Recently, io9's Charlie Jane Anders put Francis
Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (hereinafter "Coppola's Dracula")
on her 12movies that are incredibly beautiful and utterly vapid list. Anders' description of the film is, "Every
frame of this movie is gorgeously crafted, full of silhouettes and chiaroscuro
tableaux. But it doesn't add up to anything."
This post is my response to the inclusion of
Coppola's Dracula in the list.
First, I am not quite sure what Anders' means by
"doesn't add up to anything."
One possibility is that she simply thinks that Dracula is complete bosh,
and therefore the reason why this version of the Dracula
story makes the list is that all of the others are not even pretty to look
at. If this is the reason, then I have
no response. On the other hand, Anders
may be putting Coppola's Dracula on the list because she believes that Coppola's
version adds nothing to the Dracula corpus.
If this is the case, I disagree.
Coppola took the Dracula story, and dialed up the Catholicism.
Unique among Dracula films, perhaps among vampire movies as
a whole, Coppola's Dracula asserts vampirism is a consequence of sacrilege. Dracula is given an origin, and this origin
is the profanation of the Holy Eucharist.
Dracula becomes a vampire by taking Holy Communion unworthily--not
simply outside of a state of grace, but as a deliberate middle finger to
God. Thus, as we learn from 1
Corinthians 11:28-30, he drinks damnation to himself and the Blood of Life
brings death instead. The vampire, then,
is a walking mockery of the Resurrection.
This is a constant theme in the film.
It is significant that, in his seduction of Mina in the asylum, Dracula
speaks of drinking his blood in Eucharistic terms. What we have here is blasphemy--a profanation
of the Sacrament. Similarly,
it is significant that in this same scene, Dracula opens up his right side and
has Mina drink from there--a reference to the post mortem wound inflicted by
the spear while God hung lifeless on the Cross, and out of which came Blood and
water--a symbol of both Baptism and the Eucharist (See John
20:34). Coppola is clearly linking
vampirism and blasphemy. Finally, in
Coppola's Dracula, unique among Dracula movies, the vampire is not destroyed
but saved. Unlike in other Dracula
films, Van Helsing and his team do not succeed in tracking down Dracula and
eliminating the evil. Rather, Dracula
repairs to the very chapel in which he committed his most grievous sin and is
reconciled to God. Dracula's idolatry
(love of Elizabeta greater than his love of God) becomes, in an act of supreme grace
and divine irony (through Mina), the means of his final salvation. It is, as the Easter vigil Exultet puts it, felix culpa, a happy
fault (in the Exultet, this refers to the sin of Adam--the Fall, which was the
proximate cause of the Incarnation, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ--and
by adoption, the glorification of Man). Dracula's
original sin is forgiven, and he is restored from his fallen state of vampirism. Dracula's true death is the means of
accomplishing this--by death he destroys the walking death of vampirism, and in
an audacious switch, Coppola makes Dracula the Christ figure because by dying
at the [read: on the] cross, he frees Mina, the one he loves [read: mankind]
from her curse of living death, granting life.
Anders is mistaken in thinking that Coppola's Dracula is
vapid. Coppola's take on the Dracula
story is unique, and it is as fresh today as it was back in 1992. Coppola took a story traditionally seen as a
cautionary tale with vampirism as metaphor for either disease or sex and
transformed it into a divine comedy.
Perhaps he was successful, perhaps he was not. One can argue with the idea that this is a
legitimate reading of Bram Stoker's novel, one can disagree with Coppola's
Catholicism, but I cannot see how one can describe this fresh take on an old
story as not "add[ing] up to anything."
P.S. -- I still cannot figure out how Keanu Reaves was able
to get these dramatic roles. He was in
this (and sucked), he was in Much Ado About Nothing (and sucked), he was in
Devil's Advocate (and sucked), he was in Point Break (and sucked). Does this guy just audition really well? Does he have phenomenally damaging blackmail
material on all of Hollywood? What is
going on here?
