Lately everything to me has been related to Frankenstein in some form or fashion, but one item in particular has struck me as being especially similar to the story: the movie Warm Bodies.
Warm Bodies is a romantic comedy movie (with kind of a horror twist?) about a zombie boy who falls in love with a living girl during the apocalypse. What immediately set off alarms in my head when I watched this movie this past weekend is how the protagonist zombie boy (named "R") is undead. R wasn't an inanimate body that was brought back to life; however, you could say that both he and the creature in Frankenstein are two beings composed of dead/dying parts, livened by a spark of peculiar origin.
The story only gets more similar from there.
For example, R says in the beginning of the movie that he doesn't recall how humans began turning into zombies, but the movie makes a brilliant comment when it illustrates and implies how humans were already well underway in their transformation into figurative zombies before the apocalypse began--hundreds of people are seen in an airport, but instead of enjoying each other's company, they are all plugged in to some kind of electronic device, completely detached from their surroundings as they shuffle through the airport, milling around like mindless drones*. If Shelley's Frankenstein is the earlier warning of the dangers of technology, then Levine (the director of Warm Bodies) attempted to make his movie its contemporary descendant.
Adding to that, the fact that R is unsure of how humans became literal zombies argues against how I interpreted the role of the Creator to be significant in Frankenstein. The zombies are not implied to be created from some divine being, but they breathe and walk just as the living humans do, suggesting that perhaps the "nurture" side of the nature-nurture argument wins out after all. Once a human became a zombie in the movie, it wasn't taught how to be a zombie from some parental figure; rather, it observed what it could/should do from the other preexisting zombies around it. Furthermore, how the zombies were said to come from humans--rather than being "born" or "created"--I think says something about human nature as well. I saw in Frankenstein how the creature's monstrosity was reflected back on mankind, resulting in the Unjust Society idea in the book. Warm Bodies goes along with that in the way that because the unsightly zombies were considered to be degradations of humans (and the zombies in this movie have even further degradations they call "Bonies"), the movie could be saying that humans are inherently gruesome and monstrous, or that all mankind eventually degrades into an inferior form. (I'm not quite sure.)
Another similarity between Warm Bodies and Frankenstein that I noticed is in the context of knowledge being a very important and desirable thing. In Frankenstein, both Victor and his creature seek to know more, literally, while in Warm Bodies it is more of a visual representation. The character R claims his favorite part of the human body to eat is the brain, simply because it is the tastiest, and allows him to see parts of the unfortunate soul's memories when he eats them. If human brains were taken to be the visual representation of knowledge in this film, then it can be said that R also seeks "knowledge". Not only does he like to eat the brains out of humans, but after he meets his love interest of the film, he attempts to use the memories he absorbed as well as his own faint memories to discover what it means to be human again.
So, what does it mean? What's the big idea? So what? I'm not entirely sure. Whether Levine was attempting to do a modern take on Shelley's Frankenstein with his movie or just reference the novel, I don't know. But I think Levine does agree with Shelley in that humans are on their way to their demise, and their destruction will be their own faults.
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See the first four minutes of Warm Bodies here, including *this scene:
Wow! I never really connected those two stories, but I totally agree. I was able to see that movie as well, and I see your point. But, in another way, Warm Bodies has an alternate ending. In Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein, she reveals the horror in humanity and how the supernatural are more intellectual because they are capable of seeing society in a different aspect, but in Warm Bodies I thought the writers were admiring humanity because it is the “cure” for monstrous habits that seem to take over our lives. “R” also is cured by love – an element that Warm Bodies uses as a concept that only humans can feel, almost like a fairy tale (which, Shelley also brings up the entire debate ‘who can love and who cannot love? The creature or the human?’ ). At the end of Warm Bodies, the “kiss” was what brought him out of his decaying body, giving him life. Mary Shelley admires the exact opposite – the love that Victor felt (or at least seemed to feel. I know some people argue of whether he truly loved anybody) destroyed him because it was used as a vulnerable flaw. The being that actually won in the end was the creature, because he was able to let go of love and let power fill him, unlike Victor. I find it interesting how these two different stories differ – in Warm Bodies love and humanity is admired, and then in Frankenstein love and humanity is a flaw.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I cannot exactly remember how the movie Warm Bodies began, but if I recall it correctly I do not think they ever introduced why there was a pact of zombies or how they became zombies exactly. Actually, I am certain that the whole point was that being a zombie was inevitable because we all lose our humanity at some point, but what is that humanity? I guess you have to look out how those people began zombies – humans tried fighting them off in small groups, but once they gave up and let the zombies “eat” them, or consume them, it was too late. So is it really nurture? Or is it nature for us to give up? Mary Shelley asks the same concept when it came to cowardice and how Victor completely abandoned the creature because he was afraid of what would happen next. He was afraid of the next step of life and possibly even change, because of course he would have to accustom his life toward this creature. So let’s say a zombie was going to get you and you had no choice for survival: Do you let yourself get eaten and become a monster yourself because you are afraid of death? Or do you be a hero and die fighting, accepting the next step of life? It connects back to your humanity. A lot of people say that people are onions – sure, we may thing we’ve changed through the years, but in the end we were just peeling layers until we found out who we really are. There is no such thing as change. So are we born with this cowardice? Are we born with heroism? Is being a zombie inevitable if this is already decided?