Opinion: ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ is giving us a new kind of monster

Editor’s note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer living in Chicago. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinions on CNN.

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In Mary Shelley’s pioneering 1818 Gothic novel “Frankenstein,” obsessed scientist Victor Frankenstein decides to create life, typically the domain of women. Just as Shelley decided to create literary fiction, typically the domain of men at the time. The monster that Victor creates is a monster because it was brought to life by a man, just as the book was thought to be a monster because it was brought to life by a woman. Creation is uncontrollable, distorted, and unclassifiable. It continues to pop out of the gender grave that society is trying to fill it with.

Now, women are slowly starting to have more opportunities to direct films in Hollywood, which has long been an almost exclusively boys’ club. In that context, it’s no surprise that we’ve seen several more-or-less feminist remakes of Frankenstein’s story, including Lisa Frankenstein and last year’s Poor Things.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Thing was widely praised for its depiction of a reanimated woman who rebels against her creator in order to create herself. Zelda Williams’ new film Lisa Frankenstein, her directorial debut, makes some of the same points. But to its credit, the film depicts women gaining access to the means of creation as a more haphazard and bloody endeavour, gaining ambiguous and stitched powers. Along the way, you will be exposed to ugly swings, anger, and confusion.

The script, written by Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body), is set in 1989, and when the story begins, it seems like a pastiche of ’80s teen comedies. Lisa (Kathryn Newton) is a shy and traumatized teenage girl recovering from her mother’s death. Lisa is trying to navigate her father’s remarriage, her new school, and her evil and aggressively ordinary suburban stepmother (Carla Gugino). . But in search of her true solace, Lisa hangs out at her local cemetery and places her flowers on the grave of a sad, nameless bachelor (Cole Sprouse) who was hurt by her love.

It probably sounds like a teenage outcast story we’ve all heard before. However, things quickly take a turn. The sad bachelor’s grave was struck by lightning. Electricity revives him and he stumbles back, groaning into Lisa’s life as a lovesick zombie.

The monster bachelor is missing body parts: an ear and a hand. Lisa helps him find a replacement, sews it on, and turns them into living tissue (of sorts) by zapping the monster bachelor with a half-broken, sparking toffee tanning bed. . She creates fragmented monsters and her friends while simultaneously reinventing herself and embracing her inner goth, her inner hormone-driven teen, and her inner murderer.

This is the turning point between “Poor Things” and “Lisa Frankenstein.” Vera Baxter in “Poor Things” starts out as a clumsy and innocent girl, but over time her knowledge grows and her confidence grows. At the beginning of the film, she is a monster created by her surgeon and scientist father. She is a woman, after all. Lisa’s journey is not that simple. As the film progresses, despite Bella’s sexual explorations, she becomes a creator in a way she never really was. Lisa also becomes increasingly strange, and even more unstable. She breaks out of her shell and reveals her talent for planning destruction, her indifference to bloodshed, and her love for REO Speedwagon.

Alongside Lisa, the film itself teeters strangely from genre to genre, as if Williams were stitching together a hodgepodge of body parts with a stapler. In one flashback, we learn that Lisa’s mother died in an ax murder shortly after “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th.” Suddenly, a passerby enters the teen comedy and starts mowing down the scene. The film’s tone also shifts from awkward interpersonal humor to grotesque horror, with splashing bodily fluids and absurd castration fantasies.

These fantasies of castration, and the accompanying slow-motion, frenzied blood splatter, manifest as anti-patriarchal exhilaration. Lisa and Williams are building something new, absurd and brilliant, much like 19-year-old Mary Shelley, who was encouraged to write horror stories by Lord Byron many years ago. In that context, “Lisa Frankenstein” can be seen as a celebration of the monster made possible by a woman in the director’s chair. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn reimagines noir by reinterpreting the femme fatale. Celine Song’s “Past Lives” turns the rom-com inside out by acknowledging that a woman’s career and other ambitions sometimes, and legitimately, take precedence over romance.

Thanks to these films, especially Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie, it feels like we’ve reached a watershed moment for female filmmakers. But if you look at the actual numbers published in recent reports, that change is very slow. In 2007, a dismal 2.7% of the top 1,700 box-office films were directed by women. Things have gotten somewhat better since then. In 2020, her 15% of top films were directed by women. (The “Barbie” distributor and the UK/Irish distributor of “Saltburn” share a parent company with CNN.)

Still, the numbers are not impressive, especially for women of color, who directed just 2.7% of the most popular films in 2023. In fact, all women have actually lost ground over the past three years, directing just 12% of 2023’s top films. . That’s four times as many as 15 years ago. But it also means that men directed 88% of the most popular films last year. That’s embarrassing.

It’s also infuriating, and according to the movie, Lisa, Williams, and Cody are all suitably furious. This monster bachelorette is, in a sense, a fantasy of Lisa’s romance, but also of revenge for the misogynistic slasher-genre violence that killed her mother and the gendered expectations that created a limited role for her. It’s also a fantasy. She wants to build her self from more colorful and uglier parts. Instead, more than 200 years later, Mary Shelley still had no place in suburban high schools or most movie studios. Who can blame Lisa for wanting to walk around and break things?

“Lisa Frankenstein” is too gory and weird to capture the public imagination like “Barbie” or “Poor Things,” and even more so, to capture the public imagination like “Barbie” or “Poor Things.” I don’t think this applies to biopics of great men directed by men. But like Mary Shelley’s book, the grotesqueness of the film is what makes it so powerful and memorable. Women keep being told that it’s wrong to be creators or even want to be creators. So Lily decides to become the clumsy, patchy bag of violence, anger, lust, and imaginative hiccups stitched together that Mary was before her. Half of humanity, for the most part, is still not allowed to make movies in Hollywood. “Lisa Frankenstein” shows why it’s a loss for all of us. And Lisa is ready to dismantle the patriarchy to prove it.