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Mad Doctors of the Movies: Faustus and Frankenstein · The Difference Engine Podcast

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: Modern science provides us with a glut of monsters.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: The bomb, the unravelling human genome, the tyrant computer, the deadly strain, the cyborg.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: The Genetically Modified Android.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_03: There are many scientists,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: perhaps the majority of them,
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: who believe that these and a thousand other perversions
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_03: of their genius have been laid unjustly at their door.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_03: These monsters,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: they would insist,
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: are the bastards of technology, sins of applied, not pure science.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: But many of us are unconvinced by such attempts to blame everything on technology
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: and politicians.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: Perhaps it comforts the conscience of scientists to invoke this much-muddled division of labor.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: But Dr. Faustus, Dr.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Jekyll, and Dr.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: Strangelove,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: the scientist who does not face up to the warning in this persistent folklore
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: of mad doctors, is himself or herself perhaps the worst enemy of science.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's these images from film and fiction that reflect a deep-seated public fear
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: of science and perhaps a fear of the arrogance of scientists and science itself.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: We're all gathered together to talk about the top ten mad doctors of cinema.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: From the growing inventory of terrors of film and fiction.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: And we're going to kick off today by talking about our two,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: the first two in the top ten mad doctors of cinema.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_03: And that's Dr Faustus and Dr Frankenstein.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Does anybody want to kick off to start with?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I suppose, for me,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: the link between the two is the fact that both Victor Frankenstein,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: remember that people make the obvious mistake when they think of Frankenstein,
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: that it refers to the monster,
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: but actually it refers to the man,
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: and also Faustus,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: Dr Faustus,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: are both victims of their own hubris,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: and the fact that it's their own overconfidence that ultimately proves
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: to be their downfall through...
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, a variety of actions.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: In fact,
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: the opening of Marlow's play,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Faustus is identified with Icarus,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: whose hubris took him too close to the sun and he burned up.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is what happens with films about mad doctors.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Their stars burn, they burn very brightly.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: But in the end, they are normally the architects of their own destruction.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's a good place to start, I guess.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: The difference between the book,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: the original book written by Mary Shelley in 1818 and the second edition
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: of 1831 differs greatly to the first film that perhaps most people are familiar
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: with, the 1931 film.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: The original book,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_03: is quite a complex,
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: onion-layered book The creature,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_03: as we might call him,
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: rather than the monster, who is not Frankenstein, but an artificially made creature.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: The differences in the film,
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: with the famous labs,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: the streaks of lightning,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: the implication that was electricity that had generated the monster,
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: and not necessarily something else.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_03: Because there has been some research to suggest that it wasn't necessarily...
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_03: Galvanising energy which sparked the life into Frankenstein.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: It might have been something else.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, I read it might even be something as kind of down to earth as compost or something.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: But nonetheless,
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: there's this famous idea,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: isn't there, that he went collecting... Is that
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: why he's green?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Because they stuck him in compost.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: It could be.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: It could well be.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't green in the book, was he?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: No, he wasn't,
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: but in the film versions,
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: they tend to have this green hue upon the creature, don't they?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you're suggesting he's green in a black and white film?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: Let's not forget that one of the narrators in the original Frankenstein book written
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_03: by Mary Shelley is the creature himself.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: And what makes the creature bad is the way that he's treated by other people,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: which is kind of a kind of progressive idea for its time.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's that very poignant bit in the book where He's looking out of the woodshed
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: and he's observing the family and that's how he learns to speak
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: and he learns social interactions and eventually he feels confident enough to emerge
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: and engage one of the children and the shock and fear upon the child's face and then
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: the loathing and antagonism of the adults who are drawn to
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: the child's cries push him away and that's the first action.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: He holds out an olive branch and he'd have somebody grab it and hit him around
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: the back of the head with it.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Victor is described as a neglectful parent,
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: being his sort of second sin, having created the monster.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: He then is irresponsible towards it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: There's also that interesting element of,
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: one of the things that makes it science fictional is this fact that you see life.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's an alien life form here.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: It's an artificially created alien creature which science creates.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: And you begin to see the universe through the eyes of the creature.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_03: You begin to see...
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: What about, let's talk a little bit about the background of the Romanticism.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: Because there's an interesting attitude to science which starts with,
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: you could argue,
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: starts with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and is also part of the Romantic movement.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: So it might be worth us talking about,
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: to a certain extent,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: the context in which she's part of the Romantic movement, isn't she?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: She has this relationship with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps a good way to start would be,
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: because we're talking about cinema,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: To talk about Ken Russell's gloriously camp and over-the-top film Gothic.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Which of course recreates that famous moment when Frankenstein was written.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: At a time when the skies were black because of,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember which volcano it was, it erupted.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so the weather was completely higgledy-biggledy.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: They find themselves in this lake house and challenge them.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Themselves to write a scary story,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: as it were,
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: but gathered together at that time,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: you had these pillars of that movement, including Shelley, Percy and Mary as well.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: And she's very much the star of the show, but also the youngest, as it were.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: She's been brought by Percy into this circle.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: She's unsure of herself.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: And she really pulls out all of the stops and takes on board all the books and
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: the reading that he'd encouraged her.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he'd placed works by Galvani in her hands and he'd encouraged her
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: to become more aware of science and art and literature so
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: that she wouldn't embarrass him in front of all of his friends.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: And in the end, she almost eclipses him.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: There was a recent report or there was a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: which to me seemed absolutely typically sexist of the kind of attitude
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: of Mary Shelley and not just an attitude to Mary Shelley's gender but also
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: to her age.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: That somebody had done deconstruction of it and had decided that it was written
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: by Percy Shelley, in fact.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: And they'd done this by looking at some kind of analysis of his work and
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: then analysis of Frankenstein.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: It didn't seem to have occurred to them to look at Mary Shelley's book,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: The Last Man, written in 1826, and do a similar analysis to see if those two.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so that kind of...
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: Nonsense, I guess, you read a number of places.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: It was Mount Tambora that had erupted in the previous year and produced this,
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: the year of the long summer,
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: or the year without the summer, which was the situation.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: Also on that same evening,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: the physician of Lord Byron,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: Polidori, I think, was the guy who'd written the first vampire story.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: So actually the progenitors of the first Frankenstein
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: and vampire stories were both written in the same night.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: But what's interesting,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: I guess,
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: from our point of view as commentators on science,
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_03: is the ambivalence that the Romantics have To science.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: And to the new science that was emerging early in the 19th century.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_03: Because you have a healthy scepticism about the old order.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: I think they're happy about the fact that the old order is going down the drain.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that's signified in the book by the old alchemists.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: Because Victor Frankenstein has to turn his back on the old alchemists and turn
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: towards the new science.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: This is what happens with Faust.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's exactly the same.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: Faust starts off with this...
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: Alchemical,
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: magical background and does deal with the devil and is then given the gift of this,
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: of being able to understand and have access to the new science.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: But then, of course, squanders that knowledge and in the end pays the ultimate price.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: But both of them have,
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: we know that when Victor goes to college for the first time
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: in Shelley's Frankenstein,
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's laughed at by all of the lecturers and all of the students
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: because his knowledge is predicated on old, almost magical, alchemical procedures.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: And it's exactly the same with Faust.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Faust doesn't have any time for alchemy in the same way that Dr Faustus,
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: he's a doctor of divinity, but he doesn't have any time for theology.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's all about power for him and for him it's about getting access
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: to these new spheres of knowledge and the sphere of knowledge being science.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_03: What's interesting about that is it's only when they turn their back on some aspects
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: of the old order and embrace what the Romantics had characterised
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_03: an over-rational approach to nature.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: I think what they're saying is if it's only the rational that you're dealing with
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: and you turn your back on some of the old wisdom It's only when you embrace
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: the over-rationalized nature of the new science
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: that you're gifted these terrible triumphs.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: And you have to then face the responsibility of the gifts of that new science.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's part of the thing, I think.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's become emblematic ever since, hasn't it?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: Frankenstein's become emblematic ever since.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of coded into the atom bomb, the genome.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: we've talked before about the fact that Christopher Frayling,
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: who wrote an interesting book called Mad,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_03: Bad and Dangerous,
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: had done some research amongst school kids, primary school kids in Britain.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: This research had been done previously,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: I think,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: in the 1960s,
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_03: where a Canadian researcher had asked school kids as young 7,
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: 8 and 9 to draw their depiction of what a scientist looked like.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: And after all the media attempts and the filmic attempts to draw a more positive
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: and progressive image of scientists,
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: the Canadian researcher in the 1960s and Christopher Frayling in
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: the 2000s still finds that kids as early as seven,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: eight and nine are drawing Think Victor Frankenstein-like scientists,
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_03: even in 2007,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: saw that image,
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_03: that very pervasive image of irresponsibility of science is still quite
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: a dominant one.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say, though, that's necessarily to do with the over-rationality of science.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's not necessarily anything rational about wanting to create life or
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: as Frankenstein wants to or to have that level of power as Faust wants to.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's purely ambitions.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And personal pride.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a logical outcome of simply, you know, scientific pursuits.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, it's more to do, I guess, with the social responsibility that comes with these gifts.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: But isn't part of it,
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: and I know that this series of podcasts is predicated on the idea of
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: the single scientist who turns his back on collegiality.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: But both Faust and Frankenstein turn their back on their peers and pursue this solo course.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: And up until fairly recently, that was the image of science.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: The negative image of science was focused around this idea that it was
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: a lone researcher who was going to do something terrible,
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: release something from the lab.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: But all that seems to have flipped recently.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: And you now get films like 28 Days Later and video game adaptations like Doom
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: or whatever,
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: where it's actually collegiate group of scientists,
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: corporate scientists who let loose the monsters in the future.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's quite interesting.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know,
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: Chris Frayling mentioned,
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: we saw him speaking at the Cheltenham Arts, sorry, the Cheltenham Science Festival.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: He mentioned that some of the kids had drawn some quite profound things
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: in their depiction of scientists.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: There was one female scientist,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think he'd said,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: that had been drawn,
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: and she was throwing something into the waste paper basket in the corner
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_03: of this drawing, and it had written upon it, cure for cancer.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, I know it's quite,
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: it's quite dark.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's a nine-year-old...
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: It suggests,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: that the direction of science isn't necessarily a beneficial thing
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: or necessarily going in the best way or going in the best direction
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: that it possibly could.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, so it suggests a profound cynicism about science.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: it does, yes.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: But this goes to the heart of the podcast, doesn't it?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is what we're talking about because of the way that the general public
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: and children's perceptions of science in particular are picked up from the media and
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: from cinema.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And even now,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: when I told my six-year-old daughter that I was going to come and talk
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: to you guys here in the studio,
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: and she asked me what I was talking about,
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: I said I was going to talk about Frankenstein, and she said, like Scooby-Doo, Daddy.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because she watches Scooby-Doo on the telly and Frankenstein Monster always chases
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: the gang who escape in the mystery machine and that sort of thing.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: But her image of science is defined by watching those sorts of things.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, occasionally you do get the heroic scientist,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: you get the latest incarnation of Doctor Who,
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: who, you know, is arguably deploying scientific knowledge.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: He's a good doctor,
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: of course.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: A good doctor.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: Most of the time.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Although possibly still mad.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely, yes.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: And dangerous to know.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: But not necessarily cinematic.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: But what about the creature, the creature itself?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_03: Robot?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: Android?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: Some kind of artificial life?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: there's a suggestion that Frankenstein's creature looks forward to
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: the massive droids that march across the cinema screens of the 20th century.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: But perhaps it's more to do with AI.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's a kind of artificial intelligence, isn't it?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: But you can link it in with the Faustus legend as well and actually say
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: that it looks back,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: that it is the latest incarnation of those golems and homunculi which emerge from
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: the medieval worldview,
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: which we see with the depictions of the demons in Faustus,
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: these shambling creatures that are mockeries of the human form.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: We know that in the Faustus legend,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: the demons are made as poor representations of mankind, of God's creatures.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: And to a certain extent, that's what Victor did in the same way.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: He tried to create that which God creates in some people's worldview and created
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: a mockery instead.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: So this is why I think...
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: The Faustus legend and Frankenstein is so important because they exist on the cusp.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: You can look at the last incarnation of those sorts of things,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: but also the first incarnation of the new AIs and robots.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: They are separate from the robots and AI stories
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: because those are very often portrayed as becoming self-aware,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: realizing they're superior to their creators.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And taking some action.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I don't think that Frankenstein,
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: certainly,
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: I have to mention young Frankenstein,
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: certainly in some adaptations on film,
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: are not superior creatures simply because of the...
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think also
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: as well,
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of the fear of robots and AIs comes from the fact that they won't think
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: the way we think,
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: they will be utterly alien and the decisions they make and the basis
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: for those decisions will be something different from what we would have done.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: Something autonomous from us, yeah.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, whereas I think that something like Frankenstein's creature is The fear comes more
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: from what he is and how he was made rather than the way he thinks.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: His reactions and responses are very human, but he's not treated as a human.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: In the book, maybe,
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: but in cinematic representations,
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: he's quite often depicted as an unyielding adversary, almost robot-like.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: He's the first incarnation of the Terminator.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: He will never stop until he destroys what is in front of him.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: He's certainly one of the first metaphors for the powerlessness of the inventor.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so there is that commonality with robots and AI.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I made you is often a line screamed by the
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: creator in the cinema.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: I made you, behave yourself.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, there's a parent-child thing going on there as well, isn't there?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's another thing,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_03: by the way,
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: is that it's a very personal agenda associated with Mary Shelley losing one
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_03: of her children.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: And...
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: Apparently she had a very powerful dream, I think.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: She had a number of powerful dreams, obviously.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: It must be extremely traumatic losing a young child.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: And you can imagine the urge of a parent wanting to put life back into a child
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: that had been lost.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: But that original dream that she had,
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: that fateful day or few days that they spent on the shores of Lake Geneva,
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: that year without a summer,
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: Where she had those dreams about seeing a creature and the inventor kind of stooped
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: over the creature and trying to bring the thing to life.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very kind of arresting idea.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: I'm conscious of the fact that we're talking quite a lot about Frankenstein
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: and Shelley because it's well within our comfort zone.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do Faustus.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_03: Do you want to start with how to spell it?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you think people don't know?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: The thing that...
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: The Marlowe version of Faustus does is,
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: remember at this time,
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: you've got Shakespeare producing a lot of the key works,
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: and Marlowe is a contemporary of his.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: And Marlowe's Faustus is not highborn, he's not a king, he's not a hero.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: He's the product of a working stroke middle class environment who wants to elevate himself.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's the hero with a thousand faces twisted.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's the young apprentice who wants to become a king,
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: which is why it was so popular,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: because the people who were watching it Could initially sympathize with Faustus.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: They could sympathize with his desire to better himself through science.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: And they could equally turn to disgust when he just throws all that away,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: when he just,
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: goes to see the Pope and sort of like steals food off his plate invisibly instead
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: of actually taking the opportunity.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: To elevate himself.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there's a class commentary element going on there as well,
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: which we know is present in Frankenstein in the same way,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: because it does deal with issues of class and rural versus urban and knowledge
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: and power in the same way.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: What about the religious aspects?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: There's been a suggestion that,
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: we've talked about the fact that Mary Shelley's masterpiece,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: which is what Frankenstein is,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: although slightly difficult to read, it's a kind of a masterpiece about...
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: The tension between man and the new science.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: God, it seems, is nowhere to be found in this landscape.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: She chooses Switzerland.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: Switzerland had re-emerged as a nation in 1815,
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: so it was a very new landscape against which this drama unfolds.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: But it seems to a certain extent that there's no supernatural agency involved.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's stripped of all the supernatural so that it becomes a stark
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_03: The stark responsibility is a human responsibility of growing up and then of trying
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: to dealing with the agencies which are within our power.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: What do you think about that?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's been argued that science fiction is about grappling with the other,
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: grappling with the alien.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's been iterated time and time again.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: And when Marlow was writing Faust, the other was the supernatural.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: By the time Shelley comes along, we have the emerging new field of science.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that is creating the other on the microscopic level,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: on the anatomical level, on the physical level as well.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: But they're still both grappling with alienness, with alienation and with the other.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to throw in the fact that when Contemporary society deals with these issues.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's still dealing with these issues.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: They pop up in these unexpected places.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that The Simpsons has dealt with both the idea of the Faustian bargain,
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: but also with the idea of the creature myth and Frankenstein as well.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: And we know just how popular The Simpsons are.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah,
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: the other thing,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: of course,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: is we referred earlier to Christopher Frayling's work and how contemporary
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: and pervasive the Frankenstein myth is.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_03: We still walk in Frankenstein's footsteps because the media still use
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: the word Frankenstein and refer to genetic manipulation, modification and so on.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: And we've talked about the fact that school kids have this kind
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: of Frankenstein-esque idea about an image of a scientist,
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: so still very contemporary.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: I also wanted to draw a comparison between what modern science fiction does and what
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_03: the romantics It is a very similar,
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_03: for the most part there was this kind of idea that ever since the Renaissance
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: that physics has nothing to do with poetry and that literature has nothing to say
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: about science.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's kind of been, you know, the mainstream idea.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: But I've got this quote from Wordsworth and he says that the
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_03: And of course we'd have to add women of science today,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_03: should ever create any material revolution in our condition,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_03: the poet will sleep then no more.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_03: And the important thing about what Woodworth says is he's talking about the taste
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: and the feel and the human meaning of scientific discoveries.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: That was true of what
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: Shelley wrote about Frankenstein, and that's also true of what science fiction still does.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: it's still,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: it's mostly about,
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: this is a mistake that many people make,
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: they think it's actually about the hard science fiction and getting the facts and
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: the data correct.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: And actually it's more to do with the human experience of where science has taken us.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: Which is the big science fiction hit that's going on at the moment.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And it's predicated around this idea that
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: a human colony created these artificial creatures, the Cylons.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Which then rebel against them and cause their almost entire complete destruction.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: And not only that,
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: but it's then revealed that these artificial creatures take on human form
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: and become...
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: And there are times in the later episodes where you're rooting as much for some of
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: the Cylons as you are for some of the humans who seem to be persecuting them.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I agree.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: Science fiction has brought it right up to date.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, one of
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: the most popular science fiction stroke fantasy stroke Horror stroke everything else
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: series over the last decade was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it dealt time
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: and time again with creating vehicles of our own destruction
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: and also these Faustian bargains with things that are going to come back
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: and quite literally bite you on the arse.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: Indeed.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for listening to the first of our Difference Engine podcasts.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: This one has been about the first two in our top ten mad doctors of cinema.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: Faustus and Frankenstein call for vigilance in the practice of science.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: They warn of the primal urges of power and control in all creations of technology.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_03: They became a potent metaphor of the powerlessness of the inventor and ever
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: since Faustus and Frankenstein,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_03: codified in such artefacts as the hydrogen bomb and human genetics,
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: it has proved difficult to limit the social fallout of knowledge.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: Tune in next time for the next Difference Engine podcast.
• 27:38
  [music]