Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein

I once had a dream wherein two young children, hardly more than toddlers, in Victorian garb, moved around a sort of upstairs or attic room. They opened a trunk and found therein items of clothing—a cloak, a cap, a facial covering—that had once belonged to Joseph Carey Merrick, the famous "Elephant Man," the subject of the renowned play and David Lynch's classic film. Curious. I then had, a short time later, a curious "follow up," where the children were now pre-adolescent, and it was modern times. I believe they were in a church now. Similar trunk. Same items. They discussed it as if this was where "he had once lived." Merrick, I suppose.

All of which reminds me of the two little child explorers that are the undercurrent to Flesh for Frankenstein, a stab at testing conventions by Andy Warhol, a visionary artist, painter, musician, filmmaker, and all-around legend of his time.

Andy Warhol was an enigmatic and confounding visionary who drove art, music, and cinema into the future with his bizarre recontextualization of the mental landscape, erasing the barrier between art, advertising, commodification, and outrage. His greatest accomplishments, besides pop art depictions of Marilyn Monroe and juicy bananas, were filming a man sleeping and leaving the world an indelible image of a wildly eccentric genius in an era when the world was exploding outward in color to rival any of his creations.

Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein Trailer

Flesh for Frankenstein, directed by Paul Morrissey from his own screenplay, starring Udo Kier and Joe Dallesandro (as "Nicholas"), is a sexy, gory, utterly sickening high school production with excellent actors and a weirdly cheapjack feel. It's loaded down with splatter effects and men licking huge surgical scars before attempting to crawl back into the belly of their symbolic mother. It features Kier as Baron Frankenstein, the mad doctor who is married to his sister Katrin (Monique van Vooren). Here, he apparently does not care for much in the way of normal sexual congress (the whole damn thing is an allegory for familial degeneration and incest).

Kier, who has somewhat the similar mien as Conrad Veidt, is apparently married to his sister. Two silent children—and I'll get to that in a moment—wander from the beginning of the film until the end, punctuation in the background. They begin the film by examining items in Baron Frankenstein's laboratory; one of which includes a caged bird, if I do not misremember. The idea of the imprisoned, caged animal relates to the position of the servants here, who are feral, primitive, unrestrained; at least Joe Dallesandro is, with his tough-talking Bronx accent and his penchant for a roll in the hay with various peasant wenches. A scene with him at a brothel, with a woman with monstrously huge breasts, has the whores going berserk when a salamander crawls out of his anus. We think.

His friend, Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic), who becomes The Monster, wants to go away to a monastery. He doesn't mind a diet of bread and water—and, as low-key and handsome as he is, he doesn't seem to be perturbed by very much. The undeveloped romantic chemistry between Dallesandro, a gay icon, and this man is puzzling. How are we to determine his exile to become a monk? Is he turning to religion to expiate his guilt? Or, out of his confusion and indifference to his own life?

Baroness Frankenstein, the sister-wife, is a licentious if domineering termagant who has no real love for the Baron. She imperiously commands Dallesandro and her underlings. She could easily be in an old Nazi exploitation flick as “Ilsa, She-Wolf of Frankenstein's Castle,” and she seduces Dallesandro while upbraiding him when finding him wenching on a hillside.

Kier delivers a performance as a deeply obsessed Baron Frankie, obsessed with the Serbian "Master Race" (comic irony set to strains of Wagner) and finding "ze perfect nasum" for his creature, a male counterpart to a female "Bride of Frankenstein" with a gorgeous if mutilated chassis. Ultimately, she is destroyed in a gory mess on the floor, after she is forcibly disemboweled by a perhaps premature attempt to "enter" her symbolic womb by the mad assistant, a stand-in for Igor, who licks her scar grotesquely in an act of symbolic oral pleasure.

Dig me?

There is sexual repression here, and a very strong gay subtext. Also, the class distinctions and hypocrisy of the bourgeois class are manifested by the insanity of the obsessed Frankenstein, in his noxious marriage to his own sister. Dallesandro is left hanging, in the literal and figurative sense, between his monstrous friend—revived, returned from the dead—and the spectacle of the demented, corrupt bloodline of the aristocracy manifest below where he hangs. There, in a bloody pool, they are resplendent as victims of their own wanton, indulgent evil.

The two children? Male and female energies, little snooping eyes that see and hear all and take it all in; but in a corrupted form. They carry the “secret curse” of the story: the fascination with death, bloodletting, sadistic cruelty, and the rejection of natural affections for ones that are base and rife.

But what is the film truly saying? It is an intensely gory, if subdued, Grand Guignol film. But there is a subtext here as buried as one of Frankenstein's old cadavers. Or, perhaps, his "dark, secret love," to quote Blake.

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Moies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1

Ebook

Print

My book: Silent Scream!: Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels.