Young Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein is a 1974 parody of Universal's monster films, directed by Mel Brooks in black and white as a loving homage to the Gothic horror tradition. The film contains no discernible markers of contemporary progressive sensibility, which is to say it is entirely of its time and makes no attempt to address or redress social consciousness of any kind. Gene Wilder's neurosurgeon inherits his grandfather's castle and rediscovers the secrets of reanimation, leading to a series of increasingly absurd comedic set pieces that operate purely within the register of slapstick and genre pastiche.

The representation of disability here warrants particular scrutiny, though perhaps not in the manner one might expect. Marty Feldman's Igor is played as comic relief, and Brooks even undercuts the traditional hunchback trope by having the character's hump migrate from one side to the other throughout the film, a joke that operates at the level of pure visual comedy rather than any statement about disability itself. The female characters exist within the narrow comedic framework typical of 1970s comedy, neither progressive nor particularly regressive by the standards of their era. Madeline Kahn's Inga and Cloris Leachman's Frau Blücher are written as comic stereotypes without any attempt at dimensional characterization or social commentary.

The film's concerns are entirely formal and generic: how to successfully parody the visual language and narrative conventions of 1930s horror cinema. Social consciousness, whether progressive or otherwise, simply does not enter the picture. One approaches this film not as a cultural artifact worthy of scoring on axes of contemporary sensibility, but as a technical exercise in comedic pastiche. It is, by the standards of modern social consciousness, essentially inert.