Of monsters and imagination in the society of the spectacle, by Hal Hartley

Abstract

Based on the Frankensteinian monster, whose predicates mirrors the contradictions of industrial capitalism, the excesses of science and modernity’s fractured individual’s psyche, this work purports to analyze the character of the Monster in the movie No such thing (2001), by American director Hal Hartley. The article focuses, particularly, on the discussion, suggested in the movie, about the place of the monster in a historical moment in which the media, the spectacle, and consumerism leave little space to an entity idealized by human imagination, an entity that translates, ultimately, the desires, anxieties and fears of a given society. The monster that usually kills and terrorizes men is treated in the movie as a product of an artistic imagination that expels the evils of the soul, whereas hypocrisy, utilitarianism and scientific rationality figure as the real monstrosities that assault the so-called postmodern world. Thus, the monster in No such thing, an immortal character attached to modern values, is, like Frankenstein, less monstrous than the contemporary, ultra-capitalist society in which he still survives and which has transformed him into its unpardonable victim.