A detailed analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the film Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott for the elective Texts in Time.
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In the elective Texts in Time students are required to undertake a comparative study of texts and context. One pair of texts involves the Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the film Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott. The two texts explore common themes despite a varied treatment that results from the authors’ different contexts.
By examining Shelley’s historical context we can see many of the key concerns of her time reflected in Frankenstein.
Written during a time of great change and upheaval in Europe, it functions as a social commentary on the realities of the author’s context.
Humans will and should be punished for interfering with the natural order or trying to “play God”. Humanity cannot be replicated or improved by scientific knowledge without disastrous consequences.
Example:
Frankenstein represents humanity’s hubris and folly personified when he is horrified by his attempt to recreate human-life and punished for it by a life of misery (the creature kills his loved ones: William, Clerval, Elizabeth) and his own death due to exhaustion. “His limbs were nearly frozen and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition”.
Technique & Effect:
Shelley uses an intertextual reference in the novel’s title to characterise Frankenstein as “the modern Prometheus”. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the champion of mankind who stole fire from the gods and was punished for it with eternal agony (an eagle eating out his liver daily suggested nature was having its revenge for the disruption in the natural order). By drawing on this fable, Shelley takes on its moral to suggest when humans try to emulate the gods or disrupt the natural order, as Frankenstein does when he tried to create human life, they will be punished. Shelley gives the moral of her own story credence by drawing an allegorical legend, authoritative because of its longevity.
Example:
Frankenstein: “I ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge”.
Technique & Effect:
Shelley uses the technique of dramatic irony to highlight Frankenstein’s error in the acquisition of knowledge, as the reader is already aware from the start of the novel the failure of Frankenstein’s quest: “I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew”. She suggests that knowledge is dangerous and man cannot be trusted with too much power.
In line with the ideals of Romanticism, Shelley glorifies/idealises the natural environment and suggests its restorative power to humanity.
Example:
Frankenstein: “a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks … fills me with delight”, “the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man” and “it was a divine spring, and the season contributed greatly to my convalescence”.
Technique & Effect:
Shelley uses personification to imbue nature with the human characteristics of “a soul”, “the spirit” and the ability to engage in consciousness-driven actions such as “play”. This allows her to glorify nature as an all-powerful and eternal force with restorative powers. The religious connotations of the word “divine” suggest that nature is powerful and God-like.
Shelley critiques Enlightenment ideals of scientific rationalism and progress at all costs, instead suggest the value of tradition/nature.
Example:
Ernest (Frankenstein’s brother) is “full of activity and spirit”, “ looks upon study as an odious fetter; his time is spent in the open air”. Frankenstein: “often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation”. “It was a most beautiful season…but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature”
Technique & Effect:
Shelley characterises Ernest as representative of Romanticism and Frankenstein as representative of the Enlightenment. Shelley juxtaposes the two to highlight how their contrasting relationship with nature results in contrasting levels of personal well-being. Ernest is described in terms with positive connotations such as “spirit”, while Frankenstein is described in pejorative terms such as “loathing”. The juxtaposition allows Shelley to critique the Enlightenment and promote Romantic ideals.
Shelley rejects the Enlightenment understanding of an objective truth that can be determined through logical reasoning. Instead she embraces the subjective, experiential understanding of “truth” popular in Romanticism.
Example: |
“Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history; he … corrected and augmented them … ‘Since you have preserved my narration,’ said he, ‘I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity”. |
Technique & Effect: |
Shelley employs an epistolary novel to present multiple narratives with multiple viewpoints on the same events. The reader’s awareness that they are getting the 2nd or 3rd hand version of events allows Shelley to suggest that meaning is confused and there is no one single interpretation of events. Her rejection of the traditional narrative device of the omniscient narrator in favour of first person confessional documents, allows her to explore the emotional motivations of different characters. These multiple layers and retellings bring the Enlightenment’s objective understanding of “truth” into question. Shelley highlights that there is no one correct truth, but that truth is understood only through the subjective, personal and experiential. |
Scott grew up in the grim depressing industrial landscape of north-east England before moving to America. The 1980s were a time when many Americans feared there country was in a great decline.
Exploration of what makes us human and whether humanity can be replicated.
Example:
The replicants represent an attempt to recreate humanity. Roy: “we’re not computers Sebastian, we’re physical”
Technique & Effect:
By giving the replicants unique and distinctive identities and showing them demonstrate human emotions such as desire, love and hatred, Scott encourages us to emphathise with them as “human” victims.
Example:
Pris: “I think Sebastien, therefore I am”
Technique & Effect:
Scott blurs the boundaries between humanity and artificial humanity by characterising the replicants as “more human” than Deckard. Juxtaposing the replicants and Deckard highlights their hunger for life; “I want more life fucker, in contrast to his detached apathy. Pris’ intertextual reference to philosopher Descartes, “I think, therefore I am” allows Scott to suggest that she is a free-thinking, rational being, as human as anyone else.
In this dystopia, society is in demise. The future is depressing.
Example:
Bryant: “If you’re not cops you’re little people … no choice pal”.
Recurring search lights and shadowed bars across the characters faces.
Technique & Effect:
The repeated visual lighting technique is symbolic of a society under constant surveillance, the culmination of Freud’s super-panopticon. The lighting technique of shadowed bars across the characters faces suggests their free will has demised and they are imprisoned by the rules of their society.
When nature and the natural environment recede the consequences are dire and depressing.
Example:
“I’ve never seen a turtle before”.
“Of course it’s [the snake] not real”
The artificial owl “must be expensive”.
Technique & Effect:
The repetition of animals within the context being artificial and expensive highlights that nothing natural remains and the natural has been taken over by commerce. Scott uses the animals to symbolically represent the entirety of the natural landscape, suggesting it has entirely receded.
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