Frankenstein
An abundance of references to movies is made throughout this novel. The very first reference comes in the opening paragraph. The first-person narrator is conveying the feeling of one of those days when nothing goes right. “So then you go hurtling into school fifteen minutes late, praying no one will notice that your hair looks like the Bride of Frankenstein’s.” The comparison made in this simile is to the 1935 Universal Studios sequel to the original Frankenstein movie with Boris Karkoff. The specific reference is the title character played by Elsa Lanchester sporting one of the most iconic hairstyles in film history comprised of a high tower of brown hair zig-zags of gray up the side resembling a bolt of lightning. While striking, it is—as the reference suggests—very hard to pull off without drawing undo attention.
Dracula
At one point, the narrator meets up with a BMW convertible-driving young fresh fellow she somewhat derisively refers to by the nickname “007” who can’t keep his hands off her leg. They are headed in style to a party and the narrator looks once again to pop culture to put things into perspective. “When we finally pulled up to the party, I was shocked. Not because the house looked like Dracula’s castle—of course it did.” Frankenstein’s creature—or, rather his bride—is not only the movie monster that gets referenced through simile. What should be a fairly cool comparison, however, is completely undermined by irony. When the party you borrow your dad’s BMW to drive a girl to is being held in a castle that fails to impress her, it is a pretty fair bet that fantasies of romance are not going to turn out as hoped.
Bruce the Shark
If one comes away from this novel having learned only one thing about its narrator, Lina, it is that she is a young woman who really enjoys a good scare at the movies. First, Frankenstein’s runaway bride and then the ancestral castle of the family Dracula. When Lina first lays eyes on the home where her mother’s old friend Howard lives in Italy, it appears as a lighthouse surrounded by an ocean of graveyard tombstones. This image immediately leads to another simile derived from pop culture cinematic terror. “I knit my fingers in my lap, my stomach dropping as the house got closer and closer. It was like watching Jaws emerge from the depths of the ocean. Duuun dun.”
Excitable Girls
Not all use of similes involves references to scary movies, of course. A particularly memorable example is one that is used to describe to Lina what her mother had been like as a young woman. “Like an exclamation mark in human form. I’d never seen anyone so excited to be doing what they were doing.” The image seems to have made a strong impact on Lina because later in the novel she will return to the punctuation mark in her narrator to craft a metaphor of her own: “Eight hundred exclamation marks went off in my head.” The callback to the description of her mother nearly a hundred pages is a nice bit of subtly drawn connective tissue linking mother and daughter. That link is, of course, a major thematic concern of the story.
