The Multiplicity of Monsters: Frankenstein, Nuremberg, and Us

With its sharp, cold air and darker hours, the end of the year has a way of bringing me back to the movies. And bioethics is on the big screen this season with two canonical bioethical narratives: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg. Though at first glance starkly different—Frankenstein is fantastical, mythological, and fictional; Nuremberg is realist, historical, horrifyingly nonfiction—I found myself drawn to both the overt and subtle similarities between these films, and believe their retellings tell us something we need to hear now.

Both films are based on books: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. Both films feature doctors. Victor Frankenstein is a gifted albeit disgraced physician in the film, who, as a young man, declares his intent to conquer death after his surgeon father fails to save his mother during childbirth—a backstory unique to this rendition. Nuremberg features psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley, an American soldier who