Imagine a piece of content exclusively premised on the observation that we confusingly use "Frankenstein" to refer to the monster instead of the doctor who created him. Netflix's Frankenstein's Monster's Monster, Frankenstein takes this errant tradition and turns it into a thirty minute meta-comedy sketch. Sort of like if Tom Stoppard had directed Ed Wood.
David Harbour of Stranger Things notoriety plays a character named David Harbour III, using documentary to confront the acting legacy he inherited from his megalomaniacal father David Harbour Jr. (also played by David Harbour) and the "real-life" drama suffusing the latter's television play "Frankenstein's Monster's Monster, Frankenstein," in which Harbour Jr. plays the titular character...whoever that is.
The problem of naming Frankenstein's monster parallels the character's struggle with humanity and otherness. It's a dilemma as old as the first staged adaptation of the novel in 1823. Shelly herself attended the production and was pleased with the listing of the creature as "--" in the playbill, remarking, "This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good." The Universal film adaptation of 1931 credited the role as "the monster," but nevertheless Hollywood fame made “Frankenstein” the grunting pop-culture icon you immediately associate with the name, so much so that it might now be considered acceptable usage. So while some distinction is obviously necessary to discussion of the text, anyone who "corrects" the misappelation in casual conversation might be considered an insufferable pedant.
By some baffling, middling, comedic conceit Frankenstein's Monster's Monster, Frankenstein lampoons this pretension by playing up the equivalence between man and monster. David Harbour III's documentary concludes that his father was indeed a figurative monster. Harbour Jr. is so insecurely threatened by his younger co-star that he constantly undermines the success of his televised play, (the plot of which hinges upon him impersonating the erstwhile monster too successfully) at one point breaking character to (falsely) declaim how he got into Julliard. The pretentiousness is transferred from the title, to the plot, to Harbour, to the inherent pretension of theatre itself. Chekhov's gun is referenced so many times you would think there would be more bodies in the end. The word "dramaturge" is repeated enough times to remind you how funny it is.
As one of the most adapted things of all time, I guess Frankenstein could be an apt vehicle to compare the superficiality of popular culture with the pomposity of fine art. But this show's humor succeeds more from facile mockery of Masterpiece Theatre than any attempt to reclaim the monster from Hollywood. Nick Dear's play Frankenstein (2011) already resurrected the creature as philosopher, and this is hardly a parody of that. No, maybe the true target of this satire is its own existence.
Released on the coat-tails of Stranger Things 3, this is simply self-aware that it’s a product of streaming-era excess. Our inevitable consumption of it mirrors David Harbour Jr.'s indulgence in puff pastry at "London USA," a restaurant franchise whose selling pitch is "the finer things don't need to be fancy." At such a short run-time I'd be hard-pressed not to recommend this piece of content based simply on the sheer ham of David Harbour's performance in his many intersecting roles. And yet simultaneously it is so mind-bendingly vacuous. To think about this thing is more absurd than the thing itself, which has pretensions to absurdity, but ultimately embraces the layered irony of many a mockumentary…with extra layers on the side. You might even say that it's like eating beef wellington without the beef.