Frankenstein (1910)

Recollection on the beginnings of my self-archive and film watching

After the tragedy at the beginning of my life and at the end of my creator’s light, I stayed in the great expanse of the sea as a bag of parts, assembled into the image of a man. A man I could never be. At times it had felt like I had made my way to an after life unknown even by man. Days and years of floating through the Atlantic, unmoored by the winds and storms and other creatures swimming and snatching their next meal right next to me. I had no want, I had no need. Despite how I reminisce of this time with sorrow and pity, I cannot lie to you now and write that I did not feel a twinge of relief as I landed on the beaches of the first city I ventured in the new world—Boston, Massachusetts. 

I first skimmed the edges of the city like a scared animal, waiting to see if the human would be kind or cruel in temper. As I kept tip-toeing, it was clear, despite the lighted streets at night, there was a comfortable darkness a creature of my configuration could thrive in with the right coat and accessories and vigilant stride. I was a trickster in a sense, but unlike Puck, I kept quiet with no plan of play as I slipped in and out of the crowds, clinging to walls and alleyways. I slouched in areas I knew I would least draw attention, leading me directly to the burgeoning allure of the Star Theater in Scollay Square.

I had seen people outside buying their tickets, so I followed suit on the days I had scrapped enough loose coins, always avoiding meeting the eyes of the worker. The yellow hue marks me as other. Good news readers, city-dwellers have never much cared about eye contact. The first time I went to a showing I felt a thrill like I had succeeded in masquerading as a man, a man with the leisure of attending a motion picture. I sat in the back as the black box changed from quiet darkness to the churn of the celluloid, and oh, how I enjoyed the whirl of the film behind me and the hum of the images as they flicked from one scene to the next in front of me. I almost did not care what the show was about because I sat there just for the wonder of watching lives outside of peering into the windows of families I could never have, and beyond the cautious shifting on the cobblestones of Boston. The light bringing life to the dark screen almost made me forget my history, and the experience almost made me think I was granted a new welcome to this world.

It was Friday, March 18, 1910 and I had just seen the first film that brought me out of the lull of film sound and crackling surface. The Edison Studios, and yes, that Thomas Edison, had produced the film earlier in the year. In 14 minutes I was reminded of my horrid past depicted superficially on a storyboard. Frankenstein, my creator, is set up as a young man who goes to college and in a few years he discovers how to create life, how to create me. The day he decides to pull off his great experiment, he writes a letter to his sweetheart and is invigorated by the prospect of creating the perfect human being. Yet the title card reads, “INSTEAD OF A PERFECT HUMAN BEING, THE EVIL IN FRANKENSTEIN’S MIND CREATES A MONSTER.” Monster? I am the monster for looking the way I do? Or is there more? What makes me inherently evil?

I keep myself from gasping as the next scene shows Frankenstein concocting like a witch, not a scientist, a corpse out of nothing into being. I learned later that the studio reversed the filming of the burning of a corpse to give the illusion of matter forming from the waves of fume and fire. And Frankenstein was horrified, so much so that he went running from the horrid image of the monster. Oh, and there I was, huge in every sense of the word and disheveled. I almost did not want to continue watching, but the irony was that I stayed and watched as the monster on the screen followed Frankenstein home, and for the first time saw himself in the mirror, aghast at his horrid appearance. I was the one seeing myself in a distorted mirror, biting my tongue in the crowd wanting to clarify, wanting to scream, wanting to set the record straight. Despite the monster’s interferences, Frankenstein finds solace in his sweetheart and eventually marries her. As the monster tries to throw a wrench into their affairs, the end shows a sequence of Frankenstein seeing the monster through an opening, ready to confront him until the image switches into Frankenstein standing in front of a mirror. The monster was always himself, the evil part of his mind, his appendage of mischief. Bollocks.

I left the theater enraged. I was not just a figment. I was real, I was here, and despite my decades out in sea, the light in me has not extinguished. I dug around trash, finding scraps of newspaper. I then set a small fire underneath a brown bag, careful to not set it ablaze but just enough for the flames to coat the lining black which I scraped with a knife down to a nice pigment-substitute for me to start my first pages of what I had just watched. The pages that I have modified here in text form. Before the computer, these were my tools. Welcome to my world as written by me.