Frankenhooker: A Lobotomy of the Absurd

Brain Surgery, Bodily Autonomy, and the mystique of science.

Buckle up, you are in for an outrageous read.

Frankenhooker is a cult horror-comedy film directed by Frank Henenlotter. Released in 1990, it offers an unforgettable and politically incorrect sequence of mind-boggling, surreal, and off-brand comedy. The MPAA rating board allegedly claimed that this was the first film to be rated S, s for shit. Surely, not made for all audiences and sensibilities - certainly not for the writers of this article - but we watched it nonetheless¹. It is a head-scratching, and at times funny film². The movie isn't serious, but it does raise questions about bodily autonomy, the concept of the self, and the uses of psychosurgery. 

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Frankenhooker, Source.

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Franken-Plot 

The film tells the story of Jeffrey Franken, a medical school dropout and electrician with a passion for bioelectric engineering, whose life takes a dark turn when his fiancée, Elizabeth, is tragically dismembered by a lawnmower Jeff had rigged during her father's birthday party³.

Driven by grief and scientific ambition, Jeffrey seeks to bring his dead fianceé back to life. He managed to salvage her head and devised an infallible plan to build her a perfect body. The plan consists of using the bodies of New York prostitutes like pieces of a Lego set, and creating a newer, better, and sexier version of Elizabeth. To do so, Jeff lures a group of sex workers into a New York hotel room to participate in a party. Once in the room, without enough money to pay and slightly doubting the morality of his experiment, Jeffrey offers them a powerful and unstable form of crack cocaine which, once consumed, makes people’s bodies explode into little pieces. Jeff had designed this drug to kill them, but when they found the drugs, he tried to stop them from taking them⁴. 

Having gathered the pieces, he brings them to his garage where he is assembling a new body for Elizabeth, and once an electrical storm comes through the neighborhood, he elevates the corpse on a platform so that it is struck multiple times by lightning. This brings Elizabeth back to life, albeit with a whole different personality.

The body parts of the hookers seem to retain their memories and experiences, which causes the new Frankenhooker to escape Jeffrey’s garage and head out to New York to find clients. She soon discovers that having intercourse with her causes the clients to explode through an electric shock, and goes on a sexual and gory rampage across the city. The film uncritically presents this objectification of women⁵. 

This whole mess concludes when Jeffrey brings her back home and fixes Elizabeth. Now fully aware of her existence, she gets upset at Jeffrey for creating such a monstrosity out of her. Jeffrey is decapitated with a machete by Zorro, the pimp who managed the hookers, and had followed them from New York. The dead women’s remaining body parts murder Zorro (Yes, this was truly bizarre). Finally, Elizabeth uses the remaining body parts to construct a new body for Jeff and revive him. 

In several ways, the film is a Frankenstein mix, mixing Frankenstein’s galvanism with electricity, modernity, and psychiatry. It draws themes from different eras, which do not necessarily fit well together.

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Why Are We Even Writing About This? 

Dear long-time readers, by now you should know we are writing about films that depict or discuss lobotomy⁶. 

In Frankenhooker, there are multiple scenes in which psychosurgery is either mentioned or represented. Nevertheless, it is almost always done for comedic effect and offers very little insight into the history of these surgeries. However, we will still explore some of these instances. 

In the first scene, Jeffrey conducts an experiment in the kitchen during a party, in which a brain with a single eye in the middle is placed in a tank filled with purple liquid. The brain’s eye is wired to a TV, which shows what the eye sees. Jeffrey is trying to make it follow his hand, but since it is not working, he decides to operate on it. He says, “Be careful here. I’m gonna give it a lobotomy.” He picks up a scalpel and a small hammer from his toolbox, and as he makes the incision and hits the stuck scalpel with the hammer, the brain responds and starts twitching. 

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Human brain in a tank (not from the film). Source

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It seems to make it work, as now it follows Jeffrey’s hand. Sadly, moments later, the brain stops functioning, although there is no clear indication of what caused it to stop working. In a later scene, the brain is shown to be working very well. Once again, no explanation is given on how, why, or even if it is the same brain.

The most bizarre use of psychosurgery comes when Jeffrey feels blocked or stressed. He pulls up a drill and places it to his temple (or behind his ear), and starts drilling into his brain. After, Jeff appears to be calm or stimulated, depending on where he drills. He keeps a model skull with a brain, in which he marks the places where he drills to get a specific result. The brain is filled with flags, indicating that he does this same thing frequently. In the real world, lobotomies sometimes left individuals with fewer inhibitions and restraint. Through his drilling, Jeff becomes less concerned about having to kill others to revive his dead wife⁷. 

This depiction of lobotomy is likely just for comedic effect and in no way suggests that the brain has straightforward mechanisms. Yet, within the film’s universe, brains do have localized functions. In our world, the notion that specific body functions are located in very niche and easily identifiable regions of the hemispheres and frontal lobe is precisely what inspired neurologists and biologists at the time to develop surgical interventions in the brain. 

The film does not take science (or itself) seriously, as evidenced by the fact that the super crack causes those who consume it to explode. Moreover, when Jeff is planning to revive his wife, he mumbles and says a lot of scientific terms, but incoherently. These ramblings could be less coherent than tearing a few pages from a middle school science textbook and putting them through a shredder, and randomly assembling them to form sentences. The film also hinted that the stitched-up Frankenhooker has memories from each of the parts used to construct her, as if a knee could carry memories.

The idea of the self & autonomy

Whether the writers of Frankenhooker intended to raise questions about identity or bodily autonomy is questionable in and of itself; however, we found that the film addresses these important issues. One of these is what makes us who we are. Relatedly, it raises questions about the embodiment of consciousness.  

In Frankenhooker, the individual dismembered parts of the prostitutes retained memories and experiences, causing Frankenhooker to seek to replicate them. The physical body was an amalgam of body parts, but crucially so were the experiences, triggers, and memories. She can then navigate parts of New York unknown to Elizabeth, and at times, she exhibits different personalities. Other films have similarly imagined body parts as carriers of memories⁸. This seems fantastical. However, we do know that epigenetic and maternal effects can be passed on to subsequent generations. Perhaps more interestingly, it serves as a stark reminder that we experience the world through our senses and how the world reacts to us. Elizabeth experiences the world differently because she is now different, and people respond to her differently. 

If body parts carried memories, what would such a universe imply for people who receive organ donations? And what does it suggest about what makes us us? Is it our body, our brain, or something ethereal such as a soul?

Did you think this was related to Jeffrey Dahmer?

Jeffrey Franken. Source.

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I admit that when I first saw this film, Jeffrey Franken reminded me of Jeffrey Dahmer. First, they are both named Jeffrey; they have dark, unkempt hair and are socially awkward. Both are depicted as lonely individuals who struggle to interact with others. They retreat into obsessive purists. Both had exposure to medical texts, some training and were obsessed with their projects. Weirdly, both embark on a project to have a “sexy” companion. Both Dahmer and Franken also have a weird relationship with dead bodies. 

The strangest part is that Dahmer was killing at the time in which Frankenhooker was written, developed, and filmed. The movie was released in 1990, almost a full year before Dahmer was caught, so there is no conceivable way in which Dahmer could have inspired Franken. Yet, it remains an eerie coincidence.

Conclusion 

Frankenhooker is a strange and unforgettable comedy, not suitable for all audiences, and offers little value for historians or those interested in the history of medicine and crime. The film perhaps does suggest that these kinds of brain surgeries were considered the stuff of crazy people in the 1990s. Nonetheless, in our mission to collect and analyse all the films in which lobotomy or psychosurgery is featured, we had to include one of the strangest we have looked into so far.

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1. I was traveling through Japan when I watched Frankenhooker, in three sessions. During the second, my partner had gone to sleep early, so I took my iPad and notebook to the hotel’s bar. At that point, Jeff’s super crack made a mouse explode. Shortly thereafter, Jeff is at an uncensored party scene with the sex workers. At this point, I felt I could not watch this in public, so I shut my iPad and took another sip of the delicious sake by my side.

2. The movie is full of absurdities. From our vantage point, there are also a series of serious issues with the film. The humor is crass and often has undertones that are not politically correct. Some of the jokes rely on sexist and other discriminatory assumptions.

3. Jeff is somewhat portrayed as an inventor and tinkerer. In this case, the lawnmower had been rigged to be remotely controlled, and the accident resulted from its misuse.

4. In these scenes, we see Jeff designing the drug and justifying his decision to do so after drilling into his skull. Later, when the sex workers are trying to take it, he tries to stop them, suggesting some morality persists, or perhaps the drilling of the brain is non-permanent.

5. There are some serious problems with the portrayal of genders in this film. For example, in the scene in which Jeff parties with the prostitutes, he is seen to be measuring and ranking different body parts. As if these women were just parts. The fact that we have not written about gender is not an endorsement or meant to imply that these issues are not important; they simply are beyond the scope of our investigation.

6. We have written about: From Hell, Session 9, Man in the Dark, Shutter Island, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and A Clockwork Orange. We are planning to cover every lobotomy film!

7. This may echo observations that some lobotomized patients lost their inhibitions. Nevertheless, we suspect that this was not intentional.

8. Several films have hinted at a kind of cellular memory whereby transplanting an organ or a body part carries attitudes, memories, and abilities. For example: The Eye (2002/08) where, after a corneal transplant a woman can see ghosts; Body Parts (1991) where a man lost control of his arm after receiving a killer’s arm, Hands of Orlac; Face/Off where a criminal and cop exchange faces; Self/less where a rich person tries to transfer his mind into a younger person; and others.