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Original source: Diego Ruzzarin
This video from Diego Ruzzarin covered a lot of ground. Streamed.News selected 4 key moments and summarises them here. Everything below links directly to the timestamp in the original video.
Understanding Shelley's biography transforms *Frankenstein* from a horror story into a meditation on grief, creation, and the cycle of life and death. How do artists' personal experiences shape the great works that, in turn, shape how we see the world?
Mary Shelley's personal tragedy shaped Frankenstein and its concept of 'giving birth to death'
Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein gains deeper meaning when read against the author's personal losses. Shelley lost four of her five children, including an infant who died weeks after birth — an event she recorded in her diary after dreaming her "baby came back to life." This repeated grief, set against the backdrop of common childhood mortality, drives the novel's central theme: creating life from death, and reproducing death itself.
The film's deeper argument explores what it means to "give birth to death" — a question rooted directly in Shelley's anguish. Victor's refusal to let his creature reproduce, on the grounds that it would only breed more death, mirrors a mother whose efforts at procreation ended in loss. The structural tension between life and its inevitable end — and how the absence of mortality redefines existence — sits at the novel's core.
"I dreamt that my baby came back to life. I rubbed it and it began to breathe."
The monster's origins: born or made? A moral dilemma that leads back to God
Frankenstein asks a fundamental question: are monsters born that way, or shaped by circumstance? In the film, the Golem is not born — he is made by Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Yet Victor himself was not born a monster; a traumatic childhood, an incestuous relationship with his mother, her death, and an abusive father forged him. This chain of cause and effect suggests monstrousness is a product of prior conditions, not innate essence.
That logic shifts ethical responsibility upstream. If the Golem is Victor's creation, and Victor was shaped by his father, who was shaped by his own circumstances, the causal chain ends with God as the original creator. By taking on the role of creator, Victor is forced to confront accountability for what he has made — a tension that implicates any figure of authority or power. The dynamic between creator and created carries profound theological and ethical weight about autonomy and morality.
"If Dr. Victor Frankenstein created this immortal golem with enormous strength capable of causing pain, violence, and evil — is Dr. Victor Frankenstein responsible?"
The Golem as a metaphor for subjectivity: a collage of experiences and Hegel's recognition of the other
Built from fragments of different bodies, the Golem is a powerful metaphor for human subjectivity. The film shows him as literally a "collage of other lives" — a metaphor that extends to everyone. Personal identity is not an isolated entity but an amalgam of collective experience, shaped through relationships and the recognition we receive from others. Remarks like having "your father's eyes" or "your grandfather's laugh" reveal this deep interconnection.
This idea is grounded in Hegel's master-slave dialectic, popularized by Alexandre Kojève and influential on French post-structuralism. Free consciousness, Hegel argues, requires recognition by another free consciousness — the self forms and validates itself through the other. The Golem's lack of that recognition, and the unequal power dynamic between creator and created, blocks the development of full consciousness. His fragmented existence underscores the relational, dependent nature of identity, where each part contributes to a larger whole.
"The Golem is literally a collage of other lives. But notice how interesting that is — because used metaphorically, we are all a collage of other lives."
The Golem and the Death Imperative: Immortality as Curse, and the Tension Between Ethics and Aesthetics
In Guillermo del Toro's recent film adaptation, the Golem exists in an existential limbo — neither truly alive nor able to die — and this condition proves its deepest damnation. Death is not merely an ending; it is an intrinsic, necessary counterpart to life that gives life meaning and urgency. Denied death, the Golem is denied a story, denied the desires that only finitude can ignite. It remains fundamentally inhuman despite its capacity for empathy and beauty. By withholding death, Dr. Victor Frankenstein inflicts an existential torture as cruel as denying the creature birth itself.
This predicament sharpens the film's deliberate contrast between ethics and aesthetics. Unlike earlier versions, del Toro's Golem is rendered beautiful — a direct break from the convention that monsters must be ugly. The choice challenges what Nietzsche called aesthetic ethics: the idea that our judgment of good and evil bends toward beauty, as when we recoil from killing a butterfly but not a cockroach. The deeper problem is that dehumanizing the "other" has always depended on perceived ugliness to license violence. Fascism, among other brutalities, works precisely this way — strip a being of aesthetic humanity, and cruelty follows naturally.
"The greatest torture Dr. Victor Frankenstein inflicts on the Golem is this: he does not let it be born, does not let it live, and at the same time does not let it die."
Also mentioned in this video
- The main topic, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein film, warns… (1:05)
- The host explores the idea of reductive reason versus experience… (7:56)
Summarised from Diego Ruzzarin · 45:42. All credit belongs to the original creators. Streamed.News summarises publicly available video content.
