A Postmodern Shell Game
To have the likes of Goethe refer to your only published work as the greatest Lord Byron ever produced would be enough to lead anyone to suicide. “Poor Polidori,” as Byron is supposed to have said upon hearing the news.
If you have seen ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ you’ll recognize the name.
Dr. John Polidori, 1795-1821, was present that night in 1816 when Lord Byron suggested the writing of ghost stories, inspiring Mary Shelley’s writing of ‘Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus’. Polidori wrote ‘The Vampyre’, which was later published with Byron’s name attached. Goethe’s alleged remarks can only serve to add insult to injury. (cf. ‘The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire’) Little wonder then that Polidori committed suicide at the age of 25.
Imagine how he would feel if he were somehow to discover that after his work was misappropriated and that recognition for the creation of the modern vampire lies elsewhere in the popular imagination, the X Files, in a fit of postmodern self-indulgence, attaches his name to someone else’s creation! History just has not been very kind to Dr. John Polidori.
Mind you, if ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ is anything to go by, history has been none too kind to Mary Shelley either. Imagine having a story that was meant to ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror,’ reduced to a jolly jape with a serial rapist!
Shelley’s novel is one that can be read in any number of ways. Claiming a definitive reading of the novel is likely as foolish as the many attempts to film versions of it. I agree with Chris Carter that James Whales’ 1931 version is probably closer in spirit, if not in imagining the creature, but there have been few others interpretations worthy of the novel - including, unfortunately, ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’. Though it is not as dire as Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (1994) – which is anything but.
I am entirely without comprehension as to the purpose of this episode. I am also not entirely sure in what way it is ‘postmodern’. Oh, wait! Mulder calls for the writer and has the ending changed – is that it?
Or is it the fact that, in a modernist text, a serial rapist would be seen to be just as bad a person as a mad scientist who commits patricide? Whereas in a postmodernist text, the imposition of the male upon the subdued female is just another boundary for which we need have no respect. Worryingly, it does seem to be a position adopted by the writers of the X Files, what with ‘Small Potatoes’ and now ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’.
It is no small matter to take a classic text and transform it beyond recognition. The postmodernist, especially those of a more poststructuralist persuasion, will argue that the actual author is irrelevant to the meaning of a text, as did Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ and Michel Foucault in ‘What is an Author?’ If that be the case, then the voice of the 18 year old Mary Shelley, a young woman writing in the early years of the Nineteenth Century is silenced and instead of hearing what she has to say about the abomination of male generative creation, in which the female is deprived of her key participative role, goes unheeded. And more. The very thing she censured deforms her text, making of it the very creature that should never have been. Frankenstein’s creature is monstrous because it was born from the rape and abuse of nature; it could never be anything other than what it was.
With this episode, Chris Carter, in effect, turns Shelley’s novel on its head. When Jerry Springer asks the mothers if it is hard to love these babies, Shaineh replies, “What’s not to love?”
Victor Frankenstein’s desecration of the feminine brought forth a monster; Carter’s brings forth babies to be loved.
Where Shelley would warn of the dangers of science unchecked, Carter seems to be deriding the idea and usurping the role of woman.
If you have seen ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ you’ll recognize the name.
Dr. John Polidori, 1795-1821, was present that night in 1816 when Lord Byron suggested the writing of ghost stories, inspiring Mary Shelley’s writing of ‘Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus’. Polidori wrote ‘The Vampyre’, which was later published with Byron’s name attached. Goethe’s alleged remarks can only serve to add insult to injury. (cf. ‘The Poet, the Physician and the Birth of the Modern Vampire’) Little wonder then that Polidori committed suicide at the age of 25.
Imagine how he would feel if he were somehow to discover that after his work was misappropriated and that recognition for the creation of the modern vampire lies elsewhere in the popular imagination, the X Files, in a fit of postmodern self-indulgence, attaches his name to someone else’s creation! History just has not been very kind to Dr. John Polidori.
Mind you, if ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’ is anything to go by, history has been none too kind to Mary Shelley either. Imagine having a story that was meant to ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror,’ reduced to a jolly jape with a serial rapist!
Shelley’s novel is one that can be read in any number of ways. Claiming a definitive reading of the novel is likely as foolish as the many attempts to film versions of it. I agree with Chris Carter that James Whales’ 1931 version is probably closer in spirit, if not in imagining the creature, but there have been few others interpretations worthy of the novel - including, unfortunately, ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’. Though it is not as dire as Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (1994) – which is anything but.
I am entirely without comprehension as to the purpose of this episode. I am also not entirely sure in what way it is ‘postmodern’. Oh, wait! Mulder calls for the writer and has the ending changed – is that it?
Or is it the fact that, in a modernist text, a serial rapist would be seen to be just as bad a person as a mad scientist who commits patricide? Whereas in a postmodernist text, the imposition of the male upon the subdued female is just another boundary for which we need have no respect. Worryingly, it does seem to be a position adopted by the writers of the X Files, what with ‘Small Potatoes’ and now ‘The Post-Modern Prometheus’.
It is no small matter to take a classic text and transform it beyond recognition. The postmodernist, especially those of a more poststructuralist persuasion, will argue that the actual author is irrelevant to the meaning of a text, as did Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ and Michel Foucault in ‘What is an Author?’ If that be the case, then the voice of the 18 year old Mary Shelley, a young woman writing in the early years of the Nineteenth Century is silenced and instead of hearing what she has to say about the abomination of male generative creation, in which the female is deprived of her key participative role, goes unheeded. And more. The very thing she censured deforms her text, making of it the very creature that should never have been. Frankenstein’s creature is monstrous because it was born from the rape and abuse of nature; it could never be anything other than what it was.
With this episode, Chris Carter, in effect, turns Shelley’s novel on its head. When Jerry Springer asks the mothers if it is hard to love these babies, Shaineh replies, “What’s not to love?”
Victor Frankenstein’s desecration of the feminine brought forth a monster; Carter’s brings forth babies to be loved.
Where Shelley would warn of the dangers of science unchecked, Carter seems to be deriding the idea and usurping the role of woman.
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