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Devon Coffee
@devoncoffee.bsky.social
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Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/moviesbeforebreakfast Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/17C11
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#filmsky two bonus #twincinemamovieclub pairings coming up:

1) del Toro's Frankenstein in theaters this weekend + Haifaa Al-Mansour's biopic Mary Shelley (2017) on #kanopy
2) Lanthimos's Bugonia in theaters next weekend + the film it's based on Save the Green Planet (2003) also on #kanopy

me:
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Androids are on subject! But no I have not.
#frankenstein Wollstonecraft argued that women were not objects but subjects, rational beings w souls, cogito ergo sum etc. Shelley’s monster transforms from object to subject, like its android descendants, raising existential questions about who gets subjecthood & who is mere object
Reposted by Devon Coffee
My classic sci-fi bookclub is woke and 50% women. The #1 off-topic is Star Trek. The amount of copium that old white dudes ingest is astounding. Boo Hoo, Bob!
here is my Substack essay about Romanticism and science, including a section about #frankenstein and Percy Shelley's chemistry experiments. Frankenstein (1931) is featured in Twisters (2024) #filmsky

Romanticizing "Twister"
open.substack.com/pub/moviesbe...
Romanticizing "Twister"
Gothic horror, trauma, and the weather
open.substack.com
forgot to mention, its free to stream w your library card on @kanopy.com !!
#frankenstein Joanna Russ: "Every robot, every android, every sentient computer...every non-biological person...is a descendent of that 'mighty figure' Shelley dreamed one rainy night in the summer of 1816..."
currently watching Haifaa Al-Mansour's Mary Shelley (2017). It falls into the usual biopic traps, but makes Mary's world tangible. Elle Fanning projects both naivete & intelligence. Al-Mansour was the first Saudi woman to direct a feature (Wadjda 2012) #filmsky #frankenstein #moviesbeforebreakfast
if you're interested in Ellen Moers's essay on Mary Shelley, the Gothic mode, and "women's mythmaking" it's linked here: knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/moe...
Moers, "Female Gothic"
knarf.english.upenn.edu
#frankenstein Moers: "Death & birth were...as hideously intermixed in the life of Mary Shelley as in Frankenstein's 'workshop of filthy creation.'" "Most of the novel...can be said to deal w the retribution visited upon monster & creator for deficient infant care."
#frankenstein Ellen Moers points out that most women authors of the time were unmarried & childless i.e. had limited experience w birth/infancy, & also there was a taboo against depicting sex & birth. Moers: "[Shelley] brought birth to fiction not as realism but as Gothic fantasy..."
#frankenstein the birth of horror was MATERNITY horror, and the birth of scifi was FEMINIST scifi
#frankenstein but it’s not just a fable about god & man. Frankenstein’s monster is motherless, & he resents his creator for abandoning him. & Frankenstein is haunted by guilt & horror at the miserable life he’s created. Feelings MS must have felt about her own mother & baby
My opinion of it has evolved with me as I’ve grown up and also read more sci-fi, especially feminist sci-fi!
I still have the copy I read as a young teen back in the late 1900s #frankenstein “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!” Frankenstein’s monster is an angry teenager
#frankenstein as a bookish teenager w big feelings (ie undiagnosed mental illness), I read & loved Frankenstein. I related to the monster's feelings of isolation, alienation, resentment, his big questions about why he is cursed w life & how to live when you're a hideous freak. Ah adolescence
#frankenstein Mary was already a Romantic bookish teenage goth girl w big feelings. Per Joanna Russ, she was "a woman who...was not only constitutionally melancholy but had good reason to be."
#frankenstein Also Percy was getting it on w her stepsister while she was pregnant. Mary believed in free love but that was some unethical nonmonogamy. Percy's wife (yeah he was still married to someone else) gave birth to a healthy baby boy around the same time. Ugh Percy 🙄 why are men
#frankenstein At 17, Mary gave birth to a daughter, but the baby was born 2 months premature, & died at 2 weeks old. Mary fell into a deep depression & was haunted by visions of her baby. Which, like, fair!
#frankenstein Mary Jr ran off w Romantic poet Percy Shelley at 16. Her father was pissed & cut her off. They lived together unmarried & poor, reading widely & constantly (novels, poetry, philosophy, politics, sciences) & even kept a shared journal
😂 I would totally watch the cat in a wooly jumper solving crimes w the milkman
#frankenstein fun fact: when they were dating, Mary & Percy Shelley would hang out at Mary's mother's grave. also Mary Shelley's maiden name was her mother's name: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, i.e. the name on the headstone at her favorite date spot

Mary Shelley was the original goth girl
a woman in a black dress is dancing in a crowded room
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