Unintended Consequences

Has there ever been a novel with more resonance than Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”? 

Does anyone ever say in Act I, “Wait! Am I building a monster here?” They don’t, of course. (Though if your plan to win the Science Fair depends on robbing graves and repurposing corpses you really ought to check yourself.) Nobody ever asks themselves that question. Life would be a pretty boring movie if they did. 

You would think, though, at this point in human history we’d understand that there's a difference between "unintended consequences" and just not having really thought things through. 

All right. He'll be 8-feet tall, have the strength of ten men, and the brain of a convicted serial killer… Right! Let's do this!

At the very least, shouldn't we have better strategies for dealing with monsters? We make them on the regular it seems. Even so, Plan A always seems to be: Get another monster.

Someone get me Mechagodzilla on the phone! Or Mechagodzilla's agent! Anybody got signal? Any-

This plan (if we can call it that) only creates a never-ending cycle of monsters, of course, along with billions of dollars in collateral damage. There's a selfish vanity to it...

You created a monster in 1955 and now you're telling me I don't get a turn?

Or maybe there's a petty vanity to it…

Your monster is so fat, when he sits around the house, he literally sits around the house! Until my monster puts him on the You're Thin, Beautiful, and Dead diet!

Well, I suppose we always need a teardown before a rebuild. Wiping the slate clean would be a good thing if not for the hundreds of thousands of dead. (That's one big-ass omelet.) I suppose it's mostly supernumeraries. And the scientists responsible for the monster, of course. It's B-Movie logic. You make a giant monster tarantula, that giant monster tarantula is going to have you for Sunday brunch. Also, we hate science. Scientists are not to be trusted. Unless they look like Chris Pratt.

Maybe the bigger problems happen after the monster loses its metaphor. Does anyone watching "Godzilla vs. Kong" think, "We really should take better care of this planet we live on." (There's always a boring part in the movie where one of the monster-chow scientists says something about Earth blah blah as a lost Eden blah blah but we were out at the concession stand getting another large popcorn, Diet Coke, and Red Vines.) Do we think, "Nuclear war is just wrong." Because that's something you would think would be really hard to argue with, especially when you see what you get when you drop an A-Bomb on a city in a country where people need to fish to live. A fire-breathing monster that rises from the ocean's depths, plutonium fueled, completely and utterly pissed.

It's all fun and games when you're the apex predator. Not so much when you're just monster toejam. And that's pretty much what the Godzilla story is all about now. Toejam. And Frankenstein? He's just a buffonish extra in werewolf movies now. The notion that creation is a destructive act seems somehow undergraduate; fodder for a class discussion led by the professor's grad assistant who's hitting on that girl you like (That monster!) or dismissed as the nonsensical twaddle of liberal elites (Those monsters!).

Do we ever try to make sense of it; try to understand the monster and what its existence means? No, we grab up our torches and pitchforks and storm the castle; we become the monster-killing monster. We don't care about the monster's motivation, his back story, the moment in his life that made him a monster. Did Frankenstein ask to be assembled from spare parts, struck repeatedly by lightning (that had to hurt), and reanimated with green skin, those bolts in his neck, and that terrible haircut? No. He did not. 

We don't care. We don't care if the monster is actually a monster. It just has to be different. 

We're all just hammers, and everything else is a monster.