Stephenson Humphries-Brooks
Hamilton College
Abstract
Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, effects a double
reversal of the Christ myth: the Christ is inverted and Dracula is
constructed as a Christ antitype before being saved as a new Christ
inclusive of the feminine principle. The film achieves this double
reversal by stereotyping the female characters as representative of
diseased and immoral flesh that can be cleansed only by absorption
into the non-bodily male spirit. Thereby, the film leaves us with
elided but nevertheless explosive mythical tensions.
Introduction
[1] Despite its title, Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film, Bram
Stoker's Dracula, constitutes a deconstruction rather than an
"adaptation" of Stoker's original monster, transforming
Dracula into a complete, though ambiguous, Christ-figure by making
him replete with sexual and romantic experience. While inverting the
Christ through the development of Dracula as a tragic romantic character,
however, Coppola reverses Stoker's subtler characterizations of Lucy
and Mina by confining them more closely to the archetypes of Wanton/Virgin,
or, as it were, Magdalene/Madonna. The mythological recasting in the
film places the audience in the position of nostalgia for the comfort
of a traditional gender-differentiated and sexually sublimated solution
to the antinomies of Life-Death, Spirit-Flesh, Man-Woman, Good-Evil.
Thereby, Stoker's early modernist attempt to reconcile traditional
Christian theology with modern industrialized society through the
action of a community becomes, in Coppola's interpretation, rather
a matter of the redemption of the Man by pure non-bodily eros,
which obliquely condemns Woman as the representative of diseased and
immoral flesh.[1]
[2] The film is at once more complex in some ways and less
successful in others than the novel was in its own time. But by constituting
his film as the primary focus of our discussion, we can avoid the
vexed, and some would say irresolvable, issues of faithful translation
vis-ˆ-vis creative reinterpretation and increase our understanding
of the way in which Coppola has been able to transform received material
into a rendering of the sexual/spiritual confusion and losses of the
present day. For that reason, the present examination is intended
to foreground the film's at times chaotic mixture of the ideological
and mythological and finds in the directorial "failures"
as much ground for inspiration and expectation as for reproof and
condemnation. The film, from some angles (that of gender distinction
for one), could even be said to indicate where the culture still "needs
work."
[3] In film we can look for complex meanings in the visual
syntagmatic deployment of mythic structures as well as in their verbal
deployment across the duration of narration. Postmodern film narratives
generally develop significant changes in American mythic traditions,
even as they can also reflect disturbing elided tensions.[2]
As a particularly clear example, Bram Stoker's Dracula presents
an excellent opportunity for interpreting the postmodern alterations
of the American mythology of Christ.[3]
Once we strip away the cinematic style and analyze the mythic structures
of the film, a dominating concern with the traditional myth of Christ
emerges, along with an attendant confining of female characters within
(pre-modern) Christian types. "Unlike Modernist attempts to 'demythify'
established generic forms, what results here is a Postmodern 'neomythification,'.
. ."[4]
[4] The Christ is one of the fundamental myths of modern American
film. In Neil Hurley's analysis, a hinge dramatic event for the Christ
story, ". . . the nature of Jesus' death as a criminal, uncontrovertible
as a historical datum, makes the persecution or death of certain rebels
take on a mystical aura."[5] To press Hurley's observation further,
modern and postmodern film makers use the death of the rebel to ground
their structures in the deeply engrained Christian mythic tradition
which survives and structures their approach to unseen other reality
even in a post-Christian era.
[5] Although Coppola's original title was Dracula: The
Untold Story,[6]
the book, Dracula by Bram Stoker, gives Coppola's movie its
title, plot, characters, and elements of style. The movie (hereafter
BSD) uses the book's technique of telling the story by journal
entries from various characters. BSD adds the perspective of
the camera, which frequently lets us see the world through Dracula's
eyes and allows a visceral empathy with the character.
[6] Best known for his direction of The Godfather trilogy
(1972, 1974, 1990) and Apocalypse Now (1979), Coppola has shown
great interest throughout his career in large, mythic, screen depictions.
In the latter movie his use of both literary (Heart of Darkness)
and biblical (Revelation) references combines to give an interpretation
of the Vietnam experience that is both surreal and timeless. Similarly,
in BSD he samples genres and styles in a postmodern pastiche
of images: elements from gothic romance, B-Movie horror, and surrealistic
film, in an, at times, almost excessive homage
to the well-established Dracula tradition of modern film.[7]
[7] Inverting the Christ through the development of Dracula
as a tragic romantic character, BSD deconstructs Stoker's original
monster. The tradition of Romantic Tragedy frequently endows its heroes
with a nature both Christlike and demonic in power, creating a figure
at once rebelling against the Creator and sacrificing himself for
humanity ˆ la Sisyphus. Whereas Dracula's Satanic nature is
virtually unchallenged, or put more precisely, unmitigated by virtue
in Stoker's book, in BSD, Dracula as a force of evil
becomes a tragic lover and, through an eternity of suffering, is transformed
into the suggestion of a more complete Christ, replete with erotic
love fulfilled as a mythic return to Edenic existence in the heavens.
The figure of Dracula, reversed initially as the antitype to Christ,
undergoes a second reversal in the final scene becoming a completed
Christ type. As Bruce Lincoln reminds us, "An order twice inverted
is an order restored, perhaps even strengthened as a result of the
exercise."[8]
Reversing the Christ
[8] The Christ myth is reversed both in plot progression and
by direct allusion to the story of Jesus found in the gospels and
film. The emplotment of Dracula's descent begins immediately. In the
opening scene, Prince Vlad becomes the crucifier by impaling his enemies
on the battlefield. His wife, Elisabeta, tricked into believing that
he is dead, takes her own life and is condemned by the Church. In
response, Dracula proclaims, "I shall rise from my own death
to avenge hers with all the powers of darkness." Blood pours
from the cross when Vlad stabs its center. He controls the sacred
blood of the Christ by alliance with Darkness for his own purposes,
"This blood is the life and it shall be mine." As we subsequently
learn, this means not life, but eternal, dreary undeath.
[9]The scene closes as Vlad descends below the frame. If Christ
descended into hell to bring forth the sinners held there, then Vlad
descends to hell to learn its powers and to oppose God. At this point,
Vlad would seem to be the complete opposite, the final opponent, of
the Christ. Indeed, Dracul, the Dragon, in his blood red armor evokes
the image of Satan in the end of time, "And behold, a great red
dragon, with seven heads and ten horns and seven diadems upon his
head . . . and the dragon stood before the woman who was about to
bear a child, that he might devour her child"(Rev 12:3-4). Later
scenes will add the element of child eaten by his followers, increasing
the Demonic charge of the Dracula figure.
[10] In what appears in context as an odd referencing of classic
Hollywood depictions of the garden tomb of Jesus (e.g. Cecile B. DeMille,
King of Kings [1927]), Dracula seduces Lucy Westenra by magical
powers to come to him in the garden, raping her in the appearance
of a werewolf on a stone bench in front of what will become her own
tomb. Dracula makes her his by brutal sex followed by the drinking
of her blood, thus enslaving her to eternal undeath. By contrast,
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane begins the giving of his own suffering
and blood for the life of the world. According to some ancient manuscripts
of the Gospel of Luke he even sweats great drops like blood (22:43-44).
[11]This reversal of the symbol of blood continues as the
film progresses. Professor Abraham Van Helsing first appears on screen
in a scene not contained in the novel and strongly reminiscent of
the Sanhedrin trial in Jesus films. He explains to his students the
diseases of the blood as the story of civilization--"syphilization."
He theorizes the link between blood, sin, death, and sexuality. Therefore,
Dracula commands a power derived from original sin. He represents
the inborn condemnation of humans, their civilization, and their children
carried as biological necessity. When associated with the garden scene
of Lucy's rape, the references to traditional Christian myths are
multiplied. Now the rape looks like a brutal reinterpretation of the
Fall.
[12] The movie also includes provocative parallels to the
Last Supper, even if recast as a romantic dinner for two, as
the first communion of a romantic Dyad (with Elizabeta's memory as
perhaps the third figure of a new Trinity). The palpably symbolic
and ritual nature of the scene pointedly reminds the audience of blood
and its link with passion and with sin. The camera highlights AB and
SIN on the bottle. Sin is carried by blood type. The interpretation
of Van Helsing has become the camera's.
[13] Evocations of the Last Supper continue throughout the
movie. Dracula curses Lucy with words similar to Jesus' own, "I
condemn you to living death, to living undeath, to blood." Jesus
blesses his disciples, "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day" (John
6:54). Indeed resurrected to undeath as a vampire, Lucy cruises the
night, stealing children in grotesque parody of Christian images
of eucharist and rebirth.
[14] Similarly, in the most sexual scene of the movie, Mina
drinks from the side of Dracula to her own eternal everlasting undeath.
In the Gospel of John blood and water flow out of Jesus' side, symbols
of eternal life (John 19:34). Consider, further, the following dialogue
compared to the gospels' language of Jesus.
Mina: I want to be with you always.
Dracula: You cannot know what you are asking.
Jesus: You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink
the cup that I am to drink? (Matt 20:20-28).
Dracula: There is no life in this body.
Jesus: . . .unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink
his blood, you have no life in you (John 6:53).
Dracula: You must die to live.
Mina: My life and love always.
Dracula: I give you life eternal, everlasting love.
Jesus: The one who loses life for my sake will find it (Matt 10:39b;
trans. mine).
The audience cannot but be moved and confused by this layering of
images and speech. Dracula's phrases and action reverse the mythic
images and speeches of Jesus.
[15] Dracula recreates a world of life and death that both
condemns the Christian world order and destroys the mythic Christ
himself. He undoes Christ. Yet Dracula himself cannot remain in the
realm of undeath. Love for Mina overcomes him, and his destiny in
the movie returns to the order pronounced by Christ. As with classical
tragedy, the moral order must be preserved, reestablished. For the
movie, the return to moral order means the return of Woman to her
traditional place, and in a parodoxical move, the newer film version
reverts to the past of its source text and resurrects an older symbolic
vision of Woman to combat the novel's vision of a New Woman.
Woman in Bram Stoker's Dracula
[16] While inventively rewriting the Christ myth, BSD
returns to a highly traditional, Christian understanding of Woman,
with Christian interpretation of Eve and the Virgin-Bride Mary providing
the options for women characters in the movie. As Eve, Woman is the
sexual carrier of Sin for Man, the one condemning and enslaving Man
to his bestial nature. As Mary, Woman saves Man for his eternal spiritual
destiny. BSD promulgates in the audience (perhaps most especially
in the males in the audience) a nostalgic longing for the traditional
Woman.
[17] The opening segment portrays the devoted passion of mythical
Woman in Elisabeta as true wife, a soul mate full-blooded and sexual.
Subsequent scenes break this mythical, shall I say pre-Fall, unity
into fragments and assign various roles the women characters. Together
they constitute Woman. From the film's perspective Woman's wholeness
is no longer possible, and by breaking her image into separated visual
symbols, Coppola is able to use the camera to project literally and
cinematically an extensive range of male fantasies and traditional
representations of the lure, the danger and the evil of female sexuality.
[18] For example, the she-vampires are other; naked and foreign
they seduce and devour Jonathan Harker in perhaps the only "scary"
scene in the film. Eastern and Romanian speaking (Lucy will also later
speak Romanian as her blood infection spreads), the foreign women
invade and pass on sexual disease, attacking wrists, breasts and genitals.
Sex becomes feasting, as they hold Jonathan in a cruciform posture.
The stigmata of the modern cruciform Man are inflicted by the sexual
lust and disease of Woman. Using male fears of women's unbridled sexuality,
the horror here is also shaped by the American male's attraction to
and fear of foreignness.
[19] Lucy exemplifies the modern woman who grasps for her
own assertive libido only to be decapitated as the bad girl, who submits
to Darkness. She is, as Mina observes, a virtuous girl with loose
ways. The camera shows her as a desirable sexual object. She knows
what men want. Red hair down, shoulders bare, breasts heaving, she
is the type, the mythic Woman of male fantasy who today sells everything
from beer to automobiles. Mina is, by contrast, buttoned up; her hair
coifed into a bun. Titillated by the Arabian Nights, she lacks
sexual imagination: an "old fashioned girl." Both invite
domination.
[20] We know Lucy's fate before her rape "to be subject
and to own the desire is impossible for women."[9]
Lucy appears as in a trance. Her red nightgown marks her as a seductive
and available woman. Mina in blue and covered suggests an angel, beautiful,
the saviour. Coming upon the rape in progress, Mina stops its consummation.
The aforementioned stone crypt, appears in the background of the shot,
a symbolic indication of Lucy's ultimate resurrection as vampire.
[21] The constructed garden of the movie incorporates both
Christian and pagan traditions. Opposing symbols in the scene elevate
the conflict between the bestial, sexual nature of Man and the sublime
spirit. As Lucy and Mina leave the garden, the viewer who looks closely
will notice two crosses that they pass behind. One is Roman. One is
Celtic, thereby encompassing Coppola's and Stoker's respective cultural
traditions. They are superimposed in the same frame with the statue
of a satyr - an attendant of Dionysus the god of wine, fertility,
and sexual ecstasy. We see our current situation, or the situation
the movie wants us to see, through these fragments of myth. The threat
to the moral order is nature, sexual and fertile.
[22] Later, in direct homage to the famous baptism
scene from The Godfather, the movie cuts between Lucy's death/marriage
to Dracula to the marriage of Mina and Jonathan. The unholy is contrasted
with the holy, but within the symbolic universe of the movie, the
unholy suggests passion and vitality while the holy has become an
antiquated and ineffective form. Dracula condemns Lucy to "living
death, to eternal hunger for living blood," as Mina drinks the
eucharistic cup. Dracula, changing form into a wolf, feeds at Lucy's
neck; Jonathan and Mina kiss and for the only moment in the film their
passion is suggested. Lucy dies to rise again as the undead bride
of Dracula. Lucy, open to sexuality, is condemned, Mina, still a virgin,
marries a lover aged beyond easy recognition, exhausted and lacking
the virility and mysterious appeal of Mina's "Prince." Since
early in the film we had seen him with Harker in a different
guise, we must to some degree recognize that Dracula has become young
in Mina'seyes, just as the Jonathan she marries has grown old.
[23] The final scene of the movie bears the most careful analysis.
In it the oppositions of the movie's mythic structure are resolved,
but also exposed. The scene begins with a long shot from floor level
to the vault of the ceiling of the chapel where the camera sees dimly
the figures of Vlad and Elizabeta. As chapel vault, this represents
the celestial sphere. The camera connects us from earth to heaven.
[24] The second shot reverses the perspective; the camera
now looks down from the vault of the heavens to the floor where we
see Dracula bleeding. The distance is cut approximately in half and
Dracula appears in a medium high shot, "Where is my God. He has
forsaken me. It is finished." With those words Dracula ceases
to be the antitype of Christ and becomes directly identified as Jesus
on the Cross (see Mark 15:34; John 19:30). The perspective provided
by the camera is that of the heavenly, or rather we see Dracula's
death from the perspective of God. The heavenly perspective of BSD
allows the audience to stand in the place of God and as it were, decide
for or against Dracula/Christ, but only for a moment.
[25] Mina provides in voice-over the interpretation that in
the presence of God (further signified by the miraculous emergence
of lights around the chapel, even in the trees) "My love would
release us all from the powers of darkness. Our love is stronger than
death." Hence, the resurrection of Christ is reinterpreted as
the apotheosis of Vlad/Dracula through the purified Woman's love.
Moreover, the camera's focus provides us with a symbolic juxtaposition
aimed at resolving some of the film's psychological, mythic and spiritual
tensions. After Dracula begs for peace, the cross, wounded by Vlad
at the beginning of the movie, heals; Mina's brand on the forehead,
signifying her "vampireness," disappears. Dracula becomes
young once more. Mina kisses and then beheads him. We get a tight
high shot of Mina and then a cut to her perspective looking up at
the now bright ceiling of the vault where Elizabeta and Vlad can now
be seen as painted in flight to the heavens.
[26] The scene establishes a heavenly-earthly axis that connects
the characters Mina and Dracula with their previous lives and unifies
them in one moment of death and apotheosis into a new single mythological
figure. The Christ, inverted to anti-type and longing for his erotic
feminine principle throughout centuries of alienation, finds her and
becomes the new Christ, inclusive of the feminine principle by means
of a divine marriage. The polarities of Male-Female, Christ-Satan,
Light-Darkness, Love-Revenge, Life-Death, Spirit-Body, Chastity-Fertility
are resolved in this final scene in play around the visually constructed
heavenly-earthly axis. Man is returned to God by the renunciation
of bodily love on the part of the Virgin Bride. She functions as judge
and executioner. Her dark sexuality is purified by a higher idyllic
and unconsummated love. She becomes the proper, unfallen, virginal
Eve. Within the movie Mina is both the Savior and eternal Virgin Bride.
[27] Expressive always of the body and the blood, Woman threatens
the salvation of Man. She is, seen psycho-socially and theologically,
the symbol that constellates the Male perception of his entrapment
between body and spirit. In Coppola's film, she becomes that symbol
in excess. All women are potentially vampires and fodder to vampires.
Even as Elizabeta, the passionate and devoted wife, she becomes "an
occasion for sin," as her suicide provokes Vlad to defiance of
God. In Lucy's coterie of lovers is proof that to living men, rather
than the undead, her power as Femme Fatale is irresistible (and therefore
not their fault). Woman's spirituality is cleansed only, as Mina,
she takes on the active role of the Man as judge and executioner.
She even symbolically gains a phallus in the form of the Texan's knife,
which she uses to decapitate Dracula. Mina renounces her sexual self
for the sake of her man, her transcendent love; there can be no child
from the pure marriage of souls. Mina accepts the role of the Virgin
Bride by the end of the movie with fertility never instantiated.[10] She becomes male in order to
enter the Kingdom (GospThom 114).[11]
[28] The preceding analysis of Coppola's film suggests some
significant conclusions about the development of myth in postmodern
American film. The primary resource for mythic symbols and structure
remains traditional Christianity. A perceived lack in the Christ symbol
is filled out with an experience of the agonistic feminine represented
by sexual and romantic love. The new Christ transcends this suffering
love by escape from the body, which is seen as sinful and diseased.
The female, however, cannot be reconciled or balanced with the male.
Instead she must be extinguished and absorbed by the spirit, which
is male.
[29] The aesthetic sensibility and emotional mood of the film
is at least as important as its structure. Faced with little hope
for directly returning Woman to her pre-modern, let alone Victorian
roles, the film expresses a longing for a non-threatening soul-mate
while at the same time lashing out at the postmodern Woman for her
freedom. This vindictive nostalgia represents a postmodern American
male attempt to come to terms with his own loss of meaning. The lurid
intensity expressed in the film is a gauge of his frustration and
outrage at the supposed cause of his loss. How much this reinterpretation,
transmutation, of Stoker's novel is individual directorial vision,
and how much of it the emergence of authoritative myth is not entirely
clear. In this regard Coppola's work might be compared with Martin
Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ. Most intriguing, the
futuristic visions presented by a younger generation of directors
notably the Wachowski brother's Matrix and Matrix Reloaded,
or Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko offer other possibilities,
albeit variations of sacrificing oneself for the fair lady (in the
case of Reloaded "fair gentleman").
[30] The hope for the development of both Woman and Man, at
least in film, is that Coppola's film adaptation doesn't quite work.
While the inversion of the Christ figure projects substantial neomythological
power, it is ineffectively yoked to archetypal images of women that
are exhausted and ultimately unconvincing, if still capable of evoking
fears and conveying menace. The pastiche of symbols finally lacks
unity. The symbols are too many and too strong, while the gendered
imagery is too archaic to create a convincingly unified new myth.
Instead, and against its own intent, BSD has exposed the residual
mythic tension elided by the sidesteps of retelling: What to do about
the women? Faced with similar circumstances at the turn of the twentieth
century, Stoker found the resources to imagine more complete women
and men characters, and in doing so left a subtle as well as mythological
story of struggle. The director in this instance may not have risen
to the level of his model, but the resources for mythmaking now are
not less variegated, nor less subtle. We have not yet exhausted the
possibilities that Stoker inscribed for us over 100 years ago.[12]
Notes
[1] Christopher Guist Raible notes that in the novel
Dracula is destroyed through the combined efforts of Van Helsing and
Mina. This is not the case with the film ("Dracula: Christian
Heretic," in Dracula: The Vampire and His Critics, ed.
Margaret L. Carter [Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988], 105-7).
[2] As Claude Levi-Strauss points out, myth expresses
meaning not in isolated elements but in the combination of new and
traditional elements into new narratives (Structural Anthropology,
trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf [New York: Basic
Books, 1963], 210, 224). Language in myth exhibits specific properties,
which are more complex than those found in any other linguistic expression.
Those properties are found "above" ordinary linguistic levels.
Mythical thought always progresses associatively and spatially. It
expresses an awareness of opposites that must be brought into a relationship
of balance that is sensed as "resolution" or "catharsis".
Frequently when two opposite terms, or antinomies, allow no intermediary
resolution, they are replaced by the sidestep of two approximately
equivalent terms admitting of a third as mediator. In such transformations,
of course, some perceived crisis or tension is elided. In the sidestep
remains an energy, a power that can re-emerge into mythic consciousness
as the destroyer or disturber of balance at some future time.
[3] The analysis depends on the videorecording (Burbank,
CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1993). As far as I can discover this
corresponds to the original theatrical release (1992) except it has
been formatted to fit the television screen.
[4] Vera Dika, "From Dracula - with Love,"
in Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry
Keith Grant, Texas Film Studies Series (Austin, TX: University of
Texas, 1996), 389.
[5] Neil P. Hurley, "Cinematic Transfigurations
of Jesus," in Religion in Film, ed. John R. May and Michael
Bird (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1982), 67.
[6]Alain Silver and James Ursini, The Vampire Film:
From Nosferatu to Bram Stoker's Dracula (New York: Limelight,
1993), 155.
[7] See further Dika; Silver and Ursini.
[8] Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction
of Society: Comparative Studis of Myth, Ritual, and Classification
(New York: Oxford University, 1989), 159.
[9] E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of
the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), 5.
[10] Only in the novel are we told of the birth of
a child to Mina and Jonathan one year after the death of Quincy Morris
(and thus of Dracula).
[11] For the critical translation see "The Gospel
of Thomas," trans. Helmut Koester and Thomas O. Lambdin in The
Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1977), 117-130.
[12] Clive Leatherdale begins a discussion of Christian
symbols and their use in the novel (Dracula: The Novel and the
Legend (East Sussex, UK: Desert Island Books, 1985), 190-207.
His suggestion that Renfield functions as a John the Baptist figure
proclaiming the arrival of the (anti-)Christ "Master" seems
more muted in the film than even in the novel. A fuller treatment
of all of the religious symbols in the film awaits future work.
