conversation of many different Frankenstein variants over the decades. Sort of similar to how no modern production of Hamlet can be solely based on the text of the play. Having accepted that, I wasn't going to be upset by the fact of there being significant changes. Some of the changes failed to land with me for aesthetic or political reasons, but I felt that they were justified in making their own decisions of what "in character" meant.

After all, my own personal headcanon of the story is pretty wildly different from any other I've seen :-) [In brief, there's very little textual evidence that the Creature actually exists, and tons of evidence that Victor has some serious mental health issues, probably tied up with repressed homosexuality. Victor is strongly suspected to be the culprit in several of the Creature's murders -- maybe he is both the murderer and Creature. This does require a bit of textual contortion, but not enough to make me abandon the headcanon.]