Dracula
A Francis Ford Coppola film
Reviewed by Ian Bolas
The originality of Coppola's Dracula lies in his decision to film the sub-text of Stoker's novel, its real as well as its surface content.
The dark eroticism he creates is not gratuitous. Dracula was always a metaphor, the terrain he stalked less the "barbarous east" than the Gothic recesses of the Victorian skull and the equally alien and disturbing (to the middle class whose text it was) social landscape of the London streets. The tomb from which he persisted in returning was the grave of the repressed and denied.
Freud grasped the social role of repression. He understood (though he ahistoricised the insight) the psychological forces which sent St Pancras station soaring into the ether like a medieval cathedral and fresh-faced, clean-limbed Englishmen to the far corners of the world to inflict their collective neurosis on passing natives in the name of civilisation.
The imperatives of capital drove the railways and imperial expansion, but the steam which powered them derived from murkier boilers than those invented by Watt.
Freud also saw that the repressed inevitably returns — in distorted forms and with augmented force. You can bury the libido, but you can't make it stay in the coffin. "Love never dies", as the movie posters say.
Alive is not the same as undead, though. When "love" returns, it's with a changed face — as the bloodsucking monster of erotic obsession, the undeath of addiction. Such was the subconscious insight in Stoker's metaphor. Coppola has dragged it some way towards the light.
It's entirely apt that the battleground over which the demon lover fights the upright representatives of bourgeois ascendancy should be the bodies of women. Repressing sexuality in general, Victorian society denied it absolutely to women.
But "science" of the day also gave us the concept of nymphomania, and the nightmare that disturbed the misogynists' sleep (then as now) was the possibility of uncontrolled female passion. If women became sexual, where might it end? Perhaps with fucking werewolves on gravestones, as Lucy does in Coppola's film, and the collapse of civilisation as we know it.
It's Lucy, of course, corrupted by desire, who sustains the monster with her blood and paves his way to the (erstwhile) chaste Mina. Lucy is saved from her fate worse than death by a loving fiance who decapitates her corpse. Mina (Wynona Rider) is rescued in the nick of time and slays her vampire lover.
Coppola invokes here the werewolf myth. Dracula is also killed by "the one who loves him". A more cynical interpretation is that Mina destroys her own disruptive libido and is restored to that other undeath of bourgeois marriage. In Stoker's time, that passed for a happy ending.
So much for Dracula in its Victorian context. Coppola's film is very much of our time with its overt eroticism, its witty visual allusions to cinema history and its implicit nods in the direction of literary and film theory. The AIDS influence is also there in the blood metaphor, especially since it's established that the victim must ingest the vampire's blood to catch the disease.
But how is a narrative which explores Victorian ideology and sexual psychopathology of more than historical interest today? Perhaps not all that much has changed. We still live in a far from liberated society, which in recent years has made a concerted effort to peg back the gains of the '60s and '70s. The establishment has tried to use AIDS to restore conformity, monogamous marriage and Victorian "values".
So far it has met with limited success. Dracula reminds us that there are cogent reasons for continuing to resist. The way back is not the way forward, and there are worse ills than AIDS to worry about.
It's entertaining too, a big mainstream movie with more depth and intelligence than most. It's visually rich and frequently funny. Gary Oldman (Dracula) and Anthony Hopkins, who plays the doctor, are powerful antagonists. Hopkins is as creative as always, and his character becomes almost as crazed and obsessed as Oldman's vampire.
Dracula is bloody good fun. It might also provoke a little thought about the issues the story raises.