#dr. brenner

“011”

A colored pencil art project for school. Worked on it for about 7 hours total?

In the one-shot, the party explains various Christmas movies to El, and various Stranger Things characters are used to illustrate the plot.

A Christmas Carol features Dr. Brenner as Scrooge snd Mr. Clarke as Bob Cratchet.

The ghosts that show up to haunt ScroogeBrenner look kind of familiar.....

Image courtesy of @cara-ti-amo - go read their Bobgate theories!

No one walks like that. Totally on purpose.

That looks weird af

TWICE???

Part 24: The Monster Mash

PART 1 HERE | PART 2 HERE | PART 3 HERE | PART 4 HERE PART 5 HERE | PART 6 HERE | PART 7 HERE | PART 8 HERE PART 9 HERE | PART 10 HERE | PART 11 HERE | PART 12 HERE PART 13 HERE | PART 14 HERE | PART 15 HERE | PART 16 HERE PART 17 HERE | PART 18 HERE | PART 19 HERE | PART 20 HERE PART 21 HERE | PART 22 HERE | PART 23 HERE | PART 25 HERE PART 26 HERE | PART 27 HERE | PART 28 HERE | PART 29 HERE PART 30 HERE | PART 31 HERE

I know what you must be thinking: Wait a minute. It's not Halloween... But it is Super Bowl Sunday 😉

And V-Day is just around the corner -- the other major holiday that's all about candy.

Speaking of candy:

Last night's "Islands in the Stream" post led me down a new path of curiosity re: Season Two that's actually going to be very helpful in framing the next couple of posts that I have planned.

Because to understand what flowers are going to bloom, you need to understand what seeds were planted long before we even realized they were seeds.

And it all starts with this moment from S2 Ep 2:

Bob is cracking a joke to get Joyce to literally loosen up here, but his question proposes an interesting, perhaps unexpected pairing (to some) that at once makes sense and is "kinda hard to beat" --

Dracula and "Frankenstein"

The Vampire and the Monster

Like Bob and Henry...

Like Mike and Will.

Note that with this reading, "Shock Jock" might imply the demogorgon wasn't the only one who got "Frankensteined". Also, per the Duffers, vampirism is apparently very lame.

What's interesting is that the parallels don't end there, because as we've already established, Mike and Bob fit the vampire allegory for repressed queer desire rather well (credit again to @smalltown--byler!!).

So how do Henry and Will fit into the story of Frankenstein's Monster?

For starters, in the same Halloween episode we see El watching Universal's 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein at home:

Specifically, this scene from the movie (note this is movie-specific; it doesn't exist in Mary Shelley's novel). Warning, it's a sad one:

Here Little Maria's father (who wears a hat very much like Hopper's), leaves his daughter home alone with their cat while he's off to run some errands.

As Maria goes off to pick flowers by the pond, the Monster stumbles upon her. Even though she's initially shocked by his appearance, her manners take over and she introduces herself to him and asks if he'll be her playmate.

She then takes his hand and offers him a flower from the batch she's picked, which the Monster accepts with a cute little smile 🥹

If you read Part Seventeen, you know who I think the "flower" is. Also you'll notice even though El's favorite color is purple, the bouquet Mike brings has more of Will's yellow in there.

As they play, Maria tells the Monster she can make the flowers into boats, because they can float on the water. Here the flowers are compared to a method of transportation, much like El can open gates that allow people to travel between Hawkins and the UD. Not just that, the flowers can float on water.

The Monster is delighted by this discovery and does the same with his share of flowers... until he runs out.

And tragically -- not knowing any better -- the Monster throws Maria in the water, thinking she'll float too. Only she doesn't -- she drowns. The Monster has accidentally killed his only friend.

[Again, another hint that maybe Mike will have the fakeout death in Vol. 4, although this could be a parallel to Creelby/Bob's death. In the novel, the Creature actually saves a little girl from drowning, even though his actions are misinterpreted.]

In the movie, Maria's death is the catalyst for an angry mob that forms to go after the Monster, who they trap inside a burning building where he's presumably destroyed.

Meanwhile *Henry* Frankenstein (as he's named in the 1931 version) -- the real monster -- gets a happy ending: married with a child on the way.

But this is the Universal version of Frankenstein --

What about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? Or, the Modern Prometheus

The idea for Mary's novel (with which she would found the sci-fi genre at only nineteen) came from a discussion with her husband Percy Shelley and their friend Lord Byron about creation and human nature.

The conversation stemmed from the theories of anatomist and contemporary William Lawrence, who believed that "the origins of life were based in Nature, not divine will. Lawrence argued that there was no such thing as a 'super-added' force like the soul, and that human beings were made of bone, muscle, blood, and nothing more."

[Source: Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon]

While the men found the prospect of this Promethean theme of “Man” creating life exciting, "Mary would later say, in a preface to her revised edition of Frankenstein, that she found the principle 'supremely frightful'[...]" (Gordon, 187)

This makes sense, given Mary knew firsthand as a woman and a mother. She had grown up haunted by the knowledge she'd "killed" her brilliant mother, writer, philosopher, and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (who died of childbed fever). When Mary wrote Frankenstein (again, aged nineteen), she was already a mother twice over and had lost one of those babies two weeks after birth. She would later go on to lose two more children to illness -- her son William aka Willmouse, and daughter Clara.

So, while the men in her life reveled in the idea of creating life without really pondering its consequences, Mary was all too familiar with the burden, the risks, and the horror of growing and carrying a life within your own body, only to have to force it out into (and onto) a dangerous world.

Imagine how frightful she'd find the works of Dr. Martin Brenner, who not only foolishly tried to find proof of life in other dimensions* and caused a hole to rip in reality in the process, but did so through abusing a traumatized child (already possessed by the MF) and using him to create more children like him, who he would also abuse in hopes of turning them into weapons. Monsters.

*It should also be noted that the Project Rainbow sequence at the beginning of TFS is not dissimilar from the framing device of Frankenstein, where we see Victor end up on an expedition ship in the Arctic, in a revenge quest to find the Monster.

Dr. Martin Brenner isn't just a Modern Prometheus, he's a modern Doctor Frankenstein.

At the very least though, Brenner isn't frightened by his "creations" the way *Victor* Frankenstein is (and Victor Creel, it would seem). Rather than turning away from Henry and El, he sees them through their most "monstrous" moments, viewing it as "progress" (to what end is still a mystery).

Although it took four seasons to finally learn Henry's story (even though it was clearly in the works since S2, if not the the end of S1??), we see El embodied as "the Monster" for much of the show.*

*Subbing in for Henry/Will once again.

Like the Monster in Shelley's novel, we see El learning how to speak, read, live, and think for herself... all building to this crucial confrontation with "Papa" in S4:

Of course, "Papa" isn't the only Monster -- El's other "papa" is too.

Henry Frankenstein Creel, who has been creating his own Monsters to presumably continue the Mind Flayer's work --

Starting with Will.

What drives Frankenstein's desire for revenge (leading him to the North Pole) is the Creature killing his best friend *Henry* Clerval (who's been interpreted as being a little more than a friend 👀), his fiancee Elizabeth Lavenza, and (indirectly) his father Alphonse.

The quest leaves Victor so weak he dies from the exhaustion. When the Creature finds out his creator has died, he mourns him -- telling the captain of the North Pole expedition, *Robert* Walton, that he plans on self-immolating on a pyre before exiting the ship.

The Creature's actual fate is left unknown.

One more detail from Shelley's Frankenstein worth mentioning: The female Creature. The "Bride of Frankenstein".

Midway through the novel, the Creature asks his creator to make him a female companion. Someone like him -- to give him the company and understanding he needs. Frankenstein consents to it, but while he and Clerval are working on her, he is suddenly struck with fear over the possibility the Creatures might reproduce, and destroys the female Creature before she is even fully realized. FYI, this is the act that triggers the Monster's murder spree.

A male Monster is fine, but a female one is heinous. "Male" creation is miraculous, but "female" creation is grotesque.

Yet, like Hopper points out to El in S2, “Of course you have a mother. You couldn’t really be born without one.”

Because, as of now, birth is the one thing that can't be taken from women people with uteruses. They are essential to the act of human creation. And while that seems beautiful in concept, this is actually an unfortunate reproductive reality given the world we live in. Brenner knew this, which is why he and, allegedly, Dr. Kay had to recruit pregnant women to create their human weapons.

However, once El discovers she has a "Mama", she immediately tracks her down and seeks to make contact with her long-lost mother, much like a certain TFS character (who may also be a "Bride of Frankenstein")...

Sorry, I couldn't find any pics of Patty's Mother aka Mother Goose in TFS, so I used her substitute mom Queen Ella Fitzgerald.

...Only to discover Terry had her child and the literal act of birth ripped away from her (as Brenner performs a C-section and pulls baby Jane out himself). She's then treated as "crazy", dispensable to the scientists at Hawkins Lab -- her brain fried by Brenner when she finally fights back and returns for her daughter. A woman now trapped in her own mind, stuck in a carousel of memories (for now).

But what does Terry decide to do for her daughter in that moment? Send her Kali's way.

That'll be another post. But first, I want to continue on the topic of the supposed "Monster Mothers", the women who actually birthed "Frankenstein's" monsters....

Stay tuned.