Guillermo del Toro is one of the few celebrated directors of our time. This is not a question of merit—he’s no master, he’s never made a great movie—but a matter of the taste of our elites as expressed in the pop culture, in terms of reviews, awards, press, and all the glamorous attending events, as well as the money to make movies. As an artist, del Toro mixes an attempt at the wizardry of Spielberg with the taste for ugliness or the Gothic of Tim Burton, both of whom are far superior artists. And it is specifically the way del Toro has replaced Spielberg that shows a change in liberal taste, most obviously from comedy or family movie to horror.

　　It’s a change in del Toro as well. He used to make cooler movies like Blade II (2002) or his Hellboy duology (2004, 2008). The adolescent male taste for action subdued his ideological leftism but also set tasks for his Romantic imagination to strive after. His other fantasies, whether attempts at blockbuster franchises (Pacific Rim, 2013) or Gothic showcases for talented actors (Crimson Peak, 2015), were expensive failures. But since his big Oscar success with The Shape of Water (2017), a contemptible movie possessed by an hysterical feminism, del Toro has served as the court poet of a liberalism that cries fascism all the time.

　　Del Toro accordingly already has as many Oscars as Spielberg—three—and has just received another couple of nominations for his newest Netflix movie, Frankenstein, so he might end up the most awarded director alive. That’s a fashion nowadays; there are fewer artists, but they get as many as three or four nominations for a movie. In a way, del Toro really does deserve his applause more than others, because he cares more about the history of cinema, just like he cares more about practical effects, beautiful cinematography, or sets, and even tries to reconnect the art to the traditions of modern storytelling.

　　Hence going back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This is a much beloved story in Hollywood going back a century, and of course it appeals to the taste for fantasy that has grown to dominate cinema in the twenty-first century. Del Toro’s Frankenstein, however, is a warning about the military-industrial complex and transhumanism, i.e., Silicon Valley. The mad doctor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), in this new telling, is financed by an arms dealer, Harlander (Christoph Waltz), who turns out to want to live forever by medical-horror means. This is in one sense very realistic, war being the father of technology. In another sense, it’s much too far out of del Toro’s league, so we do not have any development of the problem here. The transhumanism theme is also topical, but strangely enough, del Toro both embraces it and refuses to elaborate on it!

　　The problem is that del Toro is imprisoned in his storytelling by the ideological hatred of his preferred audience. Consider the way he changes Frankenstein’s origin story: Victor had a surgeon stepfather (Charles Dance, acting like he’s back in Game of Thrones), a cruel taskmaster who made his wife (Mia Goth) miserable, and then she died. The young Frankenstein hated his stepfather and loved his mother—but in losing her ended up turning into his father. He demands control over everything, over life itself, experiencing beauty or love only as loss, a weakness, or a failure. Accordingly, del Toro has Isaac drink milk throughout the movie; this decayed Freudianism, which would have been a joke in a Woody Allen movie two generations back, is what’s left of psychological characterization in Oscar movies.

　　Something similar is done concerning the monster (Jacob Elordi), who is a neglected child, unloved by this cruel creator who wants to experiment on him (developing intelligence) and gets nowhere—fate repeating itself. Hence, we get the other big theme del Toro takes from decadent feminism, “intergenerational trauma.” The movie’s monster is much milder than he is in the novel; in fact, he’s a perpetual victim of manly cruelty, treated with tenderness only by people who themselves are marginal figures. That’s women like Elizabeth (again, Mia Goth in a dual role). And then an old blind man in a hut in the woods (David Bradley), in whose home he takes refuge, whose family he helps survive the winter, and from whom he learns to read, as well as to feel like a human being. He’s only a monster, in short, because he is treated as such—society made him this way. But the Oscars have righted the wrong by rewarding Elordi with a nomination!

　　Love of monsters married to sentimentality is, of course, a ubiquitous part of modern taste; just think of how many “retellings” of stories now involve making the bad guy into the good guy, the antagonist the protagonist … The transformation involves a remarkable arrogance about taming dark passions with an equally remarkable enthusiasm for reconstructing human beings. This notion of “Progress” would be more truthfully be reformulated thus: Mutilating human beings, i.e., making monsters, is necessary if we are to overcome everything that human beings have always been.

　　Del Toro delivers what his audience desires, to judge by the applause. But none of it is memorable, nor does it build up to anything.

　　In Frankenstein, that damnable past or history comprises war (Crimea), hunting, and the male invasion of the world more broadly. For example, the film starts with a Danish expedition to the North Pole, whose captain (Lars Mikkelsen) is as cruel as demented—the ship is stuck in the ice, the crew wants to return to safety and home, he won’t hear of it, he’d rather they die. … One could see here the evils of Enlightenment imperialism more broadly. Progress, what del Toro tries to sell his audience, involves all of the power of that Enlightenment, with none of the ugliness; it indeed requires turning Enlightenment against itself and thus fulfilling its deeper character. The female must replace the male.

　　Hence the recreation of Frankenstein’s bride Elizabeth as fiancée to his younger brother William (Felix Kammerer); she rejects Frankenstein’s monstrous desire to conquer nature and take control of life just as she rejects his perhaps incestuous advances. She studies insects; she says she loves small life forms. She’s presented as a pious Catholic, though that of course should not be interpreted as saying anything good about Christianity or God! She tends to the monster fearlessly and insists on its pronouns; she falls prey, finally, to Frankenstein, in the retelling.

　　The retelling of the story is harmed by a deep structural problem. It is told in three parts: the prologue with the ship stuck in the ice, attacked by the monster, then flashbacks, as Frankenstein tells his story, then back to the present, in which the monster tells his side of the story. Unfortunately, there’s no difference between the two points of view or temporal frames, nor are they plausibly the points of view of the two “male” protagonists, much less in the state in which they are when they tell their stories! It’s altogether an anti-patriarchy fit, sentimental without awareness of the true objects of human emotion, and completely devoid of concern for the power and dangers of making or technology. For all the quotes we get from poets like Shelley and Byron, neither is the language elevated nor the thought impressive. It’s as though the characters have been purged of what made them what they were so that they can voice a criticism of themselves. Accordingly, this is a Frankenstein, perhaps the first, that boys would not be able to find fascinating.

　　Indeed, the story is told for women, but told quite beautifully, as if the largely silenced characters played by Mia Goth could get a kind of revenge. The framing turns the very plot of the movie against the designs of their male tormentors, who actually drive the plot, so as to exact from them an ultimate surrender. Cinematographer Dan Lautesten is on his fifth del Toro production and his third Oscar nomination for the collaboration. Composer Alexandre Desplat, who has worked with many major directors, winning two Oscars out of eleven nominations, is on his third del Toro production and is also nominated, as was the sound team. Altogether, you can see what del Toro spent Netflix’s $120 million on. Leaving aside the cast, the talent behind the camera also got a number of nominations for their efforts: the extravagant Romantic and Gothic costumes, the production design, and the makeup.

　　Nor is this twisting of storytelling altogether surprising. Del Toro was always this way. The cry of fascism was the background to his most accomplished movie, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), but he cared more about storytelling then. Since then, everything has been reduced to wallowing in boring psychopathologies, to the extent that it’s not obvious whether anyone believes in these ideologies that tend to psychologize male attempts at the conquest of nature, but it’s obvious instead that no one dares break out when it comes to plot or characterization. I take this as a sign of decline in liberalism, of senility and sterility—del Toro delivers what his audience desires, to judge by the applause, but none of it is memorable, nor does it build up to anything, as we can see, about a decade into this artistic suicide.

　　Now, if we are to complete the analogy of the story to current tech worries—a wicked, motherless techno-lord, in partnership with an unscrupulous arms dealer profiteering off war, trying to conquer death and at the same time become a teacher, a source of intelligence to a creature made up of fragments of humanity destroyed by that very war technology—then we would have to say that the monster would be AI.

　　Further, we could complete the thought concerning the therapy that would be needed to fix manly obsession with conquest. It would be absolute tyranny over computers and research. This means censorship of information at every step from source (identifying every anonymous poster online) to material (algorithmic review of every keyword) to the form of digital activity (the algorithms, software, maybe even hardware that shape activity and communication on the Internet). This would be necessary both to prevent a monster like Dr. Frankenstein from appearing, i.e., an entrepreneur, and to save the Frankenstein monsters out there from “radicalization.” Moreover, all of these legal-bureaucratic correlatives of sentiment were either enacted in the previous decade or are now proposals to censor the internet or control access to it.

　　All of it is done, of course, in the name of care and safety on a global scale, given the global adventurism it seeks to cure. This would be ideology without any pretense of art. Since the art is less and less distinguishable from ideology nowadays, we might as well cut to the chase. I, for one, oppose such an ideology, not least for what it has done to the arts.