Lisa Frankenstein · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl gets a corpse into a tanning bed and closes the lid. The bulbs come on violet, the timer ticks, and the dead boy inside starts getting better looking. Shelley needed a laboratory. Whale needed a tower and a storm rig. Zelda Williams needs a piece of suburban vanity equipment, plugged into an outlet in a house with wall-to-wall carpet.

Deleuze has a category for movies that run on appliances like that, and it is the least famous thing in Cinema 1. Between the close-up (a feeling registered, not yet acted on) and the action movie (situation, deed, resolution) he wedges the impulse-image. Its subject is not emotion and not action but drive — appetite, compulsion, the grab. He builds it out of Stroheim and Buñuel, and he describes it as two spaces sharing one address. There is the derived milieu: a real place with furniture and social rules, a villa, a hotel, a subdivision. Under it is the originary world, a savage field where there are no persons, only pieces to be seized. Naturalism, for Deleuze, is what happens when the second keeps showing through the first.

Lisa Frankenstein has both and doesn't hide the seam. The stepmother's house is derived milieu in its purest 1989 form — aspirational consumer sheen, the good sofa, the correct daughter, Carla Gugino presiding at full camp pitch. The abandoned Victorian cemetery where Lisa spends her free time is the originary world, and the traffic between the two is body parts. Deleuze calls the impulse-image's characteristic object the fetish: a part-object torn from a whole and charged with more force than the whole ever had. This film just makes that the plot. Each act adds a corpse and a part, and the part goes home with her.

Naturalism has a tempo, too, and Deleuze names it the line of slope. These worlds run downhill. Things degrade, appetites exhaust themselves, everyone ends in ruin. Williams runs the slope backwards, and that is her actual invention here. The creature makeup is engineered as reverse decay: Cole Sprouse begins desiccated and grows progressively more human and handsome as Lisa restores him, tanning bed standing in for the galvanic apparatus. Lisa travels the opposite way — mousy muted pastels toward dark lips, structured black, a face she chose. Two transformation arcs crossing in the middle, carried almost entirely by prosthetics and wardrobe rather than by anything a character says. The slope is not cancelled. It is exported, moved off the two leads and onto other people's bodies, one piece at a time.

The palette is doing the same work. Deleuze's colour-image is colour that stops describing objects and starts absorbing them, so that the state of a scene and the state of its palette are one fact. Here the gothic-pastel scheme sets bubblegum suburbia against cemetery blue and storm green, and the gore arrives inside frames composed like a John Hughes movie. Taken as a gag, that's mismatch. Taken as naturalism, it's the two worlds sharing a single image — the sweet surface, and the thing pushing up through it.

Which is why the lens is worth the trouble. The film's most common knock in 2024 was tonal: it can't decide whether it's comedy, horror or romance. But the impulse-image is exactly the region where those distinctions stop holding, because drives don't observe genre. Deleuze placed it between two stable image-types and called it degenerate, meaning transitional, unstable by design. What reads as indecision is the shape of the thing.

The two leads are also running on different cinemas. Lisa is all language — the Cody register, dialogue as armor and performance. The Creature has none: grunts and gesture, Keaton's physical comedy with Karloff's pathos underneath, a silent-film performance dropped into a talky script. Deleuze would call him a cinema of the body, a character whose entire meaning arrives as posture and carried weight. And the gest — the attitude that gives away a social relation — belongs to both of them. His shuffle is one. Her wisecrack is another. Each is wearing something.

Notice how little Lisa does to obtain any of this. She talks to a grave; a freak electrical storm does the rest. Deleuze calls that movement of the world: the character goes still and the world moves instead, the way a Minnelli dreamer gets absorbed into a dance. The film announces the register before a frame of live action, with an animated prologue in Edward Gorey silhouette and line narrating a Victorian death like a bedtime story. Fable frame. Nothing after it is asked to obey causality; it's asked to obey a wish.

And the 1989 is not 1989. The decade is manufactured out of saturated gels, MTV compositions and needle-drops — nostalgia as a technology rather than a record. Deleuze calls this a crystalline description: a description that composes its own object, then replaces it, leaving no prior reality behind the picture to check it against. The film knows this and expects you to know it, which is consciousness of clichés in Deleuze's sense — moving knowingly through borrowed forms. It also produces the best joke the movie never says out loud. It assembles its decade the same way Lisa assembles her boyfriend. Parts from dead things, stitched into something that walks.

The parts are traceable. Vincent (1982), Burton's Poe-and-Gorey stop-motion short, is the direct template for the prologue — narrated gothic-child fable in stark linework. Bride of Frankenstein (1935) supplies the reanimated mate as a wordless, jerkily physical performance and licenses camp-macabre as a serious register for the myth. Weird Science (1985) is the structural ancestor: teenagers fabricate an ideal partner, played as comedy. Sixteen Candles (1984) donates the architecture — social strata, yearning outsider, the needle-drop doing the emotional labor a monologue would otherwise carry. Heathers (1988) authorizes the body count, arch and quotable inside a candy-colored school. Beetlejuice (1988) sets the tonal frame, macabre as gaudy suburban farce, and hands Williams her supporting-cast pitch.

Downstream is harder to claim honestly, because the film is two years old and it went quietly — a February window, an R sensibility packaged PG-13. It inherits from Jennifer's Body a style and a fate at once, and it's positioned for the same delayed cult afterlife. What it stands to seed isn't a technique so much as a permission: the female-authored teen-horror-comedy treated as a form with rules, not as a marketing failure.

So, its significance is modest, and saying so costs nothing. What it did precisely was take the 1980s teen movie's most ideological machine — the makeover, the girl corrected into acceptability — and run it in the wrong direction, alongside a monster movie's decay run backwards, so the curves cross. That's a real formal idea, executed in makeup and clothing, by a first-time director.

It leaves one thing unresolved, and I don't think it's an oversight. Taffy, the cheerleader stepsister, is written against type as genuinely kind. The fable's logic says parts come from people who wronged Lisa; kindness is a complication the accumulation structure can't quite digest. Watch it again with the palette in mind while the blood is happening, watch the two arcs cross, and then ask what the film believes the trade cost.