Frankenstein Unbound

In Aldiss’s novel, all these braided authorships make for a compellingly low treatise on the responsibilities of fiction in a world choked by climatic collapse and edged by nuclear winter. Crack it up to the differences between written fiction (ontologically bound, sprawled in front of us) and the moving image (projected, onto a screen then into the eye) or simply having too much of one’s skin in the speculative game, but as with A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)—adapted from the Aldiss short story, “Supertoys Last All Summer Long”—Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound reveals more about its maker than the rhetorics or aesthetics of fiction. It’s all here for Corman as auteur, from the spontaneous poetry-through-frugality—an insert of supposedly gored sheep is brief, but not brief enough to hide that the animals are still breathing, nightmarelike—to a middle sequence that sees Buchanan wooing Shelley that’s tonally closer to the slurry of nurse-sploitation films Corman produced in the early ’70s than to anything like the Gothic. A set of woozy, woggled “dream shots” haunt Buchanan whenever he’s knocked unconscious, beamed into 1990 straight from House of Usher (1960), all purple cellophane and crème de menthe liqueur masking an ably, admirably DIY set.

Despite his interest in countercultures and integration pictures—see The Trip (1967) and The Intruder (1962), respectively—the progress Roger Corman most purely pursued was a cinema made for humans by humans. Despite a set of nested author avatars bemoaning their complicity in apocalypse, Frankenstein Unbound is a bracing and joyful example of moving images freed from the weight of meaning beyond itself. Unlike the Creation or his variable creators, Frankenstein Unbound is not lusting after definition from outside. There is none of the dull literalism of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein or the leveraging of film history for stale polemic à la The Bride!, two recent films that attempt to demonstrate the gravity of creation and the responsibility for modeling a vision while forgetting the spiritual truth Corman breathed: cinema—and art itself—needs no justifying reason nor permission from backers to exist.

One needn’t bad-mouth boring movies in the present to praise Frankenstein Unbound. So let me end like this: there is a sequence near the film’s conclusion set in a laboratory from a future after the future that the film starts in. A monster montaged from special effect and memory chases a maker (a director) around a maze of lasers. It’s an oddly lyrical rhyme to the film’s earlier lab sequence, full of lightning flash and fogging beakers. With every splash and beam of light, all I see are outlines of Karloff and Kier, Elsa Lanchester’s Cheshire grin, and Kenneth Branagh’s hammy mane. Not every movie contains every movie anymore—this is the amnesia of a present moment saturated with data and images to the point that nothing sticks. Every Corman film contained multitudes—his and Julie’s great grift was their ability to suggest plenty without plenty. Their gift, however, was always to see cinema (and a cinema of speculative shapes) as a place for plenty rather than less, for all the acknowledged who came before and all the dreamers looking in, who wanted nothing more than the liberty of a low budget and a bucket of blood. It is, to be vulgar, a theory of unbounding creation. I hope it never ends.