Self Evaluation

Self Evaluation

I found most of my last essay to my satisfaction when I turned my editor’s eye upon it, at least from a grammatical standpoint. However, I felt that I should elaborate more on my more traditional views of fiction and writing in general, and felt the best place to find this would be in my earlier reading experiences, which just so happened to be the first essay of the year. Rather than just copy pasting in a paragraph or two, I felt that I should simply take the idea of the first essay and not worry about what I had actually written at the beginning of the year. I like what I’ve done, though I enjoy re-writing from scratch rather than fiddling with a completed essay. However, I felt I hadn’t done enough of this “fiddling” during the year, and therefore gave it a try here.

I’ve found that I have progressed as a writer throughout this semester, even if one simply uses the crude technique of looking at my grades, which steadily rose as the year went on. I’ll confess that essays will never be a thing of joy for me, but they have ceased to be a source of complete pain and suffering. I would say the main reason for this is the additional freedom we have in creating our essays, rather than have a thesis statement thrust upon us which we have to defend or support, we have the flexibility of crafting a thesis which we actually enjoy writing about. Over the coming semesters, the plan is to take at least a few more English courses before my business and math courses take over all my time. I’d like to work on my less conversational essays, which remains my weak point in writing.

Final Essay

Why Hypertext?

When I first placed Patchwork Girl in my CD drive, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had read Writing Machines, by Hayles, which had left me with a distinctly negative view on the excessive creativity of hypertext. Still, I was prepared to give Patchwork Girl a chance. Perhaps it would not fall prey to the style of writing that Hayles seemed obsessed with, a style so creative it was utterly unreadable. The work Lexia to Perplexia is a fine example of this, as even during her praising of it, Hayles mentions that there are times when “it hovers at the edge of legibility”. Why anyone would write (or read, more importantly) a book that was barely legible is beyond me, and I sincerely hoped that Patchwork Girl would, at least, be in English, not some bizarre combination of English and programming code.

I suppose I should explain where I’m coming from. I have been reading (for fun, not school) since I was around five years old. I’ve devoured fiction from every genre (well, maybe not romance) and time period, and more then my share of non-fiction as well. I suppose you could say I was something of a bookworm, and I still enjoy reading myself to sleep at night. Naturally, all this has been with traditional books. I enjoy the plot racing along, character development, slow beginnings rising into dramatic climaxes, and all those other tropes of literary fiction we know and love. That’s not to say I’m picky as to the quality of what I read, I’ll do it all, from the great classics to cheap sci-fi novels off the discount shelves. However, the story is the ever important part in any novel I read. Therefore, Patchwork Girl had to be fairly exceptional to meet my (perhaps somewhat unreasonable) prejudices and traditions.

I placed the CD in my computers drive and encountered my first problem. The operating system on my PC was too advanced to run the older software of Patchwork Girl. This immediately colored my perceptions of the book, as it is impossible to enjoy a book which cannot be read. Nevertheless, after class, I plodded to the library to read the book there. I sat down and installed the software, and opened up the program. Now, I had read books on the computer before, almost universally print books that had been uploaded in .pdf form or as word documents. I had no problems reading these books, minus the obvious limitations of having to read off a bulky computer rather than a book. No, my problem was not one of the problems described by Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies: “…The ungainliness of the interaction…he (the reader) has to click and wheel the cumbersome mouse to keep the interaction going…as though [his] reflexes were being tested in a video game arcade”. I had no trouble wheeling the mouse around and clicking on the boxes. My problem was that, try as I might, I could not make heads or tails of the plot.

I had read the plot synopsis online after my CD failed to work, and therefore knew that there was a plot, and from what I could gather, a fairly linear one. I was therefore expecting a somewhat linear progression of hyperlinks, maybe with some minor “side plot” style digressions that one could take. Instead, I ended up with (after a few experimental clicks), a naked female monster. Clicking this sent me off somewhere else (unfortunately, because I am writing this on my computer, I couldn’t tell you where due to the aforementioned software issues). After some exploring, I found the Storyspace “web” where all the individual sections were laid out. Finally, I sat back and began to read, only to find myself frustrated again and again.

My experience in reading fiction is very similar to that of Birkerts. He writes “When we enter a novel, no matter what novel, we step into a whole world anew… We do not open to the first page and find ourselves instantly transported from our surroundings and concerns. What happens is a gradual immersion, an exchange in which we hand over our groundedness in the here and now in order to take up our new groundedness in the elsewhere of the book.” I’m sure anyone who has read enjoyable fiction, no matter what quality or genre, has experienced this. Slowly, we slip into the story, forgetting our existence in reality to saturate ourselves in this elsewhere, and only come to our senses when we realize that it is 3AM and we have work tomorrow morning. I remember these experiences from as early as seven or eight, staying up late at night with a flashlight, hurrying through a Redwall book, or later, the Harry Potter novels. This is what I enjoy about reading; indeed, it is probably my primary reason for reading fiction. It’s a form of escapism; I suppose you could say, leaving our mundane life and cares behind as we slip into the exciting adventures of the book. But, as Birkerts states, it is a gradual thing. I cannot just flip open on the books on my shelves and immediately float off. This is where the greatest failure of Patchwork Girl becomes apparent. With a book, we are free to drift off because a good story flows from one point to another, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. Patchwork Girl, however, jumps and skips, from one block of text to another. I could not get immersed because the text simply wouldn’t let me. And it is not only the skips between the individual text boxes (roughly analogous to paragraphs). The jumps between the different sections (The “collections” of text boxes, such as “The Graveyard”) were even worse, forcing the reader to backtrack through the Storyspace program to find what he was looking for. As an example, picture a book, with the individual paragraphs forming a story, but not truly connected to each other. Each time you immerse yourself in a paragraph, the transition between the two yanks you back out. I cannot enjoy a book that I can’t get immersed in, that would be similar to, for example, smelling good food, but being yanked away as you tried to eat it. This is how I felt reading Patchwork Girl, unable to absorb myself in the novel. And, when it is all boiled down, that is what Patchwork Girl is—a novel. A fancy, electronic one, but a novel nonetheless. And in this capacity, it failed to arouse my interest, or hold my attention.

I had to continue to read, of course. I turned my attention from The Graveyard section to the Body of Text, the section which contains much of the plot. The writing of Shelley Jackson is not particularly outstanding, and her knowledge of the 18^th/19^th century is as patchworked as her creation. This part of the text was more linear, but the text boxes still had the aforementioned jarring quality. N the end, I was forced to rely on my online synopsis to aid my reading, for whenever I became confused or lost in the text, a situation that happened far too often. Now, usually, I finish all the books I start, even the ones which I don’t particularly enjoy, just to see what happens (We can see that narrative thrust is a biggie for me). I have had perhaps two novels which had such poorly written plots as to turn even me off. As I said before, I’m not picky, but without any thrust or clear plot, Patchwork Girl was a chores to drag through, one which I would have set down within five minutes of reading if it had been a reading for pleasure.

Patchwork Girl is a novel of great creativity, but creativity alone cannot make a novel great. Readability, if I may use the term, is even more important. In her essay ‘Stitch Bitch”, Shelley Jackson tells us that “Writing hypertext, you’ve got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text.” It becomes clear that Jackson is a supporter of personal freedom, the ability to explore a book without being constrained by pages and plots. This freedom also includes simply walking away. However, Patchwork Girl itself contains a plot, and is designed to be read in some form of order, at least. And secondly, any author must be prepared for the reader to stop reading if they do not enjoy the book. While Jackson may applaud her reader’s choice to not read Patchwork Girl, she also applauds the failure of hypertext to keep a reader’s attention, which utterly defeats the point of writing a book in the first place.

Essay # 4

Nick Gaeto

Why Hypertext?

When I first placed Patchwork Girl in my CD drive, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had read Writing Machines, by Hayles, which had left me with a distinctly negative view on the excessive creativity of hypertext. Still, I was prepared to give Patchwork Girl a chance. Perhaps it would not fall prey to the style of writing that Hayles seemed obsessed with, a style so creative it was utterly unreadable. The work Lexia to Perplexia is a fine example of this, as even during her praising of it, Hayles mentions that there are times when “it hovers at the edge of legibility”. Why anyone would write (or read, more importantly) a book that was barely legible is beyond me, and I sincerely hoped that Patchwork Girl would, at least, be in English, not some bizarre combination of English and programming code.

I placed the CD in my computers drive and encountered my first problem. The operating system on my PC was too advanced to run the older software of Patchwork Girl. This immediately colored my perceptions of the book, as it is impossible to enjoy a book which cannot be read. Nevertheless, after class, I plodded to the library to read the book there. I sat down and installed the software, and opened up the program. Now, I had read books on the computer before, almost universally print books that had been uploaded in .pdf form or as word documents. I had no problems reading these books, minus the obvious limitations of having to read off a bulky computer rather than a book. No, my problem was not one of the problems described by Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies: “…The ungainliness of the interaction…he (the reader) has to click and wheel the cumbersome mouse to keep the interaction going…as though [his] reflexes were being tested in a video game arcade”. I had no trouble wheeling the mouse around and clicking on the boxes. My problem was that, try as I might, I could not make heads or tails of the plot.

I had read the plot synopsis online after my CD failed to work, and therefore knew that there was a plot, and from what I could gather, a fairly linear one. I was therefore expecting a somewhat linear progression of hyperlinks, maybe with some minor “side plot” style digressions that one could take. Instead, I ended up with (after a few experimental clicks), a naked female monster. Clicking this sent me off somewhere else (unfortunately, because I am writing this on my computer, I couldn’t tell you where due to the aforementioned software issues). After some exploring, I found the Storyspace “web” where all the individual sections were laid out. Finally, I sat back and began to read, only to find myself frustrated again and again.

My experience in reading fiction is very similar to that of Birkerts. He writes “When we enter a novel, no matter what novel, we step into a whole world anew… We do not open to the first page and find ourselves instantly transported from our surroundings and concerns. What happens is a gradual immersion, an exchange in which we hand over our groundedness in the here and now in order to take up our new groundedness in the elsewhere of the book.” I’m sure anyone who has read enjoyable fiction, no matter what quality or genre, has experienced this. Slowly, we slip into the story, forgetting our existence in reality to saturate ourselves in this elsewhere, and only come to our senses when we realize that it is 3AM and we have work tomorrow morning. But, as Birkerts states, it is a gradual thing. I cannot just flip open on the books on my shelves and immediately float off. This is where the greatest failure of Patchwork Girl becomes apparent. With a book, we are free to drift off because a good story flows from one point to another, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. Patchwork Girl, however, jumps and skips, from one block of text to another. I could not get immersed because the text simply wouldn’t let me. And it is not only the skips between the individual text boxes (roughly analogous to paragraphs). The jumps between the different sections (The “collections” of text boxes, such as “The Graveyard”) were even worse, forcing the reader to backtrack through the Storyspace program to find what he was looking for. As an example, picture a book, with the individual paragraphs forming a story, but not truly connected to each other. Each time you immerse yourself in a paragraph, the transition between the two yanks you back out. This is how I felt reading Patchwork Girl, unable to absorb myself in the novel. And, when it is all boiled down, that is what Patchwork Girl is—a novel. A fancy, electronic one, but a novel nonetheless. And in this capacity, it failed to arouse my interest, or hold my attention.

I had to continue to read, of course. I turned my attention from The Graveyard section to the Body of Text, the section which contains much of the plot. The writing of Shelley Jackson is not particularly outstanding, and her knowledge of the 18^th/19^th century is as patchworked as her creation. This part of the text was more linear, but the text boxes still had the aforementioned jarring quality. N the end, I was forced to rely on my online synopsis to aid my reading, for whenever I became confused or lost in the text, a situation that happened far too often.

Patchwork Girl is a novel of great creativity, but creativity alone cannot make a novel great. Readability, if I may use the term, is even more important. In her essay ‘Stitch Bitch”, Shelley Jackson tells us that “Writing hypertext, you’ve got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text.” It becomes clear that Jackson is a supporter of personal freedom, the ability to explore a book without being constrained by pages and plots. This freedom also includes simply walking away. However, Patchwork Girl itself contains a plot, and is designed to be read in some form of order, at least. And secondly, any author must be prepared for the reader to stop reading if they do not enjoy the book. While Jackson may applaud her reader’s choice to not read Patchwork Girl, she also applauds the failure of hypertext to keep a reader’s attention, which utterly defeats the point of writing a book in the first place.

EVALUATION: The keen eyed among you will notice that this essay bears little resemblance to my rough drafts. I read through them and found that I didn’t like them at all, so I changed it. This is perhaps more conversational, less rambling, and maybe too much like a book review. But considering we are simply trying to understand how PG succeeds or fails as a novel, I hope my reportishness will be forgiven.

less rough draft (missing final paragraph)

Rough Draft

Hypertext literature appears to have several advantages and disadvantages compared to a normal print book. On one hand, it offers an extremely creative medium with which to show your works. Readers can zip all over the book, fitting pieces together and enjoying the book in their own special way. The drawback of this style is almost the same thing. The boundless creativity and options leave readers confused. What narrative thrust the plot has is lost by the twisting, jumping passages of the hypertext, potentially leaving the reader switching off the program and walking away. Shelley Jackson even admits this in her essay “Stitch Bitch”: “Writing hypertext, you’ve got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text.” The idea of this phrase is to indicate that hypertext invites the reader to think for himself, rather than blindly following a plot. The problem, as I see it, is that because there still is a plot, no matter how convoluted, with the obvious limitations of whatever the author wrote, the reader is still limited. It’s just now he has to work to find where the plot goes next. A print author has to be prepared for the reader to dislike the plot or his writing style and stop reading too.

Birkerts says, in The Gutenberg Elegies, that he cannot get passed the fact that he is in front of a keyboard, looking at a monitor “with the freedom to rocket from one place to another with just a keystroke”. The discomfort he feels when reading a book is easily overcome by simply getting used to a computer (which Birkerts will never be accused of), as I have read several print novels in .pdf format on the computer with no trouble. No, the problem is the second sentence, about the freedom to rocket about the book. When you have that much freedom, sitting still to read the “blurbs” is a chore, as you click franticly in an attempt to piece together the story or simply get the reading over with.

Let me explain why I enjoy reading fiction, which most hypertext appears to be. I want to drift off into the story that the author spins for us. I unconsciously turn the pages (or click the page down button), and let the story pull me along. I don’t want to have to dig around in the book to find out what happens next. If that happens, I’m no longer “in the story”, but instead flipping through pages or hyperlinks, trying to get back “in”. I imagine most people reading a novel they enjoy feel the same way. Birkerts says the same thing: “reading…is the positing of an elsewhere”. With a hypertext novel, whatever elsewhere I could drift into is hidden in a web of coding and electronic circuits.

I suppose I should explain exactly what drifting off into this elsewhere means. Obviously, everyone will have a somewhat different version of their own personal “elsewhere”. Birkert’s explanation, I believe, will be close enough to most people’s to suit our needs. Birkerts states: “We do not open to the first page and find ourselves instantly transported from our surroundings and concerns. What happens is a gradual immersion, an exchange in which we hand over our groundedness in the here and now in order to take up our new groundedness in the elsewhere of the book.” Anyone who enjoys reading fiction will understand this feeling, of slowly drifting into the story, until you somehow realize its 3 AM and you should be sleeping. The reason we drift off so readily is because of the simple unconsciousness of reading. Read. Turn page (/click “next page”). Read. Other media uses different techniques. Movies and TV present the plotline in an even more “simple” form, requiring us to simply sit back and have the plot spoon fed to us. Video games hook us with similar mechanics, appealing to our sense of “being involved”, with most requiring very little brain function. Where does hypertext fall, then? In one way, it is interactive, like computer games, but without flashy graphics. In others, it is like a book, but the “turn page” aspect of reading is gone, replaced with a search for the next chunk of text, and any immersion is gone. This is the primary failing of hypertext.

As I scramble for the next piece of text, or, in the case of Patchwork Girl, from one section (for example: “The Graveyard”, composed of maybe 20 different text boxes) to another, that sense of being somewhere else vanishes. Obviously, one would think this is because of the distraction of trying to locate the next element of the plot, and this is part of the reason. The other reason, however, is the lack of flow. Picture a book that jumps from paragraph to paragraph, each one its own independent chunk of text. Yes, they all tell the story, and in order, but the jarring leaps between them wrench us out of our elsewhere and slam us back into the present day.

Very rough draft for digital reading essay

Rough Draft

Hypertext literature appears to have several advantages and disadvantages compared to a normal print book. On one hand, it offers an extremely creative medium with which to show your works. Readers can zip all over the book, fitting pieces together and enjoying the book in their own special way. The drawback of this style is almost the same thing. The boundless creativity and options leave readers confused. What narrative thrust the plot has is lost by the twisting, jumping passages of the hypertext, potentially leaving the reader switching off the program and walking away. Shelley Jackson even admits this in her essay “Stitch Bitch”: “Writing hypertext, you’ve got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text.” The idea of this phrase is to indicate that hypertext invites the reader to think for himself, rather than blindly following a plot. The problem, as I see it, is that because there still is a plot, no matter how convoluted, with the obvious limitations of whatever the author wrote, the reader is still limited. It’s just now he has to work to find where the plot goes next. A print author has to be prepared for the reader to dislike the plot or his writing style and stop reading too.

Birkerts says, in The Gutenberg Elegies, that he cannot get passed the fact that he is in front of a keyboard, looking at a monitor “with the freedom to rocket from one place to another with just a keystroke”. The discomfort he feels when reading a book is easily overcome by simply getting used to a computer (which Birkerts will never be accused of), as I have read several print novels in .pdf format on the computer with no trouble. No, the problem is the second sentence, about the freedom to rocket about the book. When you have that much freedom, sitting still to read the “blurbs” is a chore, as you click franticly in an attempt to piece together the story or simply get the reading over with.

Let me explain why I enjoy reading fiction, which most hypertext appears to be. I want to drift off into the story that the author spins for us. I unconsciously turn the pages (or click the page down button), and let the story pull me along. I don’t want to have to dig around in the book to find out what happens next. If that happens, I’m no longer “in the story”, but instead flipping through pages or hyperlinks, trying to get back “in”. I imagine most people reading a novel they enjoy feel the same way. Birkerts says the same thing: “reading…is the positing of an elsewhere”. With a hypertext novel, whatever elsewhere I could drift into is hidden in a web of coding and electronic circuts.

CompPost for Digital Wreading

Basic Premise:

-Electronic Literature is very creative

-It is also unnecessarily creative, to the point of being sometimes unreadable. Even Jackson admits that a writer of hypertext must be prepared for the reader to just walk away. Also, people have been known to consider paint thrown on a canvas creative art, but it doesn’t exactly require any skill.

-Patchwork Girl failed to keep my attention as anything more then “another reading assignment”, unlike Frankenstein. Reading it was like a chore–”Well, I’ll read this block of text here, then call it a day.”

-Quote Birkerts: Can’t get into electronic literature, very consious of the screen, mouse, keyboard, etc.

-Point out the general lack of electronic texts in circulation at a normal bookstore ala Barnes and Noble/Borders. Considering they began in the early 90s, and the software is such that I can write an electronic novel with free software online if I so chose, we see almost none.

-The lack of a forward plot line means that the only impetus for the reader to continue is the desire to figure out what the plot is in the first place. But yet most eNovels have a plot that could be put to paper as a conventional novel. Why make it more confusing?

Glog #6

Birkert’s returns in this weeks reading, to comment on, among other things, hypertext and electronic novels. Unsuprisingly, his reaction is similar to mine. His friend invites him over to read this novel, which allows to reader to navigate between different characters, subplots and times with complete freedom, simply by following the little arrows that connect the text boxes, much like Patchwork Girl’s little arrows. Birkerts, however, cannot seem to get past the fact that he is clicking on a screen, moving between little boxes. In fact, the freedom makes him want to just click everywhere, rather then spend time reading the individual blurbs. Likewise, I feel as if I can never be immersed in a novel that lets me run around the timeline, run between characters, and decide whether or not I want to explore this particular plot. One of the most difficult parts in writing fiction, I find, is taking these individual scenes (“The hero faces off against the evil communist minions”, “John is flirting with the beautiful spy at the bar”) and linking them together. With hypertext, the job is made incredibly easy, in fact, you could probably write just the disjointed scenes and connect them with arrows and links. I have no incentive to make sure the plot runs together in a cohesive, readable fashion. Therefore, while hypertext may be a big step forward for those writers who believe that their creativity is constrained by mere paper and ink, I feel that it is a big step back for the quality of writing. Verbosity and florid prose does not a good writer make.

Birkerts allows for the idea that hypertext may become a viable medium some day, when the poorer writers and more “out there” ideas fade away, but still maintains that the “meditative immersivness” will never be the same as for a printed novel. I can partially agree with him here, but not fully. I can read a text novel on a PC just fine, assuming that it isn’t a pain to navigate through. Yet I agree with Birkerts that a text the requires all the extra input of moving a mouse, and shifting through text boxes, will never be truely immersive. If anything, I picture some hypertext now as a poor mans video game, attempting to be immersive and with freedom of choice, but lacking fancy graphics and atmospheric music.

Glog #5

I suppose a major stumbling block of mine was the fact that the software doesn’t run on my computer. This, perhaps, gives me an inherent bias against Patchwork Girl. I will take this as an opportunity to point out the books don’t do this–they “work” regardless of the circumstances. They don’t get viruses, don’t need upgrades, kernels, more advanced hardware/software, LESS advanced hardware/software, or a bulky computer. I suppose this is frustration talking. But one of a books advantages is versatility. You can carry it with you in a car, curl up in a bed with one, not worry about it running our of batteries, etc.

Now, on to electronic novels. I previously stated, in my glog about Hayles, that I felt like electronic novels were an “artsy” escape for some authors. After reading them, I can safely say that my opinion has not changed. I still fail to see the point in flipping back and forth between various bits of text, trying to piece together a storyline, all while supposedly marvelling at the authors boundless creativity and three dimensional thinking. I am reminded of the exibit of people having sex in Europe not so long ago. Yes, i suppose there is some art in that. No, I don’t want to go to an art museum and then attempt to discover the art for myself.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying that an e-book is “too hard” to read, and lump myself into the group of people who dread the prospect of reading anything more complicated then a magazine (Not that that is an unforgivable sin, its just not me). Rather, I feel as if the book is unnecessarily complicated, as if someone placed all the chapters from a book or scenes from a movie in something vaguely resembling chronological order, then asked a reader/watcher to make sense of it (As someone said in class, it’s like taking frankenstein, ripping out the pages, and hiding them around a room, and then expecting a reader to understand the story with minimal effort). There may be a story out there that benefits from a electronic presentation. Odds are it will be about the how nothing in life comes easy, much like understanding the plot of the novel will not come easy. However, from what I’ve read (and I’ve read some plot synopsises online), Patchwork Girl has a farily linear story, one that could be easily told in a normal book format. Perhaps the author simply wishes to make a statement.

Frankenstein Movie Essay

Nick Gaeto

Professor Meehan

10/24/08

Showing and Explaining—Movies and Novels

A movie can never be a book. Conversely, a book can never be a movie. We can try, of course. We can make The Lord of the Rings into a major motion picture, with a plot about Sauron forging a master ring and a Hobbit travelling to Mordor with his loyal companions to destroy it, but we can never really capture the essence and freedom of a story. Essence, perhaps, can be dismissed as the romantic dream of someone who still spends hours digging through bookstores, rather than watching movies (I’ll return to this point later), but what exactly is freedom?

Freedom in a book is our freedom to perceive. The closest book to me now is The Fellowship of the Ring, so that will have to serve as our example. In the opening chapter, Gandalf is described as an old bearded man, with a grey robe and blue wizard’s hat, with bushy eyebrows. In Frankenstein, I cannot find a single description of Victor, and no more than a passing description of the monster. We therefore have to rely on our imaginations to supply everything for us. I never saw Victor as looking like Kenneth Branagh, acting with melodrama worthy of a soap opera. Sure, our perception of him, and of Gandalf, is shaped by media, by cover illustrations or old movie pictures and Halloween costumes. But in our perfect imaginative world, unsullied by the outside, he can look like whatever floats to our minds.

In a movie, there is no such freedom. Victor looks like this. Gandalf looks like that. When the monster is created, a scant paragraph in the text, we see tubes and fluids and electricity. In fact, due to the original Frankenstein film, it seems that the monster is fated to always come to life in a thunderstorm, or with the help of electric eels. In a movie we are shown things in the most literal sense of the word. We know that this happens, and it happens exactly this way, because we can clearly see it and hear it. This is not a sign that we are all lazy, indolent dupes whose imaginations have dried up in the face of videos and computers. Sometimes we want to see things with another sense. We want to see exactly how Bruce Willis guns down the bad guys in Die Hard, or feel all warm and fuzzy when watching a romantic chick flick. What I am saying is that anytime we take more than the idea of something, the words suggesting the actions occurring, and replace it with concrete sense perception, we are limited in what we can take from it, because what we will take from it is what the writer and director took from the book and then placed into the screen. I believe Frankenstein came out the worse from this.

We all take subtly different messages from the novel, but I would hazard a guess that most are of the “meddle not the affairs of nature”, or “pride comes before the fall” variety. The horror in Frankenstein, at least as I see it, is not that there is this big scary monster after you and your loved ones. It is that, true, but there is the knowledge that you created it, and that you could have stopped it, and that you possibly even could stop it, just by showing it some love, yet you cannot—will not. In the movie, the basic theme is the same, but the direction we go is limited. There is a filter, a dark filter, over everything. Everything is dirty, Elizabeth looks pretty, but in a gothic, creepy way, people stumble around in bodily fluids and others have cholera. Victor is undeniably insane, not just traumatized, but quite certainly not playing with a full deck, as it were. The monster comes off as certainly more evil then the novel, as his actions are not fully explained. And over the entire thing is an air of melodrama, a story of coats flapping dramatically in labs as a muscular Victor works, a story of hearts being ripped out of peoples chests like a B horror movie. If I saw the novel as one showing that Victor was the true monster, and the Monster was forced into his way of life by his cruel parent’s choices, and saw the movie, I would be dismayed, because that is not what I would see. Rather, I would see what Kenneth Braunaugh got from the book, and then placed on the screen.

A scene where this is particularly evident is the creation scene. In the novel, it is a handful of sentences: “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” That’s it. No thunderstorms, instruments or electric eels. Why? Because in the novel, the actual creation of the monster is less important then what comes before and after. A movie, however, is practically forced to show this scene—no audience will be satisfied by some quick blackout and text, or a 10 second clip of the Monster standing up in a laboratory. For example, in the movie version, the scene is filled with flapping robes, chains, fluids, and other moving objects. (Alas, this clip is in Spanish, but there’s not really any dialogue)

Therefore, a movie will go for broke in this scene, since it demands visual stimulation. I can imagine whatever elaborate setup I want in the book, if some movie shows me a dinky little lab and a boring creation scene, I’ll be disappointed.

This illustrates the key difference between movies and books, movies show us what is going on, as in the creation scene, showing everything happen in dramatic detail, while books explain, for lack of a better word, without actually showing us, much like the creation scene in the novel—a handful of sentences. A play would stand somewhere between them in the spectrum. No-one has a right to say which is better for showing a story, as each story and each individual requires a different sort of medium to be entertained. Which is, really, what it is all about.

Compost for Film

The Kenneth Branaugh version of Frankenstein contrasted with the orginal book.

-The theme of personal horror is much more exagerated in the movie. In the book, much of the horror is “Look what I have created, now its killing people”. The movie is much more viseral, we see Victor as really kind of crazy (As shown by Branaugh overacting), with the scenes where he creates the monster and especially where he creates the bride.

-The disgusto factor is ramped up. The book has almost no detail about the nitty gritty of stitching up a corpse and bringing it back to life, or of said living corpse killing people. The movie is almost rediculous in this respect, filled with bloody childbirths, stitched up dead folks, borderline necrophiliac scenes, and hearts being ripped from chests like a B horror movie from several decades ago.

-The basic “theme” is still there. Less liberties were taken with this version then, say, with the original version. It’s still different, since the very action of giving distinct visuals to go with the story will change the way people look at it.

-Lets work with that above idea, that sounds interesting.