Published in Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal, eds., Neurocultures. Glimpses into an Expanding Universe (Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2011), 329-344. PLEASE QUOTE FROM AND REFER EXCLUSIVELY TO THE PUBLISHED VERSION. Fernando Vidal Fiction Film and the Cerebral Subject Five minutes into James Whale’s famous Frankenstein, released in 1931 by Universal Pictures, Dr. Henry Frankenstein and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz reach a gallows in the dead of night. Fritz cuts the rope from which a man hangs; the body thumps to the ground. Henry: “The neck is broken. The brain is useless. We must find another brain.” The following scene shows Dr. Waldman at the Goldstadt Medical College, comparing two preserved brains on display, one labeled “normal,” the other “dysfunctional” and “abnormal.” “Observe,” the professor asks the audience as a close- up of his moving pencil points to areas on the brain surface, “the scarcity of convolutions on the frontal lobe . . . and the distinct degeneration of the middle frontal lobe. All of these general characteristics,” he remarks, “check amazingly with the case history of the dead man before us, whose life was one of brutality, violence, and murder.” Fritz later breaks into the empty lecture hall, drops the jar with the normal brain, and steals the abnormal one. Waldman’s disciple that he was, Henry doesn’t notice the organ’s apparently obvious criminal features; and thus the brain ends up in his creature’s body, already assembled from members and organs of other corpses. As the completed being lies inert, waiting to be brought to life by electricity and galvanic energy, Henry, proud but as usual on the verge of a nervous breakdown, successively excited and pensive, asks Fritz to “[t]hink of it: the brain of a dead man, waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!” The ontological function of the brain is explicitly highlighted. In spite of its size and monstruous materiality, the creature is said to be essentially a brain, and this organ is made to differ from the rest of the body almost as spirit differs from matter. While the body that receives the brain is a composite (and particularly so in the case of Frankenstein’s creation), the brain is treated as a simple totality. The body, moreover, contains the brain as it would contain a soul; the brain is grafted onto a fully formed body, which therefore receives it as if it were a soul infused into potentially live matter.