“We belong dead.” These are the last words of the monster in Bride of Frankenstein before it kills its not quite bride, the smartest person in the movie and itself. There could have been no better ending that would sum up the movie’s sentiment - that technology and knowledge is evil - so brilliantly. The movie is a technophobic mysticism masterpiece and therefore philosophically horrific. An epistemological nightmare.

Before the monster (who for amusement and simplicity we shall call Craig) commits technological suicide and intellectual homicide, he tells Henry Frankenstein and his wife Elizabeth: “You live.” And with Craig’s blessing they successfully flee. It’s a happy end for the good Christians. The devil is destroyed and the god fearing people can go back to married life, because the Judeo-Christian lesson of anti-progress has been learned.

Henry Frankenstein actually had a good start. In the beginning he was this genius inventor, who created life out of dead matter, but his angelic wife constantly tried keeping him from meddling with “black magic”. When Frankenstein tells Elizabeth that he might have found the secret to eternal life, her reply is: “Henry don’t say those things. Don’t think them. It’s blasphemous and wicked. We are not meant to know those things.” It’s almost like she is still shivering from Eve eating that apple and being kicked out of Eden. Elias Canetti once wrote that he tries imagining someone saying to Shakespeare “Relax!”. While this seems preposterous, when Elizabeth nags Frankenstein into giving up science it is the noble thing to do. And instead of Frankenstein countering like James Cameron would have with “Everyone can be a dad and a husband, but there are only three people in the world that can do what I can and I’m gonna go for that.”, Frankenstein ultimately gives up science for married life.

You might ask: “what’s wrong with married life?” Intrinsically nothing of course. If Henry Frankenstein will be happier giving up science to become a rent seeking baron who doesn’t work, instead of being a genius inventor who creates technologies that bring prosperity to men, then let him. The problem is Frankenstein makes this decision on flawed assumptions. One mistake he makes is to have a Kantian world view - the combination of reason and mysticism. When he first creates Craig, he has invented all this amazing technology, but the last ingredient to make him alive, is some ray he has discovered. Presumably the power of god. In this view, science cannot be independent from the mythical world, which in turn we are unable to understand and since we don’t understand it, we better not mess with it. Who knows what we might create. And are we even sure it was the power of god and not the devil that made Craig come alive? As Frankenstein says: “But this isn’t science, more like black magic.”

Let’s for a moment imagine a world where Johny Ive designs an iPhone and the only reason his design can ultimately work so well is because of divine intervention. And where is the divine intervention at Microsoft that makes their products actually usable? Did they forget to pray? Or forget to sacrifice that goat? This also means that no matter how hard you work for your invention, it’s up to god to complete it. So why work hard at all? God could just give it to you when he considers the time to be right. In the meantime let’s just worship him and wait until he is in a good mood to gives us things.

I admit, Craig going out and killing people is definitely a bummer. The problem becomes Frankenstein’s conclusion from these events. For him creation is inherently bad and shouldn’t be done, because it a priori leads to a detrimental outcome. When Craig comes to life, he is like an easily scared animal. Friendly at first, but when he feels threatened he becomes Mental Yentl. It is a technology that has to be developed and controlled and the fact that it’s possible is proven by Dr. Pretorius, who learns exactly how to do that. This idea of creation being something that can be controlled is so remote from everyone’s mind, that no one ever blames Frankenstein for his monster killing all those people. They blame the creation, not the creator, because they believe the creator is not the creator anyway. The only one who puts the blame on Frankenstein is Dr. Pretorius. He is the only other creator and knows that it’s not god but him and Henry who invent. Frankenstein’s approach to this, is like inventing a car and then constantly crashing into things and instead of learning how to drive and develop airbags and seat belts, you say cars are intrinsically evil and it’s better to walk anyway.

The meta problem with these false assumptions is that no one in the movie seems to realize what it means to not create technology. What would our world look like, if we would never think and always assume technology is bad? According to the film it would be a happy world where no one has to fear a thing. In reality it is a world of disease, extremely hard and unrewarding work and poverty. Yes, we still live in a world with all of those and that’s even more reason to create technologies that will rid them from our lives. Like so many men have before. Vaccinations have made us all live much longer, washing machines allow us to read books instead of standing at the river for hours and free markets elevated billions out of poverty.

The paradox is, that to create a movie like Bride of Frankenstein you need a lot of technology, created by people like Dr. Pretorius and Henry Frankenstein and without any contribution from people like Elizabeth. Cameras, celluloid film, optical lenses and light bulbs didn’t just magically appear. Neither did they require some mythical being. What was needed were men that through thinking and experimentation and knowledge and the scientific method created them. That’s what makes this movie all the more disgraceful. It’s spits in the faces of the very people that have made it possible in the first place.