Fathers, sons and man-made monsters: Is AI going to be the next Creature?

'The Apprentice' and 'Frankenstein' are deep meditations on misguided mentorship and vengeful prodigies

In the final scene of the 2024 biographical drama ‘The Apprentice’, directed by Ali Abbasi, Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) tells writer and journalist Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy) about his three rules of winning. Rule 1: Attack, attack, attack. Rule 2: Deny everything, admit nothing. Rule 3: Always claim victory. Schwartz, co-author of Trump’s 1987 bestseller ‘The Art of the Deal’, asks him how he got these rules. The future president of the United States replies, “I have a killer instinct”, while looking out of the large glass windows of his office at the New York skyline and a flag of the US.

 

These "rules of winning”, however, are not Trump’s inventions, as the audience knows. These were taught to him by his mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The film, whose title references the eponymous American TV reality show starring Trump, is the US President’s "origin story", claims its writer Gabe Sherman. When the film starts, Trump is a rookie businessman in the New York of the late 1970s, trying to build Trump Tower. He hires Cohn to defend the Trump family business from accusations of discriminating against African-American tenants in their properties. The lawyer takes the ambitious businessman under his wings, transforming him into a political animal through his amoral pop philosophy: “There’s no right or wrong… There’s no truth with a capital ‘T’.”

 

The relationship between Cohn and Trump is filled, from the very beginning, with Oedipal undercurrents. While Cohn, who is gay, describes his mentee as “gorgeous”, Trump adopts his mentor as a sort of father-figure, over his own father, Fred Trump. As Donald Trump becomes more and more successful, and Cohn suffers from AIDS, the mentee seems to race past the mentor, even overshadowing him. When Cohn’s condition deteriorates, Trump takes him to Florida for a birthday party, gifting him diamond-encrusted cufflinks. Later, at dinner, Trump’s wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) tells Cohn that the cuff links are not diamonds at all. “The stone is zirconia,” says Ivana. “They are fake.” As the two of them look across the table at Trump, talking to someone else, Ivana adds: “Donald has no shame.”

 

The relationship between mentors and protégés — often metaphorically represented through father-son relationships — has been studied over the past century through the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (Australian scholar Christine Doran writes in a 2017 paper that the mentor-protégé relationship between Freud and Jung, and their eventual rupture and estrangement, adds a biographical layer to their theories.) For Freud, the relationship between fathers and sons is framed through his theories of the Oedipal complex and psychosexual rivalry, shaping the consciousness and identification of the male child. By contrast, Jung envisioned the father as an archetypal image — a symbol of authority and protector. While both theories have been critiqued by later scholars, American psychology scholar Miles Groth writes, in a 2017 paper: “The relationship between a son and his father is usually characterised as primarily one of rivalry.”

 

A dramatic — even violent — representation of this rivalry is depicted in another recent film, ‘Frankenstein’ (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro. An adaptation of British novelist Mary Shelley’s pioneering science fiction novel, first published in 1818, the film leans into the Oedipal complex theory, with British actress Mia Goth playing both the mother, Claire, and the romantic interest, Elizabeth, of protagonist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac). Claire’s death during the birth of Victor’s younger brother, William — and his father’s abusive parenting — leads Victor to experiments in reviving the dead through electricity. The eventual result of these experiments is the creation of Frankenstein’s Creature, a child born through unnatural means, who turns into a vengeful progeny.

 

American feminist literary critic Barbara Johnson, in her essay “My Monster/My Self” (1982), describes Mary Shelley’s novel as “a critique of the institution of parenthood”, where the novelist depicts "a parent who flees in disgust from the repulsive being to whom he has just given birth". On discovering that the unnamed Creature he has created through his experiments is, in reality, monstrous, Victor Frankenstein abandons it. Though they meet several times, they are never reconciled. The Creature murders not only Victor’s brother William, but also his wife Elizabeth. While pursuing the Creature through the icy Arctic wasteland, Victor Frankenstein meets his own demise.

 

No stranger to monsters, del Toro — whose films like ‘Pan's Labyrinth’ (2006) and ‘The Shape of Water’ (2017) have used monstrous creatures to critique fascism — claims in a recent interview that the real monsters in our world “have expensive suits and wear smiles on TV". The director adds: “When you say, ‘Country, motherland, patriotism’, these are things that sound very good, but the way they are enacted is monstrous. Or when people are selling the marvels of AI, and at the same time, they’re saying, ‘Look, knowledge is not important. You have an app. Ask it.’ At the purely biological point of view, your synapse is not going to fire. How is that good for you?”

 

In both ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Frankenstein’, the mentor-protégé relationship becomes a site for examining how power reproduces itself through the creation of monsters who outgrow their makers. In our current political moment, the rise of the right wing mirrors these narratives. Roy Cohn’s bare-knuckle cynicism leads to a shift in the political and social culture that values dominance over dialogue and spectacle over substance, strategically manipulating truth to serve a relentless pursuit of power. Artificial Intelligence enters this landscape as a catalyst of the monsters of our age that del Toro so succinctly describes. The only question that remains is whether we will recognise the monsters before they destroy us. 

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper