More on Coppola's DRACULA
Ron Hogan
BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
a ten-step film review by Ron Hogan
copyright 1992, 1993 by Ron Hogan
Given that you all are still arguing over the political implications
of this film months after its release, I thought I might bring out the
review I wrote for rec.arts.movies.reviews around early December:
BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
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.