I have been incredibly depressed for the past several months. It was a gradual issue that really built up over a year until I was having the most unbearable weeks every week. I was always tired, I was always working, and I was always numb. That numbness was the key, because it wasn’t a single event that devastated me. It was a slow erosion until I didn’t recognize myself. Things I loved passed me by with little reaction. At one point I was going through old writing and found a piece I’d written stating, “To be me is to be bursting with joy while wearing all black.” I remember reading that and pausing, going, “I haven’t been bursting with joy in a long time.”
It was my job. I’ve been working in a call center for over a year now thinking it was going to be a temporary thing to tide me over, only to find every ounce of myself drained from either working long shifts or from beating my head against the brick wall that is the job market right now in what little free time I had. Jobs I’m overqualified for were sending me same day rejections or wouldn’t send me anything at all. My reward for surviving a miserable week at this job I hate was more misery staring at a computer filling applications or going to the few job interviews I managed to get to collect further rejections. I had very little time for the people I loved or the projects I wanted to work on. It was misery building on misery.
I had to change something. I had to change something or else, and the “or else” was really starting to worry me.
So I made the change. Despite insistence to not do anything until I had something else lined up, I went down to part time. I simply couldn’t care anymore. I would take the struggle of applying for medicaid over company insurance if it meant I got to breathe again; if it meant I got to feel like myself again—and my god, did I. I remember coming to the end of my last full work week, knowing I wouldn’t be here full time ever again. Like a geode, I felt my body crack open as I drove home. It was like a damn had busted and the person I used to be came out in a rush. This brilliant feeling of relief settled over me, and I smiled like I hadn’t smiled in forever.
In my state of distress, I had one thing to look forward to. My specialty subject is Frankenstein, and I had kept an eye on Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein since it was first announced a few years ago. He’s been trying to make a Frankenstein film for his whole career and if there’s anyone in this world who loves Frankenstein more than me, it’s him. I’d been counting down the days til the film became available to see in my local theater. It happened to be perfectly timed that I was seeing it the day after my last full time day. Finally free, I spent that morning and afternoon just resting, smiling, and getting ready to see Frankenstein that night. My friends knew me well enough that we made a whole evening out of it. I was absolutely vibrating with excitement.
This film is an absolute spectacle. The sets are astounding, the costumes are gorgeous, and the performances by the actors are incredible. It’s an interesting take on the original novel mixed brilliantly with elements of the original films from the 30’s. It has its issues, of course, and things that I would change here and there, but overall it was everything I could’ve asked for. I was astounded and absolutely delighted with every scene playing out on the screen in front of me.
(Warning: slight spoilers for the film and a trigger warning for slight suicidal ideation)
As affected as I was by the film, I didn’t cry during this movie. Or at least, I almost didn’t cry until the very very end. In this version of Frankenstein, the creature is not only made from death but cannot die, always healing and always having to live on even after himself and others try to end him. He comes for his creator, furious at being trapped in this life he didn’t want by a man who made him but refused to care for him. In their final confrontation, after a whole film of suffering, the two finally make peace with each other. Victor Frankenstein apologizes for his cruelty and his ignorance, claims his son, and implores him that if the creature cannot die, then what choice does he have but to live—finally, truly live? I’ll admit there was a little pin prick of tears in me, but the movie continues. Victor dies, the sailors of the Horizont turn their ship around to return home, and the creature goes off into the icy tundra by himself.
In the original novel of Frankenstein, the story ends with the creature taking Victor’s corpse into his arms and disappearing into the arctic tundra, promising to burn himself and Victor’s body on a funeral pyre. It’s a dark, emotionally complicated ending that speaks only to the pain and misery these characters suffer and put each other through til the end. Frankenstein, for all its wonderful construction, is not a hopeful story. In trying to find life in death, it only gives recourse to more death.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, however, ends with the creature walking off into the tundra, lowering his hood, and feeling the sunlight on his face. He smiles in that moment, breathing it all in.
And I absolutely lost it. I was inconsolable for a good five minutes. Every time I watch the film, it’s that scene that breaks me. I think about the year I survived, the misery I dragged myself through and tried to call life and how it only made me hate this facsimile of living I was enduring.
It was only now, here for the first time, that I was finally choosing to live, the way the Creature finally chooses to live. It’s the active step of going from thinking of life as just something to suffer through and praying that something better eventually happens to instead seeing life as something I can make for myself and make better for myself.
And I am. I am making my life better every way I can. It’s not without struggle, of course. I’m still navigating job listings, figuring out healthcare and finances on a much more strapped budget, but I can take that. I can choose to take that so that I can actually be myself again. I can live, really live in a way I feel like I haven’t in so so long.
When I came home from the film, I was asked, “Was it everything you wanted and more?” I can honestly say yes. It was everything I wanted and then unexpectedably also something I needed. In a story about life out of death, Guillermo chose to end on life. I think of it while I work on projects or make time for something I previously couldn’t—any time I feel my life back in my hands. I take down my hood and I feel the sun on my face.
I am alive. And that is my choice.
Sam is unsure what exact words describe them best: Lunatic has been used, Gothic Romantic is apt, and Big ol’ Nerd is reductive but true. Mostly they just like stories in whatever form stories can be found. Sam specializes in Frankenstein, running “The Uncanny Productions” on YouTube, but they also dabble with podcasts, singing, and theatre as well. They have a DVD collection that’s long outgrown its shelf, a coffin they use as a desk, and an unrelenting joy for things that are spooky, ridiculous, or magical.
