BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
A ten-step film review by Ronald Hogan
Copyright 1992 Ronald Hogan
1) The film's overture is set in the Middle Ages, during the Crusades. Note that the setting is Eastern Europe, the porous region where the East and West intermingle, where Europe gets its tastes of Eastern exoticism, such as the Turks. Dracula exists in this turbulent middle ground and is profoundly changed by it. It's not just God that he rejects, but Western civilization. He gives himself up entirely to the mysterious Other that the East often represents.
2) Much has been made about the degree to which this film is faithful to Bram Stoker's novel. Of course, the very heart of the text is completely reversed, but in superficial form, the film does come closer to the novel than any previous adaptation I can recall. The multiple points of view and forms of text are recreated in an effective, if slightly disjunctive, style. By the way, isn't it an interesting point that the two major novels which lay the foundations for the horror genre (the other being Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) are both epistolary and from multiple points of view, and focus on the issue of knowledge of the nature and identity of the Monster and ways to control it?
3) I'd like to suggest that part of an explanation is that Frankenstein comes out of the birth of English Romanticism, which leads by the end of the century to Modernism, which is where I propose to situate Dracula. This historical position is expressed in DRACULA through the highlighting of the emerging technology: typewriters, phonographic recorders, the cinematograph. Also the tentative steps towards psychology. Another modernist touch is the emphasis on the text--not only the diaries, but the maps, especially that map that hangs in Dracula's castle, and the ancient manuscripts. Look at the way that these documents interface with the events of the film. DRACULA has a lot more in common with, say, PROSPERO'S BOOKS than most people would notice. It doesn't have as high a level of information density, and it's more accessible, but the connection is there.
4) It came up in conversation that this film, more than just about any other in the last year or so, is screaming for an analysis through the philosophy of Michel Foucault. I'm not prepared to do such a reading of DRACULA at this time, but I will suggest that the following books would lead towards interesting elaborations: MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION, THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, and THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE. This could probably give anybody enough of a start. Maybe I'll get around to it someday in the future (yeah, right).
5) Well, I can at least mention sexuality. It's a cliche that vampires represent sexual desires, so I'll steer away from that and simply say that the control of sexuality implied by the control of vampires is evident in two particular scenes. Van Helsing's lecture shows sexuality as a subject of scientific investigation, a subject which can be identified and regulated. The illustrations in the Burton edition of the Arabian Nights are another way in which sex becomes a classifiable object; i.e. these are the different types of sexual intercourse, identified and categorized. Keep in mind that Burton's interest was more thn prurient--it was 'anthropological', to use a slightly anachronistic term.
6) Back to the vampire: Gary Oldman was excellent in this role. I have to admit, though, that having recently rewatched JFK for a class paper, I was seeing Oldman as Oswald more often than as Dracula. It's not entirely farfetched--Oldman, especially in his biographical roles (Sid Vicious, Joe Orton, Lee Oswald, and arguably Dracula), portrays the alienated outsider, the man cut off from and rebelling against his culture, very well. Dracula's destructive rage is much sleeker than Oldman's other roles, but it ultimately draws from the same energies.
7) Dracula is also the most recent member of a lineage of Coppola's tragic protagonists, tainted and condemned by their struggles against the dominant culture. Michael Corleone's an obvious example, and one that also reunited with God at the end. Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW is another potential; he also rejected civilization and retreated into pure animalist, instinctual action and lust. You could even make an argument for Tucker, who is hunted down and destroyed by the auto industry and the government (read: the vampire hunters) because of the threat to their dominance over culture that he represents.
8) While I'm drawing parallels between Coppola films, here's one: the wedding of Jonathan and Mina and the scenes intercut with it (which I don't identify so as not to be a complete spoiler) and the baptism of Michael Corleone's son in THE GODFATHER.
9) Cinema is quite possibly the modernist medium. A movement that was emphasizing mastery over the world through identification and awareness, the act of seeing with one's own eyes, out of which emerges a medium that (until sound was added) relied entirely on the visual. According to many early film theorists (especially Siegfried Kracauer, later Andre Bazin, see also Bela Belasz), film's greatest power was its ability to stand in for reality, to offer reality to the audience as a controlled subject, but controlled in such a way that its inherent reality was not violated. As cinema grew, a language of cinematic forms emerged: dissolves, silhouettes, etc., forms which reinforced a linear, rational, narrative structure to film and to reality. DRACULA reproduces much of the early language of cinema, a language that has for the most part been replaced by the rapid fire blitz of images for which we can thank television, the post-modernist medium. DRACULA is a deliberate throwback to what cinema was, which is undoubtedly why so many critics think the film is overblown. (Well, it is in spots--but then, DRACULA isn't an old film--it's the 1990s recreation of what Coppola thinks old film were like)
10) Dracula rejected God and civilization. Nobody specifically refers to him as the Antichrist, at least not that I recall, but he's clearly meant to fulfill that role. And his final words with Mina, lifted from an obvious source (again not revealed to prevent too much of a spoiler) bring that point home. Dracula's death (I don't really think of this as a spoiler; I think we all know he dies) is not a defeat, in the same way that the guilty verdict against Tucker was not a defeat, or that Patton's death isn't a defeat (Okay, Coppola didn't direct PATTON, but he co-wrote it). I think of the end of DRACULA in much the same way that I think of the end of Coppola's RUMBLE FISH and THE OUTSIDERS--the king is dead, long live the king. The cycle begun in the overture is brought to the appropriate end.
follow-ups and email welcome Ron Hogan rhogan@usc.edu
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