Nora Webb, Publishing Editor

Photo courtesy of NBC 

On February 9, 2025, Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl LX halftime stage and performed almost entirely in Spanish. I say almost, because he delivered exactly one line in English (“God bless America”) before listing the nations of Central, South, and North America as dancers carried their flags. Behind them, a billboard flashed a message: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” At the end of his set, he held a football bearing the slogan “Together, We Are America.” 

And still, the backlash was immediate and vicious. Donald Trump took to Truth Social to call the performance “absolutely terrible” and “an affront to the Greatness of America,” complaining that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” 

Megyn Kelly was even more explicit, declaring to Piers Morgan on his YouTube show: “That kind of football is ours. The halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American. Not Spanish, not Muslim, not anything other than good old-fashioned American apple pie. There should be a meatloaf, maybe some fried chicken.” 

Apple pie. Meatloaf. Fried chicken. Symbolic language of wholesomeness, of purity, of belonging, of who gets to claim America as “ours.” That a Puerto Rican artist (an American citizen born in a U.S. territory) could provoke such vitriol reveals everything about what is considered properly American and what is not. Bad Bunny’s offense, from the moment he was announced as the half-time show, was existing, unapologetically, at the center of culture without translating himself into something more palatable. 

It’s no coincidence that Frankenstein is having an ongoing cultural moment, from Lanthimos’s Poor Things winning four Academy Awards in 2023, to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein premiering in January 2025 to critical acclaim, and now Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! arriving in theaters in March. These films grapple with the same question Bad Bunny’s performance raised: What happens when The Other refuses to stay in their “assigned place”? When they point out, as Bad Bunny did when accepting the Grammy for Best Música Urbana Album, that they’re “…not savages, not animals, not aliens. [They] are humans…” 

This tension between colonized and colonizer, between the Establishment and the Other, or even between creator and created stretches back to Mary Shelley’s novel, where there is a scene that haunts every film adaptation, whether the screenwriter includes it or not. Victor Frankenstein is in his laboratory, building a female companion for the Creature. He is halfway through the work when his mind spirals. He fears she might be more violent than the Creature, or that she might refuse him and prefer “the superior beauty of man.” Ultimately, Victor’s fear that decides her fate is reproduction: He imagines “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth,” threatening the very existence of man. 

If you’ve read the novel recently, you remember that while the Creature watches through the window, Victor tears the female creature to pieces. He destroys her because of what he imagines she might do. She might have children, or (maybe worse?) she might refuse to have children. If she reproduces, she is a threat to the species; if she refuses to reproduce, she is a threat for refusing “to comply with a compact made before her creation.” In Victor’s mind, whichever she chooses, she’s monstrous, she’s Other, and she’s outside the bounds of acceptable existence.  

When we pivot back to the Super Bowl stage, we see that Victor’s laboratory logic has simply moved into the public square. Bad Bunny didn’t do anything radical: he sang in his native language and represented his culture. Piers Morgan pushed back against Megyn Kelly’s meltdown and then later told his panel, “I saw a Latino rapper at the peak of his powers absolutely killing it, in terms of the production, and he’s the most popular artist in the world right now…He belonged there. He owned the stage. He didn’t criticize anybody. It was a message of love, of unity, of marriage.”  

But we all know the message didn’t matter. It was never going to matter. Critics objected to Bad Bunny from the moment he was announced as the headliner. It’s why Kristi Noem threatened to have federal immigration officers “all over” the event. This outrage follows a familiar pattern in American politics. It is the same logic that animates debates about “anchor babies,” or whose children are a blessing and whose are a “burden on the system.” It is the logic of purity and poisoning: certain bodies and cultural expressions are coded as legitimate, while others are marked as contaminating threats to the social order. Victor Frankenstein would understand this impulse perfectly; he claimed he was protecting “the whole human race” when he destroyed the female Creature, but he was protecting a specific idea of humanity that excludes those deemed impure.  

Modern cinema and interpretations of the Frankenstein narrative challenge this allegedly protective violence by reinstating the Creature’s interiority Victor tried to deny. Guillermo del Toro has always understood that monster stories are political. In del Toro’s 2025 adaptation, Jacob Elordi embodies the Creature with devastating emotional intelligence. This is a being who reads, thinks, and demands to be recognized as a person. I’d be remiss as an English instructor if I didn’t point out that’s how the Creature is in Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein films with grunting, unintelligible monsters have nothing to do with the novel beyond the barest, most minimal plot points. But I digress. The 2025 film and Shelley’s novel force us to sit with an uncomfortable question: if the Creature is eloquent and capable of love, what does that make Victor, the man who cast him out? There’s that old saying: knowledge is knowing Frankenstein isn’t the monster, but wisdom is knowing he is.  

Frankenstein’s cultural moment is happening alongside a time when sympathy itself is contested, and political rhetoric increasingly frames entire communities (immigrants, trans people, those seeking reproductive healthcare) as threats to be managed rather than people to be understood. It’s worth noting that I’m not simply applying contemporary lenses to a 19th-century text; this is almost certainly what Shelley intended even in 1818. As the child of two famous radicals who herself wanted to see the abolition of slavery, Shelley was writing her novel in the summer of 1816 fully aware of the earlier Easter Uprising in Barbados and its foundational 1791 Haitian Revolution. Scholars agree that she used the Creature as an allegory for the fear of “colonies challenging white supremacy,” a context in which the Creature’s eloquence becomes irrelevant because Victor insists on his fundamental Otherness. This fear of the being who refuses their assigned purpose connects Victor’s 19th-century nightmare directly to our current feminist reinterpretations. 

This fear of the being who refuses their assigned purpose connects Victor’s 19th-century nightmare to a recent and a forthcoming feminist reinterpretation. We see this defiance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023), where Bella Baxter (a reanimated woman played by Emma Stone) shatters her creator’s expectations to explore the world on her own terms and embrace her sexuality. Like the female creature in Shelley’s novel, Bella is a “thinking and reasoning animal” whose autonomy is her most “monstrous” trait to the men who wish to contain her. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (in theaters March 6^th) is set in 1930s Chicago, and the film centers on a resurrected woman. Like in the novel, she is supposed to be a solution to the Creature’s loneliness (there’s also plenty to connect Frankenstein to our contemporary male loneliness epidemic, but I’m already way over the preferred word count). Instead, she becomes a woman who refuses her assigned purpose. In Gyllenhaal’s hands, the Bride (Jessie Buckley) becomes a “wave of radical social change.”  

Monster movies aside, a woman who is perceived or idealized for one purpose but chooses something else terrifies the established order far more than any physical monster ever could. This woman has a long history, appearing throughout time as the witch, the hysteric, or the healer who understood bodies outside institutional control. These figures were destroyed because they represented power that couldn’t be managed. Today’s versions look different (the abortion provider, the childfree woman, the artist who performs in their own language) but they provoke the same panic. They are all versions of the same archetype: someone who refuses to stay in their designated place and is consequently framed as a threat to “American” or lately, “Christian values.” 

Ultimately, Frankenstein and its adaptations are having an ongoing moment because we are living in Victor’s nightmare. Because we are watching the language of protection get weaponized. Restrictions on healthcare and immigration are framed as protecting the nation, but what is really being protected is the power to decide who gets to exist fully. Victor Frankenstein positioned his act of violence as a moral duty to save future generations from contamination, but it was about Victor deciding which lives are legitimate and which are “devils.” 

Monster stories are inherently political. Fear of the monster is never really about the monster. The Creature is deemed violent; the female creature is deemed dangerous. Similarly, the fury over Bad Bunny’s halftime show isn’t about quality; it’s about language, culture, and the threat of an “Other,” a perceived outsider, claiming space.  

When Victor destroys the female creature in the novel, the Creature watches through the window and asks: “Shall each man find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?” That question echoes today: Why do some get to exist fully while others are destroyed for trying? Guillermo del Toro gives his Creature dignity; Maggie Gyllenhaal lets the Bride run free; Bad Bunny performed in Spanish and declared “Together, We Are America.” The destroyed companion in Shelley’s novel never got to speak, but we can. Belonging doesn’t require assimilation, and autonomy and individuality are not monstrous. That possibility terrified Victor Frankenstein, and it clearly still terrifies people in this country.