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-ù-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 ù 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.