ABSTRACT
IN UNIVERSAL PICTURES' 1931 film Frankenstein, the creature, outfitted with a brain that is sadly abnormal, can manage only rather poindess bestial (or motorcycle) noises. Meanwhile, his creator is gabbling on with manic aplomb, spilling even the secret of his resuscitating science (a ray in the spectrum beyond ultra-violet) and letting us know that, however questionable his control over his offspring, he is never at a loss for words, and good ones, too. That's quite a switch from the version in Mary Shelley's novel, where the self-educated creature has made himself into a Demosthenes/Joseph Goebbels figure whose dangerous fluency can very nearly neutralize the senses and trap one within its eloquence. At least that's his creator's view of the matter, a view we may suspect a little, given that Victor Frankenstein is no master of the media himself. Sour grapes? Victor's own mumblings are comprised of stock phrases, wild inclusive adjectives, and verbal equivalents of quitting the game altogether: "words cannot express," "I cannot describe," "inexpressible pleasures," "unspeakable rages." He's the editor, after all, with an authority over the words that's hard to beat; so when we find him throwing in the towel with such phrases as "No word, no expression could body forth . . .", we may just sneer. The creature, after all, locates those bodying-forth expressions readily enough.
