The Social Misfit

the social misfit

Isabella Moman

Analysis on Frankeinstein, Joker, Poor Things and the Tales of The Supernatural.

Stories about urban legends, myths and supernatural phenomenons have always stimulated the human mind, many have always had a passion by coltivating these tales and feeding into them by adding new details. Many of them have been orally passed down from one generation to the next.

So probably countless details have been altered or added during the narration. But are any of these stories true? are they a complete figmant of human immagination or has there been some sort of misunderstanding?

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Introduction

The main themes of Poor things, Frankeinstein,The Joker and the Tales of the Supernatural are oddness,uncommonness and being sometimes irrational or also being hard to understand. The first impression you can grasp from these four works of fiction is an eery and uncomfortable feeling as the unusual events are being narrated.

But if you look and analyse deeper into all four of them, you realise these are tales of social outcasts, that have been driven into isolating themselves from many social interactions.

They are usually deemed as monsters, ghosts, monstrosities of evil and just in general, villains of their own story. But most of these so called "monsters" are actually allegories and metaphors for noncomformists.

The best and most direct example of a social misfit is probably the Joker starring Joaquin Pheonix; the film demonstrates the origin story of this infamous villain and shows how cynical society is, especially the lack of empathy and humanity towards people in need.

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THE JOKER

She is seen as an outcast, but given that she is also a woman, she is perceived by many men as a curious creature that is sometimes also objectified. She also becomes a woman with passions, an education and a mind of her own, so she is completely interiorised into society by the end of the movie.

Poor Things, released in 2023, can be considered as a modern and female version of Frakeinstein, as they are both humans that were brought back to life after passing away. Emma Stones character's brain has been replaced with her unborn baby's brain, which shows the world through a baby's point of view within a womans body.

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POOR THINGS

Mary Shelley's Frankeinstein instead talks about the infamous monster brought back to life thanks to science. The creature, after being brought to life by scientist, Victor Frankeinstein, is then thrown into the western world and society. That is definitely not ready for a creature that is defined as "ugly" and "brainless", he starts to even despise his creator for bringing him into this dispecable world.

In this movie adaptation, Frankeinstein through the observation of the behaviour of other people, realises he needs a companion, in this case a wife. This demonstrates that Frankeinstein,although he appears to be heartless, is just looking for some form of compianionship, which is the purpose in life of all humans. Humanity consists of feeling like you belong somewhere and with someone

FRANKEISTEN

Scene from Mary Shelley's Frankeinstein (1994)

In this collection of short stories, many creepy and supernatural elements appear as the antagonists, when in reality they are most likely victims of violent and unfair deaths or just completely misunderstood deaths.

Such as the first short story, by Charlie Dickens, who writes about an encounter between a signalman working near the traintracks and a ghost. By the end of the story, we learn that the ghost was also misunderstood by everyone,including the readers, as he was trying to save the signalman from being crushed by the train.

The third story, in The Dark, by E. Nebit, tries to depict this boy as a tattletale because of his sixth sense, he always seems to know something that is either a secret or that should be completeky unknown. This mysterious but amusing aspect about him will end up getting him murdered.

The Tales Of The Supernatural

These outsiders, maybe antisocial characters are iether completely misenteroreted by the reader, the author or maybe the other characters that sorround them.

COnclusion

It is probably caused by the primitive istinct of human kind to feel uncomfortable and concerned with anything that is slightly or completely different from what they consider the norm.

Society has always distant itself away from deviant,uncommon, strange and unfamiliar behaviours. Society will always push towards what is familiar and homogeneous.

A famous Urban Legend that revealed to be a real social pariah was the Man with no face, thst was revealed to be Raymond Theodore Robinson,a disfigured American man whose years of nighttime walks made him into a figure of urban legend in western Pennsylvania. Robinson was so severely injured in a childhood electrical accident that he could not go out in public without fear of causing a panic, so he went for long walks at night.

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