What the heck is Tannhauser’s Gate?

The very first time I saw Blade Runner it turned out to be a whole drag. Nevertheless, maybe because Harrison Ford was starring or just because I expected lightsabers to appear from those unconventional umbrella sticks, I resisted until the irresistible ending to discover inside me a dispairing feeling of having failed to appreciate a work of art and a philosophical answer to many of my deep questions.

Perhaps I was too young to reckon the film in its entire value. It was the year 1982 when the movie was released, therefore I must have watched it on TV by 1984 or so. Eleven years old is not, I’m afraid, the best age to see and understand such a complex narrative.

In any case, being much older now, I still think Blade Runner is a descriptive work where almost nothing happens –with the exception of brief action scenes– whose aesthetics is inherited from Metropolis to Star Wars through Star Trek and all the big hits of the science-fiction genre. It lacks the narrative rhythm one would expect from a great futuristic swashbuckling soap opera –and don’t get me wrong, I love Once upon a time in the West, the paradigm of slow motion spaghetti– or the plain dichotomy between good and evil.

In a sense, Blade Runner is a perverted version of Star Wars. Just from the title the audience has a vague notion of the pure heroic main character from George Lucas’s masterpiece, Luke Skywalker. Unlike the Jedi knight, who walks through the big starred black, Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard rushes next to the precipice instead. The last hope Ford represents is covered with a mantle of antiheroism, and brilliant lights and neons appear in Ridley Scott’s film with a layer of filth while the acid rain pervades everything. Characters are ambiguous to death and the pace slows down to film noir detail. Blade Runner is not a sci-fi movie; it’s a hard-boiled detective plot with a voice-over, lights all around and Vangelis soundtrack to add some solemnity.

But it’s not the huge reminiscences of a distorted galaxy far, far away, or the distopian reminder of an Earth phagocyted by its human inhabitants what trapped me forever. It was, like to the average spectator, the ultimate verses from a superb Rutger Hauer / Roy Batty, a soliloquy worthy of the best Shakespeare, an epitaph of a mysterious eternity just scarcely glimpsed.

Any half devotee of Blade Runner would recited the quote parrot-fashion, but for those not so freak so as to remember every single comma, let’s copy and paste them from wikipedia:

“I've... seen things... you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate... All those... moments... will be lost, in time, like tears... in... rain. Time... to die.”

These words were not genuine from Hauer; at least, not entirely. He adapted the original script cutting off some redundant and not very related-to-the-topic depictions. The result is, anyway, incontestable. Maybe because of the things they avoid to say rather than what they evoke.

I don’t know you, but I, when hearing those definite regrets, thought of an unseen world of wonder, of pieces to fit in a personal puzzle, of philosophical questions and their impossible answers solved right before me. I had heard of Tannhauser before. It was a blatant double-headed long-tusked imitation of Alien, the eighth passenger on the windowsill of a god-knows-what in the inside of a picture card album. The info was clumpsily developed from Ridley Scott’s film’s Roy Batty’s allusion, but to a child it proved to be imagination-inspiring.

I have sought Tannhauser in many other occasions, reaching nowhere. I have heard of Wagner’s opera but I resist to admit there’s nothing else but a powerful knight or a German poet. If we recall our ancient dreams and desires up to the point of believing them true above the real thing, Tannhauser must be a sort of sacred guardian, whatever extraterrestrial it may be, who prevents mortals to discover the truth beyond the eternal questions of the human existence: Is there anything else? Are we alone in the universe? Is death the end or just a deceiving starting point to infinite worlds, strange beings, wonders we never dare to dream of? Is life a motorway to disappointment? Can imagination prove stronger than sore truth?

Showing more than some verses of an unbound unreality could have been disastrous por the success of the film as a cult movie, since it didn’t earn much in the ticket office, but every fan of Blade Runner is still waiting for something going far beyond Rutger Hauer chant to impossible galaxies, unbelievable creatures and mystic adventures where philosophy would meet for sure the limits of mankind’s plenitude.

As U2 said once and repeat every gig, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, but Blade Runner showed me –as if it were Lancelot of the Lake glimpsing an existentialist Holy Grail– a flash of eternal wisdom in the shadows of our own  essence. Perhaps we poor humans are not ready for more.

Lone Ranger or the rebirth of Jack Sparrow

One of the most dangerous things that may happen to a consummate film star is that the actor persona devours the movie character. Thus, never expect Humphrey Bogart to behave weakly or Clint Eastwood to solve trouble by means of accurate, convincing words. The same occurs with Johnny Depp. You may like him or not, but he never deceives anybody. Either directed by Tim Burton or by any other director, Johnny will always be the same funny guy on the verge of madness, taking himself not very seriously –actually, not seriously at all–, showing a huge range of soft, mild, even affectionate good manners and a pinch of idle extravagance.

 For this reason it was not surprising that Tonto, the loyal and supporting native American who finds a more dead-than-alive John Reid and save his life as the ranger had previously preserved his –according to the 80’s film, from which this movie is clearly a sort of remake–, from the very beginning overlaps and overshadows the title character who, by the way, is much duller and softer.

But we were highly warned. A production coming from Disney couldn’t be prone to the free exaltation of violence or the unreasoned revenge of the reflexive distric attorney, reconverted for the occasion in The Lone Ranger, the only survivor of a massacre of lawmen by the ruthless Butch Cavendish. Instead of highlighting the heroic abilities of the outlawed ranger, the studio prefers not to take the film very seriously, and gives Depp carte blanche to repeat all the tics and eccentricities of Jack Sparrow, including a pervading inofensive insanity, a relaxed sense of absurd humour and neverending remarks for every rough situation. Armie Hammer does his best as the ranger, and he’s not bad on his role, but audience and script are on Johnny’s side.

Apart from that naive comical tone that spoils more than improves the film, the length is excessive and the rhythm uneven. Often, accelerated action takes us from one place to another without much sense and other times the movie hungs around interminable reports about the extermination of ethnic tribes, the coming of the railroad to the West or the exploitation of Chinese slaves in the construction of the necessary network.

Nevertheless, the movie has good points, as well. Action scenes are devilishly fun, especially those that occur around the trains, the plot is rarely consistent but works and the general feeling that remains after the final credits is one of high optimism and faith in mankind. Once more, Rossini’s William Tell Overture fills the critical stills with adventure and nostalgic heroism.

Finally, the film doesn’t forget to pay a straightforward homage to some of the great themes, directors and movies of the genre: John Ford, the railroad, Anthony Mann, the confrontation of indians vs colonists, the all-American noble cowboy, as opposed to the crepuscular spaghetti antihero... even to Lucky Luke through the weird occurrencies of Silver, the white horse, which resembles clearly to Jolly Jumper at his best. Another scene is directly inherited from Once Upon a Time in the West, when silence fills the air and something is going to happen while the character is drinking from the well and startled birds flutter around.

The film deserves to be watched, but without too many pretentions. Just to have a good time and remember the old good times of westerns. To expect something else from this product would be an unforgivable error and an exercise of avoidable disappointment. Next try leave Disney and Depp at home and harden the tone. Maybe it flops the same but at least it will have cost much less bucks.

The three musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas

Few books have been so widely adapted to films as this masterpiece of cloak and dagger, doubtless the most famous from Dumas, apart from The count of Montecristo, which will probably rank second in his repertoire.

What the average person has got in mind is the popular history revisited over and over again in more than 30 or 40 films. Both original novels –for The three musketeers is only the first and best-known part of a whole trilogy– and subsequent film versions have in common the body of the plot, although it is only the first big adventure of D’Artagnan –that is, the one of Buckinghman’s diamond studs delivery– which persistently appears movie after movie.

An aspect rarely neglected in the film versions that reflects well the feeling of displacement is the arrival of a provincial D’Artganan at the city of Paris, yet a rushing metropoli up to that epoch, being this foreigner’s solitude a sensation overrepeated a thousand times here and there. But the aparent naivety of the young would-be musketter is not so real in the novel, for the Gascon is brave and resolute and, although not familiar to the customs of the Court, determined in his matters and soon affairs of other kind.

Much of the plot is ruled through luck and coincidence, being this way sometimes difficult to believe, but in general facts are fisible and, as we will know much later, logical under the eyes of the Big Brother of the era, Monsieur Cardinal Richelieu, the baddie behind the scenes. And the ending of the book seems solved sort of hastily. Milady Clarick’s perfidy has no limits, we all know that, but we don’t need five chapters to get convinced of that, nor did por Felton, the integral puritan corrupted by her beauty and manipulation into assassinating the Duke of Buckinham and freeing her at the same blow.

And the execution of the Countess de la Fere, aka Milady, whereas essential to the plot, has nothinh heroic on it so it’s frequently excluded in filmed versions. As for the men of Meung, his apparitions are crucial and very mysterious, but the long-awaited duel with the main character actually necer takes place in the novel, and is only referred to in the epilogue.

The book hooks you and ask for more pages to devour, but I don’t think I will take the second part Twenty years later. For now I have had enough of cloak and dagger stuff. Maybe in 2033.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering heights was written and published in 1847 by Ellis Bell, the pseudonym of Emily Bronte and, although it did not get much success in those days, the book gradually gained favourable critiques and generalized admiration until being considered as one of the peaks of the English literature. Far from falling into the oblivion, its main themes are nowadays fresher and more enrapturing than ever. The strange structure of the novel and its unique treatment of characters and facts among the Victorian works make Wuthering Heights even rarer and unmistakeable. Besides, subsequent film adaptations have contributed to increase considerably its fame, though losing part of its intensity and natural beauty.
Emily Bronte combined the poetical description of her Yorkshire moors with the harsh and vigorous portrait of her deep characters. Their strong feelings, absurd ambiguity and passionate determination make them more believable than any real person of the Victorian age. And the continuous transgression of moral rules and civic behaviour gives accurate account of the nineteenth century society and its values.
The story is centred around a well-off family and their tense relation, especially the children, with Heathcliff, an orphan brought by the head of the household. Although Catherine, surpassed the first fit of jealousy, gets on with him, her brother Hindley despises Heathcliff and regards him as a rival for his properties, facilities and especially relatives´ affection. Humiliated over and over again, Heathcliff leaves an actual enemy and an unreachable lover and escapes to a better life only to come back and take excessive revenge upon the two brothers. After an existence full of hatred and grief, and having caused the same to all the family on purpose, Heathcliff finds peace only in death. The happy ending, however, is fulfilled by the descendants of Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw.
The structural division of chapters obeys to crucial scenes and relevant episodes and can embrace a few moments or several days or weeks. Although there are thirty-four chapters the chronological order is not pursued. The description of facts is related by a number or narrators, sometimes one into the narration of another, by means of oral speech or through letters or diaries. So, the external narrator is Mr. Lockwood, who visits Wuthering Heights and becomes intrigued by the inhospitality of their inhabitants and the statements of Catherine Heathcliff Linton Earnshaw´s improvised diary. Then the complete plot from the beginning to the end is narrated by Ellen Dean, the former nurse of Catherine and actual witness of all the facts concerning Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in the last forty years. Mrs. Dean compilates all the information through own observation and confidences from Heathcliff, Catherine, Isabella, Zillah and Miss Cathy.
The relationships between characters are always marked by triangular associations here and there: The first triangle is composed of Hindley, Catherine and Heathcliff. The atmosphere is of wild beauty and fierce rejection. Another one is formed by Isabella, Edgar and Catherine, where extreme refinement and whimful life cover the period. Other triangular relations are Edgar-Heathcliff-Catherine, marked by tender or wild love, and Isabella-Hindley-Heathcliff, condensed in hatred and bitterness.
The second generation with Linton, Miss Cathy and Hareton, and the surviving Edgar and the imperturbable Heathcliff are again doomed with triangular coexistence with one –or two- disturbing member playing havoc. Although generally let behind the main action, Nelly Dean configurates the most lovely triangle with Edgar and Miss Cathy. Others, like Linton-Miss Cathy-Hareton´s, are full of grief and desperation. The most evil one consists of Heathcliff-Miss Cathy-Linton, where fear, repulsion, illness, manipulation and grief embody the scene. The last triangular relationship oozes hope: a death-waiting Heathcliff stares calmly at Catherine´s spirit forgetting all the undergone sufferings while Hareton gains knowledge to be enough for Cathy and she loves him beyond his rude appearance and modals. Other minor social triangles can be established, but what is really remarkable is the position of Nelly witnessing and sometimes softening the awkward feelings between the inhabitants of both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights.
The central character of the novel is Heathcliff. Not by chance he appears first on the fifth line of the book and dies two pages before the end. The orphan embodies all the truly passions of human nature in a savage mood, approaching raw goodness and uprightness and incomprehensibly diabolical evil and cold rage later. The introduction of Heathcliff at the Heights is significant and fateful: His appearance implies the loss of Hindley and Catherine presents –a fiddle and a whip- and symbolizes future usurpation and unconcious destruction. Although his physical and psychical strengh are never to abandon him, nobility and kindness will not long so far. As a child, Heathcliff is cold, insensible and becomes the favourite of Old Mr. Earnshaw, maybe in resemblance with his own severity.
Heathcliff´s increasing hatred against Hindley grows from humiliation and poverty and is legitimate because he doesn´t lose his sense of justice. The real wound and treason start with Catherine´s silliness and frivolity since she neglects a heartrending passion to avoid a social degradation. This and a twist of fate make facts irreversible: The union of Catherine and Heathcliff is no more possible and the lad quits Wuthering Heights as a disillusioned boy only to return from an internal hell as a vindictive man. His overwhelming presence gains with adulthood supported in a wealthy impression, exquisite correctness and cold education. But this external improvement only conceals spiritual depravation.
Heathcliff´s relationship with Catherine after her marriage is bitter and full of reproaches. She becomes ruined by present dullness and her own guilty. He condemns her to perpetual sorrow and directly provokes her mental deterioration through his harsh sincerity. But even after her death does Heathcliff pursue the wretch of both Lintons and Earnshaws. On page 188, chapter XXI (Penguin Books) the man makes a declaration of facts and intentions so brutal and savage that the reader can’t less than be scandalized. If the evil of Heathcliff is reduced to excessive rancour and contemptuous pride at the beginning, he will develop new and disgusting devices to spread out his bitterness such as marrying a woman whom he doesn’t love –Isabella-, corrupting Hareton, threatening Linton, kidnapping Ellen Dean, forcing Miss Cathy to an unwanted marriage, beating Hindley or bribing the lawyer.
Special cruelty is shown in Linton’s approach. Heathcliff hates his son because of his physical weakness and for being the offspring of Isabella. And Linton, educated in manipulation and rejection, inherits his father’s vileness.
Heathcliff´s growing villainy reaches his peak quite at the end of the novel, when he scorns Linton, Edgar and Cathy, or when out of any sacred respect desecrates the dead –like in Poe’s tales- just to glimpse Catherine again twenty years later.
The most dramatic change in his behaviour takes place just after, when, owner of the Heights and the Grange but weary of living with Hareton and Cathy, he remains absent and waits for something to happen. Only then the reader realizes all the frustrated love for Catherine and the torture he has been suffering during her absence. The villain then humanizes substituting evil for apparent madness: He starts watching Catherine’s ghost -a Shakespearean recurrent topic in Macbeth or Hamlet- and expecting his time to come. Death in Heathcliff´s heart is a real liberation from perpetual agony, hatred, pain, evil and remorse.
The second most important character of the book –letting aside Nelly’s omnipresence- dies in the middle of the plot. Catherine Linton leaves an air of unfulfilment and one feels that she is a better person than she appears. But most of her qualities -except her love for Heathcliff- remain in her daughter. Her reincarnation provides her a new opportunity to fight for happiness. When alive, Catherine Earnshaw spoils her youth in search of superficiality. She finds it fully straight. Notwithstanding, other high values conquers Heathcliff, like savage passion, a free spirit, joyous personality or social class unconsciousness. The latter is not going to last for long as long as her convalescence at Thrushcross Grange separates clearly their two social worlds: her own (upper class) and that of Heathcliff (lower class). Their love failure is the triumph of social conventions against that new spirit of equality. But this schism is not really the victory of class feelings, but the surrender of her wild spirit to a new life of comfort and boring vacuity.
After marrying Edgar Linton, Catherine shows known and new defects beyond patience: She exhibits mischief, insolence, victim mentality, egotism, manipulation and evil. She gets to the point of overacting her own death parody. Her whimful character and the contempt she feels for Edgar and the remorse for Heathcliff lead her to a genuine serious illness. Catherine Linton dies giving birth to Miss Cathy Linton, who represents herself in a resume, a second opportunity.
Hindley Earnshaw represents malice and cowardliness. He humiliates Heathcliff because he fears the orphan child. He is afraid of losing his father’s affection, his convenient position, his social status and money. And Hindley knows Heathcliff is much better, stronger and more righteous. His biased treatment will cause Heathcliff to escape, survive and come back to take fair revenge. The fact is that his revenge turns to be too excessive, too unfair.
Just as Hindley stands for the upper class evil, Edgar becomes the upper class kindness. He bears Catherine like a saint, brings up Miss Cathy properly and try to keep his nephew Linton with him. His sister Isabella possesses similar characteristics although her degree of emptiness is higher. She falls in disgrace when mistakenly marries Heathcliff.
Hareton is the only character in frequent contact with Heathcliff that doesn’t get corrupted. He survives in a rude insignificance far from the wretch of his father or the maliciousness of Mr. Heathcliff. His future prosperity is miraculous and unimaginable. He’s totally opposite to his father: Strong, pure, uneducated, healthy and good. He resembles an untreasoned Heathcliff and their relationship is relatively cordial.
Unlike his noble cousin, Linton suffers physically the scars of their parents rejection and grief. And his unhealthy body will soon put on service to a manipulating mind. Linton is a prolongation of his father’s contempt. He stands for the personification of late Heathcliff, Hindley Earnshaw and Isabella Linton: evil behaviour, corrupted soul and fragile constitution. His indicative disgrace is an inevitable punishment to his fear and weakness.
Miss Cathy is the aforementioned last chance for Catherine to gain pardon and achieve true love. She isn´t able to rescue Linton from his father’s diabolical influence, but manages to cast her wild passion for life towards much worthy people like her father or Hareton. However, her first years are full of comfort and wealth, which develop in Cathy a taste for disobedience and lack of satisfaction. Her redemption is possible only when she is deprived of her easy life and relaxing circumstances. The catharsis she suffers includes other major sacrifices like her forced wedding, Edgar’s death or her inheritance loss in favour of Heathcliff. And through pain and humiliation Miss Cathy learns to value underclass people and little things. These two redeeming factors are the key to Hareton and to happiness. And Hareton answers like a pure Heathcliff without vindictive longings. All the while, Catherine and her beloved Heathcliff find their long awaited love after death.
More than one hundred fifty years after its publication, Wuthering Heights remains as one of the most significant examples of sick love and fatality through the constrictions of social inscrutability. Some critics have seen in it an eternal fight between the forces of nature and man, between good and evil, between body and soul. In any case, Wuthering Heights stays as a novel of great beauty and devastating intensity.

Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus

Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus

All the great themes and values of romanticism are present in this moving, astonishing novel, the masterpiece of Mary Shelley, who wrote it by chance in response to a peculiar bet with her husband Percy Bysshee Shelley and Lord Byron. It was only to be a ghost story to liven the nights up there in Switzerland, but Percy encouraged Mary to develop so interesting a plot.
Technically the novel lacks omniscient narrator and displays little dialogue, linking the structure by means of addressed letters and first-hand narrations where extensive monologues mingle with brief, intense verbal interaction. Thus, the book starts right at the end of the facts with an almost-dying Victor Frankenstein saved from the glacial freezing by a vessel in search of discovery and conquest. Then the events reaching this point are described in several letters by the captain to a beloved sister, reproducing Frankenstein’s narration, which is divided into chapters. Some chapters in turn quote monster’s words or other people’s narrative, so that the same actions are sometimes told from different angles depending on the narrator. All this puzzle of narration within narration weaves a coherent web where the story reveals its main aspects and highlights.
The atmosphere of strength, despair, horror and beauty owes much of its veracity to the spirit of romanticism that impregnates every gust of air throughout the novel. Shelley was strongly influenced by the Romantic Movement. Not in vain Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the ancient mariner is referred to twice. The name of William Wordsworth is also mentioned once, which proved how interested the author was in the spirit of the age.
The story in itself is an inverted journey from desperation to initial happiness led to final misfortune. It has also to do with nature, ambition, solitude, suffering, frustration, family, vengeance, violence and guilt. Victor Frankenstein is a young student educated in a wealthy and happy family, with an ambitious desire for knowledge sharpened by the premature death of his blissful mother. From this moment, victory upon death is the only obsession of Frankenstein and, prompted by an excessive eagerness for wisdom, exceeds every legal and moral limit. Feeling predestined to overpass the natural flow of death, Victor embarks himself in the search of restoration of life, defying natural laws and the designs of God. From the very moment he succeeds things start going wrong, and they gradually only change to worse.
The doom of Frankenstein is based on two unique but decisive mistaken actions. The first wrong decision, and the origin of all wretchedness is the creation of the monster and his subsequent “birth”. The second mistake doesn’t happen far in time since occurs just after the awakening of the giant. And the point is that, right after seeing his task accomplished, Victor feels a profound repulsion towards his creature and escapes from him, leaving a potential superhuman alone, with no moral values, no family, no world knowledge, no past and no future at all, just disconcerting present. The scientist fails because his fears and displeasures beat him, and he doesn’t act in line with his principles. He does something wrong first, and doesn’t come to terms with it later.
From this chapter on the narration is full of guilt and some demonstrations of nature broken in its most violent expression, which symbolizes the wrath of God at the daring of man. A parallelism may be established between God, who creates Nature, and Frankenstein, who creates evil. The creation of man acts badly, and so does nature in response during the break of the storm.
The account of the monster constitutes a genuine treaty of acquisition of a language by means of direct observation and no interaction at all. From this learning it also appears education of values, feelings and behaviour, again from the distance, only in theory. This (and his detestable physical look, of course) is the cause of his social failure. The acquisition of knowledge is an unhappy one since the monster discovers the beautiful aspects of life just by omission, longing them in his peeping of the happy neighbour family who share companion, conversation, food and affection. Once the wretch is aware of his situation another romantic theme arouses within his soul: frustration. An utter feeling of incapability to fulfil any pleasant wish apart from primary necessities such as food, rest, shelter. Therefore the creature turns to be the naive lament of a generation of discontent and disappointed intellectuals against progress, cold rationalism and mechanization, in constant search of beauty, passion, fulfilment and other lost higher feelings. It’s not strange that the monster is vegetarian and lives in a rather naturist way.
During his stay at the hovel, his feelings are noble and he behaves with kindness and good will. He provides wood for the family and receives unnoticed instruction in turn. But another dramatic decision, this time on the giant account, spoils everything again. The monster, now capable of deep rationalism and high emotions and full of kindness and good actions, tries to interact with the family, hoping that interior beauty will surpass external appearance. How mistaken! The reaction of the De Lacey family constitutes again a fierce criticism against the superfluous moral of the time and the bitter victory of social conventions upon deeper thinking and feeling.
From this time on the destiny of creator and monster begins to be alike. Deprived of his apparent family, who deject him, the wretch tries to deprive Victor of his own. His frustration leads to hatred, especially over that who created him and then escaped from his abhorrent creation.
The pilgrimage of the giant from Germany to Geneve is full of contradictory feelings. Frustration and compensation are mixed with hatred and vengeance, but all the sensations of the monster are covered with a mantle of despair. He commits another irreversible act - killing William – and makes things worse, although his dark side enjoys producing pain. The monster now takes refuge into the wild and snowy mountains of Switzerland, establishing a peculiar relation with them, especially with the coldness. And physically the monster, so many times described as strong but clumsy through biased horror films, is full of agility and superhuman capabilities. Wild nature constitutes the reign of the gigantic figure sharing all its features: solitude, wilderness, inhospitality, calm but with strokes of unbound violence. The great contrast appears with regard to beauty. Creation of man spoils creation of God when the monster breaks the beauty of the scenery by walking on it. He later on will perverted himself with the unfair use of manlike tools, like fire, the sledge or specially the gun and pistols with which he threatens poor country people.
When the wretched thing finds Victor both share grief and curse. The giant asks the doctor a half-satisfactory wish, to have a female companion who won’t deject him. Up to this point the creature shows resignation as he understands man will never accept him. But the request turns in menace just in case this will not fulfilled. And no matter what Victor makes, he will be forever doomed with a sense of inextinguishable guilt. Both man and creature start to infect each other with his personal sorrow: Victor suffers solitude and the giant undergoes the same culpability.
Three more relevant encounters are produced between creator and creation. The second happens when Frankenstein destroys the limbs of the potential female monster. Although the decision is correct it is too late and the monster curses him and his family. He doesn’t waste time and slaughters Clerval hastily. In the next meeting the wretch accomplishes his revenge murdering Elizabeth on their wedding-night. The last encounter is marked by the sorrow of the monster and the eternal rest of the daring creator.
The parallelism between the two main characters is complete at the end, when both look for the death of his antagonist, although Victor still searches to prevent mankind from that devil. He will fail, but the monster will die in proper time by his own determination without spreading more havoc. The roles of creator and creature are sometimes inverted. Frankenstein gave life to the monster but during the novel it is the wretch who controls life and death like an impassive God. He is omnipresent and appears always in the right moment. He has a supernatural supremacy of time and space. And the doctor becomes the punished son who has committed an abhorrent error. The giant represents both the imperfection and evil of man and the anger of a defied Lord.
Mary Shelley titled her work as Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus because she resumed the myth of the titan that created man and challenged Zeus by stealing the Fire of the Gods as a present for mankind. He was punished and chained to a Caucasus mountain where an eagle ate his liver everyday inflicting him an unbearable agony. Fire represented supreme intelligence and wisdom, that is why Doctor Victor Frankenstein shares with the titan the absolute knowledge to give life. In the Greek tradition Prometheus was liberated by Heracles and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein it is the wretched giant who frees Victor not from chains, but from painful life.
The myth of Prometheus is also renewed in Prometheus unbound, by Percy Bysshee Shelley, husband of Mary, who obviously highly influenced the creation of this novel of predestination, ambition, wilderness, solitude, guilt, nature and beautiful horror.