Suzy Weiss is in the field on a reporting mission—which you’ll hear all about in the very near future—so this week’s Second Thought is brought to you by Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield, who’s taking a tour through spooky season, beginning with a very modern, weirdly sexy adaptation of “Frankenstein.”
There’s an amazing moment in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein where the titular character—that is, the doctor, not the monster—realizes that, in his mad quest to defeat death through science, he failed to think certain things through. Like, say, the part where he is now responsible for the care and feeding of a large adult son made out of reanimated body parts.
“I never considered what would come after creation,” he says.
Not gonna lie, this is surely one of the more relatable parts of the entire Dr. Victor Frankenstein character arc: “I never considered what would come after creation” is more or less what I said to my husband after I’d spent the better part of an entire weekend building a Halloween-themed gingerbread house with an artisanal roof made of individually bedazzled candy corns. (In related news, I am not allowed to go on Pinterest anymore.) But when Victor, played by Oscar Isaac, utters that line, I couldn’t help noticing that he sounded less like a mad scientist, and more like a deadbeat dad confronting the consequences of a poorly thought-out ejaculation.
Which got me thinking: What if this iteration of Frankenstein tells us everything we need to know about the modern masculinity crisis? This would be in keeping with tradition: Every generation gets the Frankenstein it deserves.
