Gods and Monsters

Gods and Monsters is based on the novel The Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram. The film is an adaptation of Bram's fictionalized account of the last days of the film director James Whale. The actual director was born in 1889 in the slums of the industrialized British midlands and drowned himself in the pool of his home in Pacific Palisades, CA in 1957. Whale left a suicide note for his companion David Lewis explaining, “The future is just old age and illness and pain … I must have peace and this is the only way.” Whale's Hollywood career as director of more than 20 films had begun auspiciously with the highly successful Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein .

Director/writer Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters pivots on the entirely invented relationship between the 68-year-old Whale (Sir Ian Mc-Kellen) and his handsome young gardener Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser). Like another recent film Love and Death on Long Island, its unusual gay/straight configuration is employed to isolate and examine the phenomenon of love between men. In this it is greatly assisted by Sir Ian McKellen's superbly intelligent performance as James Whale and Bill Condon's shrewd direction and screenplay.

James Whale was certainly not the “father” of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's novel of 1818 launched the human-made monster that has become one of the touchstones of the modern imagination. Dr. Frankenstein's monstrous “thing in itself is nothing less than the ex novo creation of a subject without a history, one of the fantasies and certainly one of the nightmares of modern man (as well as modern film, e.g., Blade Runner). The creature is both god and monster insofar as its act of creation, having bypassed the mediation of the former is doomed to be the latter. One might conclude that the anxiety generated by modern man qua God is bound up with the void left by this “death of God.” There is something of the death drive about Frankenstein's monster; its positive manifestation here is somethi