Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada's postcolonial popular culture

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada's postcolonial popular culture

              Canada has kept its own cultural sector exempt – so far – from free trade agreements, and developed a policy toolkit for stimulating domestic popular cultural production, on the premise that state investment in cultural production builds nationalism and sovereignty (Grant and Wood 2004, 386–88). This belated recognition of Canadian cultural studies is a symptom of the field’s own postcolonial historical neglect by a national intellectual elite that has privileged Arnoldian ideals of culture over and against American industries of entertainment, seen as a threat to Canada’s national sovereignty. Frankensteinian anxieties have shaped popular ideas of globalization ever since Shelley’s novel began its ‘career as an object of rhetorical allusion’ (Baldick 1987, 60) in 1824, in British parliamentary debates over abolition (Hitchcock 2007, 89). Since then, Frankenstein has been invoked – predominantly by conservative commentators (St Clair 2004, 373) – as a caution towards typically global issues: from nuclear power (Sullivan, quoted in Morton 2002, 56), to file-sharing: ‘digital piracy is Hollywood’s own digital Frankenstein’ (Sickels 2009, 22).

            Cronenberg’s 1983 movie Videodrome vividly dramatizes the postcolonial use of Frankenstein figures to represent globalization in a cyberpunk horror story about media imperialism, including one character who openly parodies McLuhan. Videodrome dramatizes McLuhan’s (1964, 54–55) claim that new media are turning ‘the real world into science fiction’. Max Renn enacts the kind of subjectivity that McLuhan posits as symptomatic of the ‘global village’: a postmodern subjectivity, colonized and reprogrammed by new media. domain Lady Frankenstein saves film budget money and reinforces the movie’s critique of corporate IP abuses in its very form. As a figure of the corporation, Frankenstein’s monster haunts the film. Chomsky, in another voice-over, characterizes the corporate entity’s legal status as an ‘amoral immortal’: ‘Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons, but then special kinds of persons, persons who have no moral conscience’. . Thus, the popular cultural image of Frankenstein’s monster – devoid of feeling, dubiously sentient, and single-mindedly destructive – has contemporary postcolonial significance as an ‘amoral immortal’ figure of the transnational corporation. Canada’s film Frankensteins thematize and formalize this connection between message and medium, in self-reflexive representations of globalization and its handmaids in communication technologies. Canadian Frankenphemes of globalization figure national anxieties over transnational cultural imperialism in figures and scenes of bilateral media consumption, in which globalized media systems violently colonize and even consume the everyday consumer of globalized media products. To close with a stereotypically Canadian gesture of diffidence, the corpus of Frankenstein adaptations explored here represents only one national site of cultural production, suggestive – but not representative – of other postcolonial adaptations of Frankenstein. Neither are such Frankenphemes restricted to film; a recent public opinion poll described its ‘statistical amalgam’ of ‘the qualities Canadians have told us they want in a leader’ as ‘an ideal political Frankenstein’ (Graves 2010). Across multiple media, and among myriad sites of postcolonial popular culture, much critical work remains to be undertaken in tracking the cultural functions of Frankenstein around our volatile global village.