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Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

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Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada's postcolonial popular culture

Mark A. McCutcheon

To cite this article: Mark A. McCutcheon (2011) Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada's postcolonial popular culture, Continuum, 25:5, 731-742, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2011.590577

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2011.590577

Published online: 03 Oct 2011.

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Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada’s postcolonial popular culture

Mark A. McCutcheon*

Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Athabasca University, Athabasca, Canada

This essay analyzes the cultural functions of Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in postcolonial popular culture. Focusing on the case of Canadian film production, I begin by contextualizing Canadian film as a postcolonial site of globalized popular culture, characterized by ‘technological nationalism’. In this context, I consider three Canadian films that adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to represent globalization. David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) borrows from Frankenstein and Marshall McLuhan to critique new media in the ‘global village’; Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds (2000) quotes from the Universal Frankenstein film; and Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot’s The Corporation (2003) uses Frankenstein as a recurring analogy for the modern corporation. This essay signals a starting point for a more interculturally and transnationally comparative investigation of how Frankenstein adaptations provide a powerful repertoire of representational devices for a postcolonial theory of globalization.

In July 2007, I was at a Canadian Studies conference in Marburg, Germany, where the

opening presentations both referred to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A team of graduate

students read excerpts from the stories of Inuit author Alootook Ipellie, one of which

involved shamans assembling their spirit helpers into ‘our version of Frankenstein’

(1993, 37 – 40). Then, in the keynote address, Paul Adams talked about transnational ideas

of home in the context of what he called ‘the Frankenstein of globalization’. Following

the connections inspired by this scene of unexpectedly conjoined images, I suggest

that representing globalization as a Frankenstein monster is not so much uniquely

Canadian as productively postcolonial with reference to Canadian popular culture. First,

I contextualize Canadian film as a postcolonial site of globalized popular culture,

characterized by a tradition of ‘technological nationalism’ (Charland 1986, 206). I then

discuss the appearance of Frankenstein figures in three Canadian films: Videodrome

(1983), Possible Worlds (2000), and the documentary The Corporation (2003). This essay

signals a starting point for a more interculturally and transnationally comparative

investigation of how Frankenstein adaptations provide a powerful repertoire of

representational devices for a postcolonial theory of globalization.

Canadian popular culture: ‘a paradigm case of media imperialism’

As Aniko Bodroghkozy writes (2002, 570), ‘Canada has been served up as a paradigm

case of media imperialism . . . . according to much of Canadian communications theory,

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*Email: [email protected]

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 25, No. 5, October 2011, 731–742

Canada wallows in dependency and dubious sovereignty’. On the political, economic, and

cultural fronts, Canada is dependent on US interests and industry in material ways that

compromise the northern state’s political sovereignty and render its relationship to its

southern neighbour ambivalent and conflicted. This relationship is analyzed anxiously

from north of the 49th parallel, while being ignored or misrecognized from the south:

‘Americans have an amazing tendency to assimilate Canadian work to American

experience . . . . Canada doesn’t exist as a national entity to the U.S.’ (Greyson, quoted in

Marks 2005, 198).

In a global context, the US entertainment industry has become almost synonymous

with ‘popular culture’ itself. Hollywood was one of the first globalized cultural industries,

and Canada’s relationship with Hollywood is long-standing and conflicted (see Gasher

2002). Canada provides Hollywood with cheap and abundant film industry services,

labour, and resources. Canadian shooting locations are not just conveniently close to

Hollywood, but actively promote themselves as stand-ins for US locations, as sites primed

for colonization, ‘largely unpopulated place[s] full of scenic wonders and infinite

resources’ (Rutherford 2005, 106). Turning from production to consumption, English-

speaking Canadians consume far more American than domestic media products. The

predominance of US content on Canadian screens is about more than what Bodroghkozy

rightly calls ‘our taste for American popular culture’ (2002, 570); it is an effect of neo-

imperial trade economics: US media companies export their products to foreign carriers

for a fraction of what they charge US carriers, making it cheaper for Canadian broadcasters

to buy US imports than finance domestic production, however popular that domestic

content may be.

As Peter Grant and Chris Wood (2004, 22) explain, these ‘curious economics’ of

globalized popular culture have occasioned state policies that protect cultural sovereignty

and diversity of expression, which would otherwise be destroyed by narrow adherence to

free-market ideology. Canada has kept its own cultural sector exempt – so far – from free-

trade agreements, and developed a policy toolkit for stimulating domestic popular cultural

production, on the premise that state investment in cultural production builds nationalism

and sovereignty (Grant and Wood 2004, 386 – 88). Canada’s toolkit of public media,

content quotas, and funding agencies they describe also includes some instruments for

supporting Canadian scholarly as well as popular culture; however, Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funding for Canadian cultural studies research has

only been formalized within the last decade. This belated recognition of Canadian cultural

studies is a symptom of the field’s own postcolonial historical neglect by a national

intellectual elite that has privileged Arnoldian ideals of culture over and against American

industries of entertainment, seen as a threat to Canada’s national sovereignty (Rutherford

2005, 105).

A postcolonial perspective on Canadian popular culture

In light of English Canada’s ‘paradigm case of media imperialism’, Oliver Boyd-Barrett’s

thesis of ‘media imperialism’ remains relevant to Canadian popular cultural studies. Yet in

communication and media studies which have produced much of the literature on

Canadian popular culture, Boyd-Barrett’s thesis has been criticized as too neglectful of

the ambiguities of ‘colonial’ appropriations, and too closely tied to ‘territorial annexation’

(Gasher, Lorimer and Skinner 2007, 287 – 88). However, cultural and literary studies have

picked up and developed the media imperialism thesis in investigations informed by

732 M.A. McCutcheon

interconnected theories of nationalism, postcolonialism and globalization (see Beaty et al.

2010; Mookerjea, Szeman and Farschou 2009).

Recent postcolonial readings of Canadian popular culture sustain the media

imperialism thesis not despite but due to Canada’s ambivalent relations to US popular

culture. Laura Marks (2005, 197) employs Homi Bhabha’s model of pedagogy and

performance in national identity to explore how ‘the little performances that constitute

Canada insinuate themselves into the massive national fiction that constitutes the United

States’. Bodroghkozy’s (2002) essay, like more recent work by Patricia Hughes-Fuller

(2010), draws on Benedict Anderson and Graeme Turner; Hughes-Fuller investigates

the ‘postcolonial Gothic’ subtext of Canada’s hockey culture (2010, 277). In a critique of

Canadian cultural policy, Donna Pennee (1999, 196) draws on postcolonialists like

Len Findlay and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to show how Canadian foreign policy

has deployed ‘“culture” from the Cold War to “the Market Wars”, from the explicitly

“ideological” threats to national security, to the explicit but apparently non-ideological

threats of global capitalism’. Diana Brydon’s recent work (2004) has forged important

links between postcolonialism and globalization studies; alluding to the vexed question

of national sovereignty (Brydon 2004, 703) and the US government’s targeting of

postcolonialism ‘as yet another enemy of US patriotism’ (693), Brydon succinctly

reaffirms the urgency with which ‘postcolonial critique continues to pose a challenge to

the new incarnations of Empire’ (693).

The postcolonial perspectives developed in research like this represent one way of

what Pennee calls ‘doing the national differently’ (2004, 83), by adding a nuanced sense of

cultural and economic globalization to Canadian cultural studies’ established materialist

focus on the institutions and media of cultural production. As I have argued elsewhere,

the constant political pressure of US trade interests on Canadian policy and national

sovereignty, in everything from copyright to healthcare and water, validates the media

imperialism thesis’ implicit link between cultural trade and territorial annexation: ‘the

difference between media and political imperialism seems to collapse when viewed from a

Canadian perspective’ (McCutcheon 2009, 9).

‘The Frankenstein of globalization’

This sketch of media imperialism in Canada sets the stage for discussion of films that adapt

Frankenstein to comment on globalization, understood (following Appadurai 1990 and

Sassen 2000) as an intensification of international flows of money and labour, whose chief

beneficiaries are multinational corporations. Frankenstein has long provided popular

culture with a figure for representing backfire crises, a figure derived, as Chris Baldick

(1987, 7) argues, from the novel’s ‘technological reduction . . . as an uncanny prophecy of

dangerous scientific inventions’. The novel’s reductive technological interpretations and

adaptations have proven very productive – in large part due to the popular perception of

almost any technological threat as an inherently global threat. Recall that Dr Frankenstein

imagines, as the ultimate result of his research, a ‘race of devils [that] would be propagated

upon the earth’ (Shelley 1818, 190).

Frankensteinian anxieties have shaped popular ideas of globalization ever since

Shelley’s novel began its ‘career as an object of rhetorical allusion’ (Baldick 1987, 60) in

1824, in British parliamentary debates over abolition (Hitchcock 2007, 89). Since then,

Frankenstein has been invoked – predominantly by conservative commentators (St Clair

2004, 373) – as a caution towards typically global issues: from nuclear power (Sullivan,

quoted in Morton 2002, 56), to file-sharing: ‘digital piracy is Hollywood’s own digital

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 733

Frankenstein’ (Sickels 2009, 22). Today’s globalized, Orwellian ‘war on terror’ has

prompted allusions from across the political spectrum, as in Arundhati Roy’s (2008, 27)

commentary on the Mumbai terror attacks of December 2008:

As recruiting agents for America’s jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to.

Less pronounced than the conservative use of Frankenstein as political allusion is a

tenacious progressive use. Marx defined capital itself, manufactured and monstrous, as

‘dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour’ (quoted in Baldick

1987, 130). Marxist literary criticism has identified Frankenstein’s monster with the

industrial working class (Montag 2000, 388), and queried the political economy of the

novel’s production during a period of Luddite agitation (O’Flinn 1983, 197).

In popular culture, as Susan Tyler Hitchcock writes (2007, 142 – 5), the Depression

prompted analogously progressive references: together with the horrors of World War One

and slavery’s legacy, Depression anxieties contextualized the success of James Whale’s

1931 Frankenstein movie in its time. And Frankensteinian representations of corporate

business after the Depression resonate profoundly today. For example, Mitchell Dawson’s

1930 article ‘Frankenstein, Inc.’ criticizes the corporate takeover of law practice, and

expresses his suspicion of corporations in most sectors, such as ‘the gigantic press

Frankensteins which now control the news and public opinion’ (276). Dawson envisions

‘the corporate Frankenstein’ (279) inaugurating an age in which ‘law and government will

be nullified’ – an age we might recognize as that of present-day globalization.

Globalization theory privileges technology in its models of transnational political and

cultural economy, chiefly for facilitating the mobile exploits of capital (see Appadurai

1990, 297 – 98; Sassen 2000, 222). Jonathan Beller (1996, 195) reads the technological

imperative of globalization in the eminently Frankensteinian pop culture image of the

cyborg: a ‘limit-figure for the conjunction of the global and the local – the intersecting of

the human being from anywhere in the world . . . and the technology (military, industrial,

and informational) endemic to transnational capitalism’.

Post-war globalization, an intensification of the technologized flow and corporate

concentration of capital, thus provides a new, complex, and moving target for

Frankensteinian figures and tropes. In Canadian film, such tropes are attentive to the

functions and powers of media systems and corporate structures that consolidate

globalization.

In a critical study of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant, Arthur Kroker

(1984, 13, 18) elaborates a theory of Canadian postcolonialism avant la lettre, identifying

these thinkers as representatives of a ‘Canadian discourse on technology’ that ‘thrusts us

into the centre of a debate of world significance’ over issues of ‘neotechnical capitalism’

and ‘global media system[s]’ – issues of postcolonial globalization. In McLuhan’s work

specifically, Kroker sees an ambivalent ‘technological humanism’, both hope for a wired

Utopia and anxiety over modernity’s ‘processed world of technology’ (60).

Contrary to its popular reception, McLuhan’s (1969, 243) image of the ‘global village’

is not Utopian, but dystopian: a ‘whirlwind of violence’ sown by ‘the dragon’s teeth of

technological change’. He figures ‘technology’ as what Timothy Morton (2002, 48) calls a

‘Frankenpheme’: a fragmentary ‘element of culture . . . derived from Frankenstein, but . . .

less than a work of art in . . . scale’. The dread with which McLuhan theorizes the ‘global

village’ and technology in general (as in his first book’s references to ‘Frankenstein

734 M.A. McCutcheon

fantasies’ (1951, 100)) shows that the spectre of Frankenstein haunts his theory of the

‘global village’ in ways that have been amplified by adaptations of his work by later

Canadian artists, like director David Cronenberg.

‘You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world’

Cronenberg’s 1983 movie Videodrome vividly dramatizes the postcolonial use of

Frankenstein figures to represent globalization in a cyberpunk horror story about media

imperialism, including one character who openly parodies McLuhan. Cronenberg’s early

‘cult’ films from the 1970s and ’80s are almost all variations on a Frankenstein theme:

in Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), and Scanners (1981), dubious corporate research

and development breeds grotesque human monsters. In Videodrome, James Woods plays

Max Renn, a TV station owner who starts hallucinating after watching an S&M TV

programme called Videodrome. Renn seeks answers from Brian O’Blivion, the inventor

of ‘the Videodrome signal’, and from Barry Convex, CEO of the Spectacular Optical

corporation, ‘an enthusiastic global citizen’ that makes ‘eyeglasses for the third world,

missile guidance systems for NATO’ – and Videodrome. Max becomes a murderous

pawn played between O’Blivion’s techno-utopian ‘Cathode Ray Mission’ (which gives

TV access to the homeless) and Spectacular Optical, which plans to broadcast Videodrome

as part of a vaguely described media-imperialist plot either to incapacitate the North

American populace into zombie-like stupor, or to incite it to violent mobilization. Turning

on his would-be programmers, Max finally immolates himself as an apotheosis of ‘the

video word made flesh’.

Videodrome dramatizes McLuhan’s (1964, 54 – 55) claim that new media are turning

‘the real world into science fiction’. Max Renn enacts the kind of subjectivity that

McLuhan posits as symptomatic of the ‘global village’: a postmodern subjectivity,

colonized and reprogrammed by new media.

Woods’ performance renders ironic Renn’s fate as the test subject for a transnational

media empire, in that he’s a Hollywood star leading in a Canadian film made with federal

arts funding. O’Blivion’s character adds more irony to the media-sector satire: he is an

open parody of McLuhan. O’Blivion makes cryptic, prophetic claims for television; like

McLuhan, he has suffered a brain tumour; and he only ever appears in the film as a ‘talking

head’ on a TV screen. The plot eventually reveals that O’Blivion died prior to the film’s

action, leaving a library of videotapes as his posthumous, virtual self, making his

monologues to Renn uncanny addresses from some monstrously remediated afterlife.

Videodrome represents new media, like video at the time, as tools of globalization that

serve the imperialist aspirations of multinational corporations. Cronenberg’s 1983 ironic

portrayal of corporate social responsibility (in Convex’s invocation of ‘citizenship’),

corporate deployments of mass media, and the resulting unevenness of global

development (a soft North America, versus the ‘rest of the world’ turned ‘tough’ and

‘savage’) appeared years ahead of the critical theories of globalization that gained

currency over a decade later (Appadurai 1990; Jameson and Miyashi 1998). O’Blivion

warns Renn that he will ‘have to learn to live in a strange new world’, signifying the

disoriented North America plotted by Spectacular Optical and theorized by McLuhan’s

violent ‘global village’.

Brian O’Blivion’s mediatized appearance throughout the film, as an uncanny ‘talking

head’, both parodies McLuhan’s ideas about television and gives a cyberpunk twist to the

Frankensteinian film trope of the ‘brain in a vat’. This trope, like the film’s setting in a

competitive corporate context, recurs in Robert Lepage’s film Possible Worlds (2000),

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 735

although this film’s uses of Frankenstein plot and imagery differ greatly from those in

Videodrome.

‘There’s only one world’

Possible Worlds (2000) follows George Barber, who tries to understand why he seems to

lead multiple lives among parallel worlds. Opening shots seem to frame Barber’s story

retrospectively, showing him as a murder victim whose brain has been stolen. When the

investigating detectives learn of Barber’s work for ‘rival pharmaceutical companies’, they

suspect Dr Kleber, a senior researcher at one of the companies, Axon. Their discovery of

his guilt immediately follows Barber’s own discovery, in dialogue with Kleber, that he

lives only as a sentient brain in a jar. Experimental stimuli and randomly accessed

memories explain his dreamlike existence among ‘possible worlds’ that are hauntingly

surreal.

Robert Lepage pays homage to Whale’s Frankenstein in the fetishistic presentation of

Barber’s isolated brain, which is not revealed as evidence of his real circumstance until the

film’s climactic scene, where Barber tells Dr Kleber that he knows where (and what) he is

now. The scenario of the ‘brain in a vat’ – a ‘thought experiment’ for cognitive science

and philosophical problems in metaphysics and consciousness – is based in Plato’s

allegory of the cave and Descartes’ exercises in doubt, but takes its mise en scène from

science fiction, specifically from the 1931 Frankenstein film, in which Fritz stole an

‘abnormal brain’ for Dr Frankenstein. Barber’s mystified condition as an amputated brain

on life support also gruesomely literalizes McLuhan’s (1964, 65) Frankensteinian claim

that with ‘electric technology, man extend[s], or set[s] outside himself, a live model of the

central nervous system itself’.

Possible Worlds leaves the question of Barber’s agency ambiguous, but it is ultimately

a question overdetermined by the film as recorded medium and scripted production.

Videodrome, in contrast, stresses the question of Renn’s agency as he descends into the

simulacrum’s maelstrom. In both films, the plot is driven by a terrifying rift that opens

between the protagonist’s perception and the world he perceives: a perceptual rift

produced and exploited by corporate competition; and eventually perceived by the

protagonist, who recognizes in it both his own status as a monstrous commodity and the

monstrous institution that manufactured it. Like O’Blivion’s talking head, Barber’s vat-

bound brain appears as an explanatory cause for the plot, but these monstrous subjects

are revealed, in their respective diegetic worlds, at opposite points in the films’ plots.

In Videodrome, O’Blivion appears quite early to catalyze the dissolution of a realistic,

corporate setting into a ‘strange new world’ of hallucinatory disorientation and cruelty.

Conversely, in Possible Worlds, Barber’s brain is revealed quite late, and crystallizes the

resolution of his hallucinatory, disorienting worlds into a realistic, corporate setting of

instrumentally rationalized cruelty.

In the resolution of Barber’s ‘possible worlds’ into one cruel world of transnational

corporate capital, the film refers ironically to two implied intertexts. Leibniz’s (1710, 228)

claim that this is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ encounters its pessimistic counter-

argument in the subject’s reduction to commodity by a world ruled by the profit motive.

And the slogan of the alter-globalization NGO, the World Social Forum (2002) – that

‘another world is possible’ – is affirmed, albeit in an ironic, elegiac way. For all the

brutality with which a multinational has exploited him, and in disavowal of the ‘one world’

that elevates its kind of empire, Barber continues to occupy a multitude of other possible

worlds, and so claims an irreducible sovereignty for the subject’s inner life.

736 M.A. McCutcheon

‘What kind of person is a corporation?’

The ruthless, Frankensteinian characterization of corporate culture in Possible Worlds is

similar to that given in the 2003 documentary The Corporation. One sequence in the film

offers its own variation on the commoditized brain in a jar. Over a montage of footage of

frenzied shopping mobs, Noam Chomsky delivers a Frankfurt School-style commentary

on consumerism: ‘The goal for the corporations is to maximize profit and market share,

and they also have a goal for their target in the population: they have to be turned into

completely mindless consumers of goods they do not want’. The consumer-mob footage

cuts to a tracking shot of a solitary man, vacantly watching TV at home. As Chomsky says

‘the ideal is to have individuals who are totally dissociated from one another’, this shot

zooms in on the TV watcher’s close-cropped head and tracks around to reveal a UPC

barcode tattoo at the nape of his neck.

In addition to its visual echoes of Frankensteinian brains in other Canadian cinematic

vats, this sequence also evokes Orwell’s telescreen and Kafka’s harrow, as well as

McLuhan’s ‘global village’ as a paradoxical real world of science fiction. The scene

renders ironic McLuhan’s recurring description of electronic media use as ‘corporate

participation’ (1967, 125). The Corporation does not cite McLuhan explicitly, but it does

much to represent the science-fictional strangeness of economic globalization in ways

McLuhan anticipated, from corporations’ manipulation of public opinion to their

commoditization of life forms. The Corporation’s visual collage mixes archival corporate

PR clips – promising a ‘better life’ through ‘technology’ and ‘capitalism’ – with reportage

and footage of current events, like summits and protests, and original interviews that

portray a grim present and project a ‘dark future’. The juxtaposition of past images of a

Utopian future with current images of a dystopian present thus gives the film a distinctly

science-fictional preoccupation with what George Slusser (1992, 128) calls ‘the

Frankenstein barrier’ in SF plots: ‘where the present, lurking all along, rises up to avenge

the sins of our uncreated future’.

The film’s opening sequence offers some descriptive metaphors for the corporation as a

way to introduce its main argument: that the modern corporation is the deeply flawed but

‘dominant institution of our time’, an entity legally constructed as a ‘person’ but legally

obliged to pursue profits exclusively. Such ‘monstrous obligations’ (in the film’s phrasing)

inculcate dispositions and encourage behaviours that make the personality of the corporate

‘person’ fit, with uncanny precision, the clinical profile of psychopathy. Among the

metaphors offered for the corporation is ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, implied by one

interviewee and invoked by another:

Off-screen interviewee 1: Corporations are artificial creations; you might say they’re monsters, trying to devour as much profit as possible, at anyone’s expense.

Off-screen interviewee 2: Dr Frankenstein’s creation has overwhelmed and overpowered him, as the corporate form has done with us.

As these voiced-over comments proceed, the film shows a clip from the 1971 B-movie

Lady Frankenstein in which the creature strangles its creator. The mix of verbal

commentary about ‘overpowering creations’ and visual footage of monstrous strangulation

reproduces a popular ‘Frankenpheme’, based in the Depression legacy of progressive

Frankenstein allusions, which describes the corporate tendency to monopolize as a

‘stranglehold’. For example, an Adbusters article invokes Frankenstein to criticize how

‘corporations take a stranglehold over the media landscape’ (Condon 2007).

The image of corporate strangulation is also a grim refutation of Adam Smith’s

metaphor of the free market as an invisible hand, a metaphor still widely championed, and

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 737

misinterpreted, by neo-liberal ideologues today (Chomsky 1993, 412). This early scene in

the film seizes on the image of Frankenstein’s monster, wielder of visible, lethal, and

borrowed hands, to illuminate the moment of danger posed by the crisis of corporate

confidence that followed the Enron and WorldCom scandals. The Corporation was

released in the wake of these scandals which, from the vantage point of 2011, look like the

shape of things to come.

That the film uses footage from Lady Frankenstein and not from Whale’s iconic 1931

film is a significant production detail. In several of its case studies, The Corporation

criticizes the exploitation of intellectual property law by media and biotechnology

conglomerates, to control culture and commoditize life itself. Much of the film’s stock

footage comes from public domain and Creative Commons-licensed material. Given the

likely high cost of licensing a clip from Universal Studios, the film’s use of the public-

domain Lady Frankenstein saves film budget money and reinforces the movie’s critique of

corporate IP abuses in its very form.

As a figure of the corporation, Frankenstein’s monster haunts the film. Chomsky, in

another voice-over, characterizes the corporate entity’s legal status as an ‘amoral

immortal’: ‘Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons, but then special kinds

of persons, persons who have no moral conscience’. This characterization corresponds not

to the articulate, compassionate creature of Shelley’s novel, but to the mute, rampaging

monster of the novel’s performance adaptations, iconized by Boris Karloff in the 1931

film. Thus, the popular cultural image of Frankenstein’s monster – devoid of feeling,

dubiously sentient, and single-mindedly destructive – has contemporary postcolonial

significance as an ‘amoral immortal’ figure of the transnational corporation.

The ‘dubject’ of cultural imperialism

Applying the popular ‘technological’ interpretation of Frankenstein to the problematic of

globalization, these Canadian films criticize the corporate institution, borrowing from

Shelley’s story and its popular progeny to comment, with self-reflexive irony, on

communication media and their instrumentality to globalization, its hegemonic

naturalization, and the ‘imperialist aspirations’ of transnational conglomerates (Naomi

Klein, quoted in The Corporation). We see the films’ self-reflexive irony most vividly

in images of characters viscerally colonized and consumed by media. At the end of

Videodrome, Renn seems to have followed O’Blivion into a virtual afterlife as ‘the video

word made flesh’; at the end of Possible Worlds, Barber becomes self-aware as a

grotesquely instrumental medium of random access memory. The Corporation’s collage

of stock footage offers its own composite sketch of media-colonized subjectivity, between

the isolated TV-viewing zombie and the mobs of hysterical shoppers. In these narratives of

neo-liberal globalization, the brain in a vat becomes a mutable image of subjection to

global capital: an allegorical figure, both of profoundly alienated labour and of the ideal

consumer – isolated, immersed, and instrumentalized.

This Frankensteinian figure of corporate subjectivity has a real-world counterpart in

one tradition of Canada’s ‘technological nationalism’, a tradition we might call

dubjection: a work of being in the age of ubiquitous technological reproduction; a practice

of uploading and globally distributing identity; a practice of mediatizing subjectivity itself,

transcribing the improvisational experience of corporeal embodiment into the archival

fixity of recording media. The dubject is a self recording and recorded, dubbed and

doubled; a doppelgänger self whose ‘live’ presence becomes radically supplemented by

its recordings and representations. For Philip Auslander (1999, 198), mediatization

738 M.A. McCutcheon

signifies the interdependence of ‘live’ performance and recording; among the Canadian

examples I have in mind, it might signify a kind of survival.

In Videodrome, Brian O’Blivion dubjects his identity to a videotape library, becoming

his own uncanny simulacrum; at the end of the film, Renn also seems to have translated

himself into a cathode ray signal. This disconcertingly disembodying image of the

subject’s colonization and consumption by media parodies McLuhan’s media theory; it

also alludes to the career of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who abandoned live concert

performances to focus strictly on studio production, thus dubjecting his public persona.

The apotheosis of Gould’s mediatized identity is the Voyager 2 space probe, which carries

a Gould recording of Bach, with other ‘music from Earth’, on the ambassadorial

phonograph sent with the probe (NASA 2010). Gould’s dubjection still resonates in

Canadian culture: Margaret Atwood adopts Gould as a namesake for the mastermind

geneticist villain in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake (84). Atwood herself has pursued

a kind of dubjection, as inventor of the Long Pen, a machine that reproduces one’s

unique, handwritten signature at a distance; Atwood invented the Long Pen, a cyborg

proxy for the author, to reduce the carbon footprint and personal stress of author book tours

(see Rak 2007).

The Long Pen and the Voyager 2 probe furnish Frankensteinian icons of the

technological-nationalist dubject as an ambivalent product of cultural globalization and

its corporate steering. The former keeps Atwood at arm’s length from the world, while

displaying the ‘authentic’ trace of her invisible hand; the latter engraves Gould’s recording

of European classical music in a dated storage device that may not ever be played,

recruited for a space mission launched by the most symbolically imperialist institution in

the USA. In McLuhan’s terms (1964, 99 – 100), Canadian dubjectivity entails both the

technological ‘extension of our own bodies and senses’ and the ‘lease [of] our central

nervous systems to various corporations’, both media bricolage and a redistribution that is

at once infiltration and dispossession.

As a factitious, ‘mosaic’ identity, dubjectivity suggests the national mediascape’s

counterpart to its ethnoscape of multiculturalism, the Canadian state’s policy that

promotes ‘cultural and racial diversity’ (Canada Multicultural Act, quoted in Kamboureli

2000, 99) in order to practise ‘diversity management’, whereby ‘categories of difference

become integrated into a commoditized “global postmodern” space of new middle-class

sensibilities . . . with fascistic undertones’ (Kipfer and Keil 2002, 236). For postcolonial

critics, official multiculturalism amounts almost to a Frankenpheme: an experimental,

ideological state apparatus that integrates Canada’s culturally differentiated population in

a national ‘fantasy of unity’, while mystifying the state’s neo-liberal political economy of

mobilizing and managing flows of labour to sustain the flexible accumulations of global

capital (Day 2000, 4; Bannerji 2000, 87).

A striking symptom of Canada’s perennially imperilled sovereignty, dubjectivity

reconfigures the individual citizen in a manner analogous to the ways official

multiculturalism constructs the national citizenry: as the commodity of a global market,

a product of competing intellectual property claims, a consumer of media consumed by

media. Glenn Willmott (1995, 184), writing on the film adaptation of Atwood’s The

Handmaid’s Tale, argues that ‘in any story with a message about power . . . there must also

be a story about the power of its medium’. Canada’s film Frankensteins thematize and

formalize this connection between message and medium, in self-reflexive representations

of globalization and its handmaids in communication technologies. Canadian

Frankenphemes of globalization figure national anxieties over transnational cultural

imperialism in figures and scenes of bilateral media consumption, in which globalized

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 739

media systems violently colonize and even consume the everyday consumer of globalized

media products. To close with a stereotypically Canadian gesture of diffidence, the corpus

of Frankenstein adaptations explored here represents only one national site of cultural

production, suggestive – but not representative – of other postcolonial adaptations of

Frankenstein. Neither are such Frankenphemes restricted to film; a recent public opinion

poll described its ‘statistical amalgam’ of ‘the qualities Canadians have told us they

want in a leader’ as ‘an ideal political Frankenstein’ (Graves 2010). Across multiple

media, and among myriad sites of postcolonial popular culture, much critical work

remains to be undertaken in tracking the cultural functions of Frankenstein around our

volatile global village.

Notes on contributor

Mark A. McCutcheon is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Athabasca University. He researches Romanticism, postcolonialism, and popular culture. Selected recent essays on these subjects appear in University of Toronto Quarterly 78.2 (2009), Science Fiction Film and Television 2.1 (2009), and in the book Local Natures, Global Responsibilities (Rodopi 2010). His scholarly blog is academicalism.wordpress.com.

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