Over the Halloween season I treated myself to a little film called Frankenhooker (1990). I'm a sucker for the horror-comedy genre and it had been on my too-watch list for far too long. The plot of the film is relatively simple, an amateur scientist accidentally kills his wife via remote control lawnmower and rebuilds her piece by piece using the body parts of New York prostitutes that explode from smoking his "super crack". Simple. As odd as the film is, I think there's a really interesting literary motif in there of the beloved corpse.
This idea goes back far. You can find tales of people trying to resurrect dead loved ones all over mythology and the idea that Frankenstein created his monster out of a level of homoerotic desire is also long standing. I think the film Swiss Army Man (2016) really plays with this motif too. Throughout the film our two leads, Hank played by Paul Dano and Manny a corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe, form a bond. Whether or not that bond is romantic can be up to interpretation but there is certainly a love shared between the two. That love brings Manny back from just a corpse but it also brings Hank back to life in a way as well. Not just bringing him back into society, but also making himself a more complete person. The film does literally begin with Hank hanging from a rope after all, and ends with Hank fighting for his life against a bear.
There is an affirmation of life found in loving the dead. An almost paradoxical symbiosis between the monster and creator. In an odd way, both Swiss Army Man and Frankenhooker invert the narrative of Mary Shelley's classic. The creators in these stories care for their monsters, and something better can come in the future because of it.
"There is an affirmation of life found in loving the dead." Great insight and I see a connection to SAM!
ReplyDelete