Word: frankenstein
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...fascination with robots began in his youth, when he first became acquainted with science-fiction writers such as H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley. Friedrich, who wrote the cover story and an accompanying box on the popular image of robots through the ages, admits that Shelley's Frankenstein has always had a special hold on his imagination. Says Friedrich: "It was one of my favorite books when I read it in high school. For me, Frankenstein's monster was the ultimate robot...
...robots do not really look like Frankenstein's monster, or like Artoo Deetoo in Star Wars, but rather like a row of giant birds...
Mary Shelley's succulent description of Victor Frankenstein's moment of triumph-a moment that Hollywood traditionally illustrated with flashes of lightning and showers of sparks-dramatizes one of the most fundamental metaphors in mythology: the creation of an artificial man. It is an idea that can be traced back to the folklore of man's own creation. According to Greek legend, the first humans were robots formed out of clay by the Titan Prometheus...
...Oedipal struggle, but a feminist one. The two women--sweet, passive Snow White, and the evil, active Queen are simply mirror images of each other, and the battle is not to win the man but to reconcile the two sides of the feminine psyche. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written when she was pregnant (an almost continuous state for her from ages 17 to 21), is put in the context of responding to Milton's Paradise Lost, dealing with his concept of the "Monstrous Eve" which Virginia Woolf (who pops up frequently in this text) called "Milton's Bogey...
...Like Frankenstein's creation and Quasimodo, or any monster worth his salt, Merrick is doomed. But there are no rampaging townspeople screaming for the creature's blood, no corny "'Twas beauty killed the beast" tag line. Elephant Man ends in sadness, but also on a peculiar, vaguely cathartic note. Lynch has made the ultimate monster movie, dark, bizarre, and oddly affecting...