Sympathizer

"Describe the moon for me." "It's solitary."




In Nick Dear's Frankenstein we encounter the world and the human race with the Creature, having seen Victor Frankenstein, for the few moments it takes for him to reject his creation completely. It's hard not to sympathize with something when you can see the length and breadth of its struggles, and so the whole first act consists of the Creature first finding its place within its own body, which despite its charnel-house origins is perfectly capable, and then its place in the world, tasks which are undertaken with evident pain and without any support. Not that Victor would have helped-- if he had stuck around to see the Creature  endeavor to walk he would have most likely dispatched his experiment then and there as a failure. For Victor the experiment is as much a failure as a success-- a failure because of his experiment's ugliness, and a success in that it posseses the life he gave it, a life he found he was totally unwilling to be responsible for. The camera which had until then been dutifully recording the play reels after Victor touches his creation for the first time, destroying our vision of stage for a moment as the reality of the situation assails Victor. After it recovers we don't see Victor for quite some time, and when he returns he endeavors to damage the Creature again and again.

 The Creature is shown compassion only once, by a blind man living in exile in the mountains, and through him receives a higher education. What he learns of humans in general, however, is through vagabonds, prositutes, and the screams of anyone who catches a glimpse of him. We share his joy of nature and confusion with the "inconsistencies" of human behavior, and we agree, for the time, with the old man when he says that the Creature has a good heart. We need to believe that this thing that we have seen grow up so quickly will also be able to overcome its severe disadvantages.

Yet by the next time the Creature is shown some pity, now by a woman who can see, it's clear that the Creature cannot gain any good from the encounter. If he did not start out as a monster (debatable), he has certainly been solidfied as one by his creator. His grave-robbed heart has been eaten away by vengence. So we watch, horrified at the little movements he makes through Victor and Elizabeth's nuptial chamber, the little empty courtesies he makes as he moves towards his end game. Stridently we wish him away from the inevitable conclusion, but we already know how tightly he is bound up in affecting both his creator's and his own destruction.

"How is it that you are justified in killing me but in killing you I am not?" "I'm not debating this with you"

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein we stand in Victor's point of view, as he tells his final story on the decks of a ship bound in ice in the Arctic Circle. The play is not Victor's story, so there we get only hints at his motivations-- a dead mother, his pride, paranoia, and profound detachment. It's difficult to be attached to Victor, a man who in most senses is a coward. Unlike the Creature there isn't anything that endears him to us. Even though we're hard pressed to sympathize with him it's still difficult to watch him make the same obvious mistake, a mistake ingrained in his character. He leaves at the wrong moments. He is unable to stay by both his own creation and the woman he has lived most of his life with. He has no motivation to understand the monster or the person, only insofar as to destroy one and secure the other. As his mind has been bound up in the first task he is unable to address the other.

In the end which character could you possibly align with? The corrupted Creature or the irresponsible scientist that made him what he is? I wanted to warn them both off their paths. Stop! Stop! But their misery is symbiotic.