"I Had Turned Loose Into The World Depraved Wretch Whose Delight was in Carnage and Misery"

I read Frankenstein about 3 or 4 years ago, and was astonished the entire time I was reading it at how the common story that we think we know about Frankenstein is not even close to the novel. No creepy mountainside castle. No lightning bolts. No bolts in the neck, no flat head or clunky shoes, no grunting. In fact, in the novel, Frankenstein was a highly intelligent being who thought, felt, and had very insightful monologues about human behavior. And Victor Frankenstein never actually said the phrase "It's Alive!" in the novel. The novel is so much more about abomination for people who are different and hideous and the warnings about trying to play God. It really isn't a horror novel at all.

So this morning, we caught part of the 1931 version of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, and it seems as though a lot of the misconceptions of the Frankenstein story stemmed from this version. The makeup artist on the film, Jack P. Pierce, actually came up with many of the now iconic features and characteristics (as a neat trivia tidbit, the monster's make-up design is under copyright to Universal until 2026). But that story, altered initially the first time, perpetuated, with the real story being lost somewhere in pop culture.

It definitely made me wonder how many books that are turned into movies really get the storyline that different that it suddenly becomes another story altogether. Of course Hollywood is a different beast and artistic license must often be used to make an often multiple-hundred page book work appropriately in a 110 minute film (what can we say? Our attention spans leave a little something to be desired). But when does it get it so off, and when does a movie become so popular, that one truth replaces another?

I'll be curious to see how this stacks up with reading Heart of Darkness and then watching Apocalypse Now. Again, I've heard that Apocalypse Now is "based" on Heart of Darkness but applied to a different setting. So I wonder how many people might hear that, then see the movie and just kind of gloss over it, and then assume that Heart of Darkness is a novel about a US army crew traveling into the jungle of Cambodia during the Vietnam war to retrieve an insane Green Beret? And how does a movie like Tropic Thunder feed into the misconceptions even more - a movie within a movie, based on the actual making of another movie based on a book? How do you even know what the real story is after a while? Should be interesting to tease out...

Progress on Heart of Darkness: slow. I'm only a few pages into the first short story, "Youth". But I have some more quality airplane time in the upcoming weeks that should help with moving things along. It is 2 days after my 33rd birthday in fact.