The tender food of “Frankenstein”

Before he learns speech before he learns cruelty before he learns the terrible weight of a creator s indifference The Creature in Frankenstein learns hunger And then astonishingly he learns generosity Guillermo del Toro renders this with a small sunlit vision a hulking figure perched on a rooftop savoring a loaf left out for the spirit the villagers imagine him to be It s a fleeting tableau but it reveals the whole story even the preponderance forsaken creation reaches for connection the moment he s given something warm to hold in his hands I kept turning that scene over in my mind after I watched the film Del Toro s Frankenstein isn t a food movie by any stretch but the moments that lodged themselves in my memory all involved nourishment offered stolen shared withheld Food becomes a visual shorthand for connection a way of grounding an immortal creature to the earth and to the fragile frightened humans who move through it In a story built on hubris violence and scientific ambition it s the smallest gestures of sustenance that feel the preponderance human Related People are just the right amount of horny for Frankenstein s monster The film follows Mary Shelley s original contours The Creature Jacob Elordi is abandoned by Victor Frankenstein Oscar Isaac left chained in a burning castle as an unwanted experiment gone wrong His escape deposits him into a frozen wilderness where the first humans he encounters react to him with instinctive horror A hunting party shoots him the first hint that this version of The Creature is not merely hard to kill but possibly incapable of dying at all Gunshots dynamite fire none of it seems to leave a lasting mark And yet he s fascinated by the people who just tried to destroy him drawn to them eventually peering through their window at a life he wasn t invited to join He follows them to a modest hut on the edge of the forest a household held together by love and scarcity a blind old man a inadequate children a flock of sheep and the kind of persistent winter poverty that makes every scrap of food feel hard-earned From the shadows he watches them wanting something he doesn t yet have a name for And when that longing becomes too acute he starts to help them gathering their firewood repairing their fences performing small miracles of labor under cover of night The family assumes these blessings are the work of a benevolent forest spirit Only we know it s a creature who has never been shown kindness offering it anyway And on occasion they too extended a small kindness towards me The Creature says in the film Clothes bread We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in contemporary times to encouragement Salon s progressive journalism This is when del Toro shows him perched on their rooftop legs splayed face tipped toward the sun as he bites into one of those loaves And for a moment a brief brief moment the world and I were at peace The film rarely grants him this kind of serenity and that s why the scene hits so hard the first thing to make him feel human is something as humble as bread in the sun Shelley s novel sketches this arc with even more texture The Creature s earliest meals are desperate and primitive acorns plucked straight from the tree which would wreck a human stomach fistfuls of berries icy water scooped from a stream He learns to tend fire and realizes that it is not only good for heat but for making food palatable When he stumbles upon the hut of a shepherd who flees at the sight of him he greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherd s breakfast which consisted of bread cheese milk and wine After days of chewing raw nuts and fruit the meal must have tasted miraculous but the richest advancement happens when he encounters the De Lacey family Hidden among the trees he studies them for weeks stealing bits of their food when he can manage it Slowly painfully he realizes they are miserable not because of one another but because they are poor a hardship he has been quietly worsening by pilfering their stores It s his first pang of guilt the first time he understands that his requirements are not the only ones that matter And so he resolves to repay them in the only way he knows with labor with devotion with the silent caretaking that eventually convinces them they re being aided by a benevolent forest spirit Which brings us back to the mythology of the film this idea of The Creature as an unseen guardian a half-believed blessing Want more great food writing and recipes Sign up for Salon s free food newsletter The Bite Soon the younger family members take a seasonal trip leaving The Blind Man De Lacey in the novel played with heartbreaking gentleness by David Bradley in the film alone for part of the winter The Creature lingers too hovering at the edges of the hut and eventually the solitude becomes unbearable his longing too loud to ignore and he tries to introduce himself despite his vocabulary still being mostly a single trembling word Victor And again del Toro reaches for food as the bridge My sight has failed me the old man says turning toward the presence he can sense but not see But there is bread and brandy on the table Pray help yourself It s such a humble invitation almost an afterthought and yet it s the first time anyone in the story has offered The Creature anything without fear or revulsion In the film the moment lands with a warmth that s almost painful kindness given freely even blindly becomes the thing that decisively draws The Creature out of hiding Ken Woroner Netflix L to R Sofia Galasso as Anna-Maria and David Bradley as Blind Man in Frankenstein Then when The Blind Man realizes that the rumored Spirit of the Forest is in fact this wounded wordless being seeking nothing more than company his reaction is not terror but tenderness Stay with me he says Share my food and my fire I would be delighted to share what little I have with you For a heartbeat you can almost imagine an alternate ending two lonely figures passing the winter in gentle domesticity urgent bread tending the fire building a language out of generosity But this is Frankenstein after all The gothic machinery grinds back into motion Circumstances spiral cruelty reasserts itself and The Creature learns again that humans will never see him as anything but monstrous no matter how faithfully he tries to mirror their kindness So he begins to dream of another life entirely a companion shaped like him someone who might share his baffling immortality his hunger his hope In the book as in the film he approaches Victor with a proposal If you consent neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again I will go to the vast wilds of South America My food is not that of man I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same fare We shall make our bed of dried leaves the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food The picture I present to you is peaceful and human and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty It s a vision that feels almost Edenic two creations living in sunlit obscurity eating fruit from the trees sleeping on beds of leaves wanting nothing more than to be left alone It s a future built entirely on gentleness the very quality the world has denied him at every turn But the tragedy of Frankenstein is that Victor cannot imagine his creation as anything other than monstrous He destroys the possibility of that peaceful garden before it can be planted And so the story returns as it invariably does to devastation a creature who longed to break bread with humanity instead learns to starve himself of hope What lingers though in both del Toro s film and Shelley s original are the small luminous moments where food becomes something more than sustenance A loaf left on a rooftop Bread and brandy on a table A shepherd s breakfast devoured in gratitude These are the crumbs that map The Creature s only path toward humanity however briefly he s allowed to walk it And maybe that s why those scenes stay with us long after the torches and pitchforks fade they remind us that even in the darkest stories connection is made the same way it is in the real world one shared bite at a time Read more about monsters in film In a bleakly exquisite Nosferatu Lily-Rose Depp has more bite than the titular vamp The queer horror of Dracula Twilight taught us the dangers of young women not choosing themselves The post The tender food of Frankenstein appeared first on Salon com