Got home real late but have tomorrow off so I’m cudgeling my brains for a good topic. And since I’ve been running my series of horror movie reviews for October, I considered finishing off the Universal monster movie triumvirate by reviewing Frankenstein.
But Camera Girl was watching the Yankees World Series game and since they were down 0-3 in the series and would be eliminated if they lost tonight, I didn’t have the heart to refuse her control of the tv. As it worked out, New York had an orgy of hitting including a grand slam to take the game 11-4. There was much rejoicing by Camera Girl but I think she understands that no team has ever come back from an 0-3 deficit to win the Series. But let her enjoy the moment.
As for Frankenstein, at its core Mary Shelley’s book is another meditation on the Renaissance civilization in Europe substituting science for God. Well, since Renaissance civilization lately seems to be in full retreat, maybe God is sending his reply.
But properly considered, the idea that Man has replaced God with human intelligence is sort of laughably ridiculous. Every time we are told that biologists have cracked the code that will allow us to cure cancer or reverse aging or turn men into women and vice versa, our efforts are shown to be abysmally inadequate. We talk about uploading our consciousness into the internet to allow us to live forever but we don’t even know what consciousness is or for instance, how a memory from our childhood persists throughout our lives, or even whether it exists in one brain cell or many.
And when we consider the unimaginable size of even the portion of the known universe that we’ve already observed, the idea that we can become like God should quickly evaporate from our minds. From my point of view, the fact that we exist separated from even the nearest star by about twenty-four trillion miles of empty space make me feel like we are an experiment locked into a terrarium that we can’t escape from.
Of course, maybe escaping from our ant farm is part of our testing. Maybe on one of the planets in the Centauri system is a message in English or Proto-Indo-European saying, “Well done. Now here is a clue to get you to level three.” Maybe God has a sense of humor and he wants to let us in on the joke. Maybe some day he’ll give us a book that explains why we can’t avoid childhood cancer, endless war, telemarketers and Joy Reid. Maybe after we die suddenly everything will make sense and we can stop worrying about the war between men and women, type two diabetes and the national debt.
Well, tomorrow is my last chance to review Frankenstein. I better get some sleep so I’ll be ready to report truthfully on the incomparable acting skills and technique of Boris Karloff and Colin Clive. On second thought maybe I should just concentrate on the cool noises and flashing lights in Henry Frankenstein’s electrical glassware display in Germany (I mean Hollywood).