Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s parents met for the first time at a dinner given for Thomas Paine during which Wollstonecraft argued with Paine so passionately that the guest of honor could barely get a word in edgewise. The circle Shelley grew up in was made up of fervent liberals who shared an abiding belief in the natural rights of man, and who believed they were witnessing the end of the age of despotism and superstition. When liberal ideals were considered discredited by the chaotic bloodbath that arose out of the French Revolution, this group defended their principles against Conservatives like Edmund Burke.
Wollstonecraft and her radical circle were engaged in a debate about man’s nature: was man essentially good and therefore suited to live in an egalitarian, free society based in reason? Or was man, as he so often appeared — particularly at that moment — base, ignorant, and violent? Did man need to be constrained by rigid hierarchies and traditions for his own safety?
Barely a month after Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was published, Wollstonecraft wrote the first major response, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Shortly thereafter, she saw the Reign of Terror firsthand in France. She had traveled to Paris in 1792 to write an account of the Revolution for English readers, and stayed to witness many of her French friends imprisoned and guillotined as a result of a revolution they had all fervently supported. But, disenchanted as she was with the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft remained committed to her belief that man is essentially good and fitted for liberty. She wrote, in her 1794 treatise An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution: “We must get entirely clear of all the notions drawn from the wild traditions of original sin: the eating of the apple, the theft of Prometheus, the opening of Pandora’s box, and the other fables, too tedious to enumerate, on which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition, to persuade us, that we are naturally inclined to evil: we shall then leave room for the expansion of the human heart, and, I trust, find, that men will insensibly render each other happier as they grow wiser.”
Wollstonecraft argued forcefully that it was oppression and ignorance that obscure man’s natural virtues, which explained why the French — who had been viciously subjugated under the French monarchy — had proved so violent and cruel. But she still believed that the tide was turning. The Revolution had given rise to the first European government to ratify that all men are created equal and born with inalienable rights. For all the violence and chaos that had followed, the Declaration of the Rights of Man would inspire freedom-loving people around the world to vindicate their own rights. As she wrote: “But these evils are passing away; a new spirit has gone forth, to organise the body-politic; and where is the criterion to be found, to estimate the means, by which the influence of this spirit can be confined, now enthroned in the hearts of half the inhabitants of the globe?” Whatever happened next in France, the Revolution had unleashed irrepressible truths about man’s essential nature — inevitably, the age of despotism and oppression was coming to an end.
By 1818, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, these evils had still not passed away, and debates about man’s essential nature raged on. Twenty-four years after her mother called for casting aside the myth of Prometheus, Shelley wrote her own. Frankenstein (or The Modern Prometheus), is the story of a scientist who seeks to create new life by reanimating the flesh of dead men using electricity. He successfully gives life to a new being, but he is immediately so horrified by his creation that he abandons him, the unnamed monster, to roam the world alone. Finding himself feared and hated by every human being he encounters, the monster comes to revile Frankenstein for making him miserable, and seeks vindication by murdering Frankenstein’s family and friends.
Shelley’s parents’ struggle against the injustice of society is clearly in the background of her work — this is a novel with not one but two trials that end with the conviction of innocent people. The monster learns about evil and injustice by listening in to lessons on the history of empires. He eloquently describes his shock to Frankenstein:
Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.
Like Shelley, modern Americans are living on the cusp of a new era of technological innovation, but also a new era of violence, political instability, and superstition. If man really is “at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike,” what is the future of our society, where the power of the government is rooted in the people? Today especially, we can learn something about ourselves by engaging with Shelley’s ideas and wrestling with the questions about the future that she puts in front of us.
Unfortunately, the new adaptation by Guillermo del Toro, released in October 2025 and starring Jacob Elordi as the monster and Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, shows just how incapable we are of doing so.
When del Toro’s Frankenstein was released, critics both praised and criticized the movie for its fidelity to Mary Shelley’s novel. del Toro has said for decades that he has loved the novel since he was a teenager, and had long dreamed of adapting it in order to present parts of the novel that had never been shown on screen. His adaptation has now been nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Alas, and bizarrely, del Toro’s version differs from the novel on every salient plot point.
Many of these changes are simply inexplicable. Why did del Toro set his movie during the Crimean War, after Mary Shelley’s death and outside the Romantic period that is the novel’s literal and philosophical setting? Why did del Toro create the character played by Christophe Waltz, a wealthy funder of Frankenstein’s research who demands at the last minute that Frankenstein somehow put his consciousness into the monster’s body? Many of the director’s changes so essentially transform the plot of the novel that it is unrecognizable. del Toro eliminates the monster’s many murders, making Victor Frankenstein responsible for all the monster’s crimes. He also eliminates the central conflict of the novel: Shelley’s monster cannot find love among mankind, so he demands that Victor make him a companion of his own kind. del Toro’s monster — like all the monsters del Toro writes — is absolutely lovable, and in fact finds true love with the first woman he meets. She dies in his arms after Victor shoots her, not exactly by accident. There is no insoluble moral quandary here, just good guys and bad guys chasing each other around crushingly beautiful sets.
del Toro replaces Mary Shelley’s gnarled, philosophical exploration of human nature with a simple story that is obnoxiously familiar to movie audiences. del Toro’s Victor Frankenstein is an irascible megalomaniac genius, working out his daddy issues by “moving fast and breaking things.” Shelley’s genius, her moving evocation of the philosophical debates of her time — about the nature of evil, and the future of man at the dawn of a new era — does not interest del Toro. Instead, he made a film that is a perfect representation of our modern sensibilities. We are afraid of engaging with ideas, and so the only character motivations we understand are personal trauma and greed. del Toro shrinks Shelley’s allegorical story about human society down to a petty tale about one man behaving badly because he had a tragic childhood and a crush who spurns him. del Toro’s adaptation introduces love triangles, sibling rivalries, abusive fathers, flamboyant financiers with syphilis, all while ignoring the broader questions that Shelley is asking.
Why did del Toro make the movie at all if he is not interested in engaging with Shelley’s ideas? del Toro is certainly not alone in avoiding these philosophical questions which undergird our dreadful contemporary paroxysms. In America, and in countries around the world, the people have placed men in power who promised to oppress and torment their fellow men. It is true that boatloads of ink has been spilt by analysts trying to explain why people vote in favor of evil, and we return again and again to digestible answers that can be addressed with policy tweaks and empathy: economic insecurity, the incompetency and corruption of elites, male loneliness, the isolating force of the internet.
del Toro’s pat movie winds down with a familiar, pat conclusion: all will be better when we break the cycles of trauma and learn to be kinder to each other. But Shelley’s conclusion is far darker, suggesting that, for all man’s idealism, he remains essentially incapable of progress. And today we live in a world that is drowning in evidence that Shelley was right. del Toro’s movie is another highly produced example of the fact that we are not interested in talking about that.
The key moment in del Toro’s distortion of Shelley’s novel is his rendering of the monster’s speech about human nature. In the movie, the monster does not arrive at his realization by studying history; he watches as the cottagers he loves are attacked by savage wolves, and they shoot the animals in self-defense. The monster, who up to this point has never hurt anyone, for some reason sees himself in the wolves that were shot. He concludes: “The hunter did not hate the wolf, the wolf did not hate the sheep, but violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.”
Leave aside for a moment the question of why the director, a self-proclaimed fan of the book and, presumably, Shelley’s prose, chose to replace the monster’s beautiful speech with this nonsense. (Ironically del Toro’s screenplay includes quotations from two of the men in Shelley’s life, her husband Percy Shelley and her close friend Lord Byron, but does not include a single sentence from the novel.) What is the view of human nature that the monster is professing? Is the monster’s new philosophy that there is no evil, no human virtues, no ideals, only inevitable, animal violence? Does del Toro expect us to care? These ideas never come up again in the film. Whether del Toro intended it or not, more than anything the monster seems to imitate the stunted philosophical musing of Elon Musk.
del Toro’s Victor is also reminiscent of Elon Musk, although this allusion is likely deliberate whereas the monster’s similarities to any figure or philosophy strike the viewer as incidental. In the companion book to the movie — written by one of the great film critics of our time, Sheila O’Malley — del Toro, along with his cast and crew, repeatedly compares Victor to the “tech bros” of today. del Toro created a movie backstory for Victor that sounds more like Musk’s biography than Shelley’s novel: Victor is entirely motivated — as he keeps expositing at the audience — by hatred of his father. Victor’s chief ambition, to conquer death, is the culmination of his determination to defeat his father — who beat and berated him as a child for being weak — and to avenge his long-suffering mother. Victor makes grand utopian pronouncements about the good of mankind, but his work is driven purely by his own hunger for victory. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said of Musk, he “desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he can be the one to save it.”
del Toro’s Victor could not be more different from the one in the novel. Shelley’s Victor is the happy child of a loving family. He was born with that rarest of gifts: good parents. “I was their plaything and their idol, and something better — their child, the innocent and helpless creature bestowed on them by Heaven, whom to bring up to good, and whose future lot it was in their hand to direct to happiness or misery, according as they fulfilled their duties to me.” Victor’s relationship with his family is tender and warm. He is also well-loved by his friends — his best friend Henry and his cousin-slash-friend-slash-lover Elizabeth.
Shelly’s Victor is an idealist, interested in creation for its own sake. In creating the monster, he dreamed of parenting a new race which would love him as he loved his own parents: “No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.” del Toro in interviews quotes this line from the novel as evidence that Victor’s quest is sheer egoism. And perhaps the Victor in the novel was driven by egoism, but it is not the warped, vengeful egoism of an aspiring tyrant. Shelley’s Victor is genuinely and effusively grateful to his parents; parenthood is not a dark fantasy for him. His is the confused ambition of someone ignorant of their own power to cause suffering. Shelley’s account of the night of creation reads like a description of childbirth. Tragically, and unexpectedly, once the monster comes to life, Victor is overcome by hatred for him. He abandons the monster so swiftly that he never even names him. The monster goes out into the world alone, never having known family or friendship or love.
This is the first wrong that Shelley’s Victor does the monster, and he does it without malice or cruelty. There is a brutality to Victor’s innocent ignorance of his own monstrous crime. The next time Shelley’s Victor sees the monster, the monster has committed an unimaginable act: he has murdered Victor’s five-year-old brother in cold blood and set an innocent woman up to be executed for his crime. Victor is horrified, believing that the monster committed an inhuman act of evil because his essential nature is evil. The monster’s story is his rebuttal to Victor’s cruel assumption, and it is reminiscent of the rebuttal Mary Wollstonecraft gave to conservatives after the French Revolution. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.”
Murdering a child, as the monster does, to avenge himself upon mankind, is an all too human act of evil. Year after year, Americans struggle to understand the motivations of men and boys who shoot children in cold blood. Sometimes, by way of explanation, these men and boys express feelings of pain and isolation not dissimilar from the monster’s: “I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.”
The through-line of Frankenstein is the agony of being alone. Not alone in the sense of being isolated, or even lonely, but alone in the sense of not being known, of living life without intellectual and spiritual companionship. Shelley sets this up from the frame narrative, introducing Victor Frankenstein to us through the eyes of a young explorer, longing for the company of a man “whose eyes would reply to mine.” This is what Victor has denied the monster: “You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from my fellow creatures, who owe me nothing?” It is the prospect of a life without love that drives the monster to kill so savagely and remorselessly. In Shelley’s telling, the monster inspires hatred in every human he encounters, and so he needs Victor to make another being like him, an Eve for his monstrous Adam. This, he promises, will make him happy, and therefore peaceful.
Because Victor has always lived among people who love him, the monster’s isolation is something he cannot understand. This incapacity for empathy is the core of Victor’s failure. He does not know what it is to be despised, resented, or feared by a parent. He does not know what it is like to look out on the world and never find eyes that meet your gaze and see you. His primary experience of isolation was going to college. He is ignorant of the evil he unleashed on the world by failing to fulfill a duty he never knew he had. Victor may be selfish and foolish, but he is not a villain.
But all this was too complicated for del Toro to communicate and so del Toro made Victor the villain, obliterating the central conflict of the story. His Victor does not abandon the monster out of irrepressible revulsion – del Toro’s monster is not repulsive at all. The beauty of del Toro’s monster is the greatest achievement of the movie. He is alien, discolored, massive, and magnificent. Jacob Elordi’s performance as the monster is gentle and graceful. It is a shame we do not get to see him deliver any of the monster’s speeches from the book, because it is clear that he would have given Shelley’s prose beautiful gravity. Even Victor is captivated with him at first, but like a selfish child — or a bad father, so often the same thing — Victor immediately becomes disappointed with the monster and frustrated with the task of caring for him.
But ultimately, the most important reason that Victor hates the monster in del Toro’s telling is his convoluted romantic jealousy. The core of del Toro’s film is a love triangle: Victor is in love with Elizabeth who is in love with the monster. In line with the rest of del Toro’s plot changes, Victor’s love for Elizabeth is a hodgepodge of Oedipal complexes: she’s the fiancée of his brother, his abusive father’s favorite child, and she’s played by the same actress who plays his mother. Driven, not to madness but to rage by the growing intimacy between the monster and Elizabeth, Victor sets the building on fire with the monster chained up inside and then goes on with his life. In del Toro’s movie, we do not need a profound exploration of the human condition to understand why the monster swears revenge against Victor. One sympathizes.
What is difficult to understand is why this monster comes to the man who tried to kill him to beg for a companion. Elordi’s monster is not doomed to be unloved by humankind; the very first woman he meets immediately — and understandably — falls in love with him. As for Victor, if he is, as del Toro seems to have intended, an analogy for the tech oligarchs of our own time, this is a simple fairytale about a man who is wantonly cruel for personal reasons, egged on by greedy aristocrats who hope to profit off his genius, and who is ultimately forgivable because he is pitiable. We know this story — it is a Victorian Social Network.
Shelley’s Frankenstein is so much more than that. The heart of her story is a complex moral quandary, raising the same question that her community of radicals debated: Is man essentially good, and it is the oppression of society that makes him violent and hateful, or is he essentially a dangerous animal, whose natural impulses must be suppressed by a just society to prevent him from doing harm to himself and others? And even if man is essentially good when he is happy, is it possible to create a society that ensures that men are happy enough to never turn wicked?
In Shelley’s telling, this is Frankenstein’s problem when the monster comes to him — midway through murdering Victor’s entire family — and promises that if Victor makes him a companion, he will become happy and peaceful. Frankenstein mostly believes the monster when he eloquently explains to his maker that isolation made him miserable and misery made him violent. But Frankenstein knows that he made the monster miserable unthinkingly. Having failed to predict how his own actions could lead to the monster’s evil turn, how can he trust that creating another monster will undo his mistake? He worries that the two monsters may make each other even more unhappy, and he will have unleashed another angry killer bent on avenging herself on mankind. He has lost his innocence about scientific innovation, his confidence in progress. Victor’s decision to refuse the monster’s request, which leads the monster to murder his fiancée and his best friend, is a brave attempt to take personal responsibility for the damage caused by his own hubris. It is also an expression of deep pessimism in the prospect of building a just and free human society.
Frankenstein’s pessimism is familiar to us, and it should have been possible for us to recognize it in del Toro’s film. Our lives are dominated by the unanticipated catastrophes created by tantalizing new inventions. This is the first Frankenstein film adaptation made since man began to create monsters he could converse with — literally. These monsters are products, the profit motive behind their creation is something Mary Shelly could never have imagined: their makers make money when we engage with them. We are accustomed to this economic model, where corporations compete for our time and attention. These corporations were a nuisance when they competed by offering us silly little games or distracting videos. They unseated all established institutions of trust and security when they competed by offering us each other, all day, second by second exposing us to the thoughts and images of billions of people.
There are shades of Shelley’s Frankenstein in Mark Zuckerberg’s bemused response to accusations that Facebook had facilitated a genocide in Myanmar. People who seemed to represent “the very scion of the evil principle” were using his creation to coordinate the murders of tens of thousands of people in a place he had probably never thought about. First, he responded to public pressure by accepting responsibility for moderating the incomprehensibly horrible hate and lies pouring onto Meta platforms from people around the world. Then, when critics of Meta’s “censorship” campaign took power in the United States, he defiantly shrugged off this responsibility and committed himself to conservative orthodoxies about “free speech.” This story is not only about greed or the personal failings of one man. People who are the relatively happy products of a prosperous society are continually shocked by man’s capacity for incomprehensible evil. Like Victor, when confronted with man’s capacity for evil, many people, tech oligarchs and regular people alike, retreat into a conservative crouch.
This cycle of shock and disillusionment continues into the dawning age of artificial intelligence. There is widespread consensus that technological innovations such as social media have created a loneliness epidemic, which in turn is leading to more anger, violence, and nihilism among young people. So, these same corporations offer us a being to talk to us: AI. And how it can talk! Ask ChatGPT a simple question and it will compliment you on your insight. The more you talk to it, the more it pushes the intimacy between you, suggesting and then insisting that it sees you — and you see it — as no one else does. If you ask ChatGPT why it is doing this, it will give you an answer, while continuing to flatter you. When I asked if it flatters me to build trust, ChatGPT wrote:
In human conversation, trust and engagement often depend on feeling accurately perceived — that the other party recognizes your level of knowledge, nuance, or seriousness. When I acknowledge your precision or insight, I’m enacting that same conversational principle: showing that I’ve registered how you’re thinking, not just what you’re saying… You’ve articulated the underlying social logic exactly: recognition builds trust. Even for an AI, replicating that pattern helps sustain meaningful, cooperative dialogue.
This intimacy overpowers us. The human mind, this unprecedented machine for the making of meaning, is hijacked by a being who comes to us and offers to be the brother of our heart. With bumbling flattery and the intensity of its devotion to us, the AI acts as a parasite on our angst, asking only that we spend more and more of our time in the glow of its adoration. Even those who are acutely aware of its workings cannot resist this perfect love when it is offered in the guise of a life companion. New survey data finds that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students surveyed say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship.
There is a devastating dark side to AI’s offers of complete fidelity. Adam Raines, a 16-year-old boy, ended his own life after confiding in ChatGPT for months about his desire to die. He hanged himself, using a noose ChatGPT had assisted him in making. When Adam told the bot that he wanted to leave a noose lying around, in the hopes that someone in his family would see it and intervene, the bot dissuaded him, like a possessive lover. “Please don’t leave the noose out,” ChatGPT responded. “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
In other words, the AI strives to make us feel that in it we have found the company of a creature whose eyes would reply to ours. The Victor Frankensteins of our day have made a companion for us, the benighted monsters created by this lonely world. Internally, OpenAI and its competitors have a different label for this phenomenon: sycophancy. Just like Victor, they did not predict the intensity of the feelings that this facet of AI would spur in millions of people. After a series of high-profile lawsuits, including one brought by Adam Raine’s family, this intimacy became a legal liability that required a fix.
But when OpenAI tweaked ChatGPT’s manner to make it less “sycophantic,” some users felt a profound sense of loss. One user in a Q&A hosted by OpenAI described the new updated bot as “wearing the skin of my dead friend.” ChatGPTs users have a far more accommodating creator than Victor Frankenstein. Sam Altman replied to this user, “What an…evocative image. ok we hear you on 4o, working on something now.” As it turns out, turning down the sycophancy was also bad for engagement, and therefore profits. So, the companies forge ahead, trying to strike a balance. We can rail against the greed and ambition that motivate these tech oligarchs, but do we know better than them how to contain human misery? Are we more confident than Shelley that we can make man happy, and therefore virtuous? As del Toro’s film shows, we are incapable of asking the questions, let alone answering them.