The scene with Whale and Clay having lunch and then a cigar (here "a cigar is not just a cigar") was added to the novel and sets up the next scene in which Whale pushes Clay's buttons and Clay erupts, leaving after "the monster comes out."

Condon says, with reference to the strip interview of Whale by the pool, that some people thought the flm was anti-gay, that it played off steroetypes about the older predatory gay man, and thought that the film could have focused better on Whale as an out gay director in the 1930s rather than an old man at the end of his life. Condon's rejoinder is that the story he tells is more dramatic.

In his DVD commentary, Condon is so concerned to say that it's "not just gay movie" that he plays down the love and even eroticism between Clayton and Whale in the scene after the Cukor party and Clay comes down half-dressed in a towel. Just before, we see Whale looking in a mirror and seeing the soldier in the reflection that he had hallucinated at the end of the party.

When Clay comes in, we see Whale looking in the window and we see his reflection, and the Clay's as he comes in, so that he is in the reflection where the soldier was in the mirror.

Then we see a closeup of Clay smiling at Whale that echoes the close up of the soldier smiling at Whale at the party.

Clay stands fully nude (for the first time) and poses for Whale. Whale touches the image of Clay in the window, but it's not clear what the gesture means, whether it is longing, erotic, a reality check, or something else. Throughout the film, Whale looks at Clay with a painterly or directorial eye, notably in the scene in which Clay tells Whale that Clay did not go to Korea. Is Whale trying to "frame" Clay in both senses of the word for his murder by his "second monster?" Cetainly the gas mask scene shows a lot of cruelty on Whale's part toward Clay.

There is a similar shot of Whale when a young man in boxers calls to him by the pool at night "watch me Jimmy" before he dives into the pool with other gay men who are all naked.

While Clay is clearly not gay, the film is powerful, in my view, partly because it suggests a variety of blurred attachments--Whale as father figure for Clay, for example; Clay as angel of mercy and replacement for a lost love; Hanna and Whale as married couple (Hanna's kiss on the corpse's mouth). Even Clay's wife remains in the background, out of focus, and their kiss is shot in long shot as he goes to take out the trash, setting up the final scene in which he remembers Whale by imitating Boris' Karloff's performance. The wife seems like a domestic type similar to Hanna. Whne she cals Clay to take out the trash, he looks at his son and raises his eyebrows ina conspiratorial way. Also, it is interesting that though Clay takes his son up and the trash, when he is outside, the son is gone and only the trash is there. It's only when he's outside that the really begins to play. The image turns black and white, recalling the black and white image, followed by the credits "A good cast is worth repeating" which is taken from the credits, also seen briefly just before on t.v. in Clay's home, from The Bride of Frankenstein. The film is like the novel and unlike the Bride in the way that focuses on triangles rather than couples (the monster lives on in t.v. and in Clay's memory). Even Whale's relationship with Leonard Brandon, the solider, is not clearly gay. Whale says "I guess he loved me" and also says there was "love in the trenches," but he doesn't make it clear if he reciprocated Brandon's love, and appears to do so only at the end of the film when he in his dream he enters the trench and lies down next to Brandon, whoo appears to be dead.

The transition from film to t.v. is represented at the bar and in Whale's home, and then again in the coda in Clay's home. Bride of Frankenstein was not in fact shown on t.v. until a few months after Whale died. Condon's film testifies to the importance of visual mass media as themselves forms of reanimation and even repression or (secondary) revision.

Condon refers to the scene Hanna and Clay find Whale's corpse as a "Joe Orton like moment." Orton was a gay English playwright big on the 1960s who was murdered by his unsuccessful lover. A biopic about Orton's life is called Prick Up Your Ears, which in England sounds like "prick up you arse" as well.

Whale and Clay are connected by dreams, first of Whale dreaming that Clay is Clive / Frankenstein, and then when he dreams that Clay is the soldier in trenches and then Clayton wakes up, as if it had been his dream. Moreover, both are like the monster. Whale makes himself into the monster, as in the second dream sequence. And the note on the back of the sketch quotes the monster's question to the bride--"friend?"--before she rejects him, again making Whale into the monster. Both Whale and Clay have bad relations with their fathers. Whale's chides him for being a "nancy boy" and Clay's parents are alcoholics. Neither of their fathers loves nor approves of his son. Both are outsiders as well. Clay is a failed marine, and Whale is a gay ex-director.

The word "friend" may mean "gay boyfirned" in England.

When Clay returns to pose for Whale after having blown up, he stands next to a Balthus painting (of a seated nude woman). Balthus was a controversial 20th century French painter of highly sexual, bizarre subjects. See, for example, his rather shocking version of the pieta below.

The use of Balthus calls up a recurrent theme of the fim, namely, the relation between the painterly and directorial gaze and voyeurism. The scene where Clay poses and then leaves because Whale's talk becomes sexually explicit is followed by a scene of Whale remembering a nude gay swim party that he watches from his stool. When Whale touches Clay's reflection on the window, the directorial and voyeuristic blur.

Mckellen added the allusion to Hamlet "oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt" at the end of the Cukor party scene and to King Lear "pray you undo this button" when Clay undresses Whale and puts him to bed.

The Shakespeare quotations allude to a tragic hero who may go mad adn another that goes mad, recovers, and again goes mad. The allusions also suggest moments of relative sanity for Whale as he loses it, his choice to commit suicide rather than have Clay murder him. Lear's speech is like Whale's when he cites it in that both are the last speeches of the characters before they die. The allusion to Lear makes obvious sense since Whale is old and about to die. The allusion to Hamlet makes less obvious sense.

Condon wanted to echo Whale by mixing tones, from serious and tragic to serious and comic. So Hanna often adds comic relief, and the moment she and Clay put Whale back in the pool is supposed to be funny.

Whale did kill himself. He didn't know how to swim and dove in the shallow end of his pool, dressed in a suit, cracked his head open, and drowned. David Lewis, his partner, produced in 1957 the suicide note he had initially suppressed.

Cukor versus Whale as gay directors. Cukor was not as closeted as the film implies, but there was a difference. Cukor's heteros included parties were followed by late night gay men only swim parties. By contrast, Whale went around publicly with his partner David Lewis.

Whale was successful as a playwright and filmmaker in part because WWI wiped out a whole generation

. Whale as gay martyr whose career was destroyed as the U.S. became more homopobic in the 40s, and 30's bohemian culture was clamped down on? Condon says this was not so. Whale lost control of what was supposed to be his first big film The Road Back after the Laemmles lost control of Universal Studios. The film was reedited and botched because of pressure from Germany (a big part of the film market), where the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front had already been banned. After the The Road Back bombed, Whale got some "B" picture offers but withdrew because he no longer enjoyed making films under the revised working conditions. By contrast, Cukor was offered "A" pictures.