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"Apocalypse 1897:
Francis Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula"
Jeffrey Chown
Department of Communication
Northern Illinois University
Francis Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula follows a long line of cinematic adaptations of the 1897 Gothic novel written by Stoker. That there have been so many cinematic re-tellings of Stoker's original story of a Transylvanian Count and his vampirism suggests that Dracula has become a cultural icon, in a sense transcending its progenitor. Yet within each re-telling of the original story is contained a larger or smaller trace, dare I say infusion, of the most recent teller's own preoccupations and attractions to the tale. Coppola's rendition was already fading as the Anne Rice/Neil Jordan/Tom Cruise collaboration on Interview with a Vampire began its post-production.
Yet Coppola's film in both its publicity and indeed in its design positioned itself as a return to the original source, rather than a revision or an up-dating. In the years since The Godfather, "A Film by Francis Coppola" has become an appellation of high expectation and marketing value. As will be developed in the ensuing analysis, the clash of authorial presences embodied in the meeting of Coppola and Stoker is really more interesting than that of say Stoker and James Hart, the screenwriter. Hart may have had just as much impact or more on the film narrative than Coppola did, but he brought no name value or expectation to the fray. In mock humility, Coppola titled his latest film Bram Stoker's Dracula, rather than Apocalypse 1897 or The Bloodfather, or in the manner of Andy Warhol, Francis Coppola's Dracula, which as we will see, might have been closer to the mark.
In fairness, close study of Coppola's adaptation strategies throughout his career shows an almost reverential respect for source literature, e.g. his nearly commas-intact adaptation of The Great Gatsby or his studied attempt to bring John Milius's original screenplay of Apocalypse Now back to its inspiration, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The film of the teen classic, The Outsiders, was so close to the original that one wonders why he bothered with a screenplay. When Coppola first agreed to the film The Godfather, he was presented with a script that had changed the location to St. Louis and the time period to the present. He threw away the script and went back to Puzo's original novel. Coppola clearly believes that fidelity to the original literary text will ultimately enhance the filmic results of the adaptation 1.
In personal interviews, Coppola invariably defers to the literary tastes of his older brother, Auguste, who on his path to becoming a professor of comparative literature at San Francisco State taught his younger brother much about European fiction. In interviews, Coppola speaks often of modernist authors such as Gide, Mann, Joyce, or Sartre. Coppola has mused that he would like to change his occupational title from filmmaker to "chromakey novelist." 2
While that aspiration sounds lofty, Hollywood film remains a vampirish entity in relation to literature. Established directors such as Coppola navigate careers by choosing the right projects, which usually have to do with hot literary properties that bring marketing tie-ins and pre-established audience, not to mention narratives and themes ripe for appropriation. Coppola's two original screenplays, The Rain People (1969) and The Conversation (1974) helped his critical reputation, but did little for his public celebrity or power within the Hollywood system. The bulk of Coppola's career suggests that a more accurate job title would be "chromakey adaptor," an artist who brings considerable filmic skill and imagination to transforming someone else's idea or conception to the screen.
This is not to say Bram Stoker possessed a startlingly original conception in writing the novel Dracula. Christopher Frayling has documented that fascination with vampire tales has been extremely prolific over the last 600 years and that Stoker had many models from which to fashion his own rendition. 3 His, of course, is the most enduring. In examining the collision of Stoker and Coppola, I have no wish to do a comparative assessment of who was more original, creative, or inspired. Rather, I am interested in the synergy of a Victorian Gothic novel melded with the filmic sensibilities of one of the more impressive practitioners of modern Hollywood craft.
In the adaptation of Dracula by James Hart and Coppola, much is restored from Stoker that had lost focus and utility in previous adaptations. For example, the delineation of the flirtatious Lucy Westerna and her three suitors as foil to the more chaste Mina Harker is far closer to Stoker's original conception than any subsequent adaptation. Initially, it might seem that the filmic Lucy's jokes about male penis size and her sexually aggressive manner with her suitors is anachronistic to the 1897 time frame. And yet literary scholar Kathleen L. Spencer, oblivious to the film, writes: "Lucy's character is 'flawed' in a way that makes her fatally vulnerable to the vampire. She is a woman whose sexuality is under very imperfect control." 4 Spencer then discusses the fact that Lucy would very much like to marry all three of her suitors and feels rather constrained by social mores. She concludes: "In sacrificing Lucy, the four men purge not only their fear of female sexuality generally, of which she is the monstrous expression, but also--and more importantly--their fear of their own sexuality and their capacity for sexually-prompted violence against each other."5
To my knowledge, the only Dracula adaptation that preserves the Lucy dialectic of sexuality and male homoerotic violence is Coppola's. Further, I would argue that had Coppola stuck closer to the novel and left out the improvised sexual innuendoes, not changed the novel's flaxen blond to the film's fiery redhead, and relied faithfully on Stoker's Victorian era descriptions of Lucy, the point would have been lost on modern audiences. Finally, Lucy's depiction in the film recalls Michael Corleone shutting the door on his wife Kay to retire with his male coterie at the end of The Godfather or women taunting men until violence erupts in the "Suzie Q" sequence of Apocalypse Now. The danger of female sexuality to male bonding is not a new theme to the Coppola film universe.
And yet Coppola has not slavishly abided by Stoker's vision. Dracula scholar David Glover has convincingly argued that Coppola has sentimentalized the tale by making the vampire more human and with rational motivation. 6 Thus James Hart, the original screenwriter, added a prologue better explaining the Count's origins, as well as giving a love interest to Dracula, Elizabetha, later reincarnated in Wynona Ryder's Mina. We see Prince Vlad Dracul as an exile from the kingdom of God, something akin to Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. His blasphemous rage against a Christian God over the death of his wife transforms him into the undead wanderer who eventually lands in England. This changes some of the trajectory of the narrative, for as Glover notes: "It is therefore the vampire's redemption that is at stake here, rather than his exorcism. At root, Coppola's Dracula is a tale of spiritual exile, of an apostate prince who is given a second chance by the reincarnation of his lost princess in a circular story of sacrifice and salvation through undying human love..."7
Glover finds that these moves in the adaptation effectively heterosexualize the narrative, remove Dracula as a dark projection of unconscious fears and desires on the part of the novel's characters, and displace Dracula's menace to that of racial/ethnic fear. Coppola took great pains in the pre-production to orientalize the Transylvanian location. His costume and set designer, Ishioka Eiko, transformed the tuxedoed nobleman of Bela Lugosi and so many other adaptations into a figure of oriental mysticism, complete with a silky red robe and, as Glover puts it: "high-coifed Kabuki hair," which finally evokes "another popular Eastern villain, the ageless Dr. Fu Manchu." 8
Foregrounding Dracula's threat as Other in his Eastern exoticism is not really out of line with Stoker's novel. Many commentators have noted Stoker's frequent mention of London's "teeming millions" and the threat that their implied racial purity could be infected by Dracula as a wind from the East. 9 It might be tempting to suggest that Coppola has transposed an allegory of racial threats to the British empire to America's modern anxiety about Asian take-overs of such things as Hollywood corporations. I find much of interest in these readings, but have several reservations.
The first is that most of the readings of the political landscape of Stoker's Dracula seem to almost conveniently ignore Stoker's status as an Irish novelist rather than as an English novelist. A few biographies make mention of Stoker's being horrified as a young boy by his mother's tales of a cholera epidemic that she experienced in Sligo. 10 Memories of another plague with catastrophic consequences, the Irish potato famine of 1845-50, would have been inescapably etched on the consciousness of any Irishman of Stoker's era. With that memory would be a certain anger about British indifference and lack of response to the famine, which perhaps explains why the Dutch scientist/metaphysician, Van Helsing and the American Quincy Morris seem more active in their response to the foreign threat of Dracula through their English counterparts Holmwood and Seward.
Irish critic Seamus Deane supplies a perspective on Dracula notably absent from English and American readings of the narrative:
"Bram Stoker's Dracula tells the story of an absentee landlord who is dependent on his London residence on the maintenance of supply of soil in which he might coffin himself before the dawn comes. He moves, like an O'Grady version of the Celtic hero, between dusk and dawn; but, landlord that he is, with all his enslaved victims, his Celtic twilight is endangered by the approach of a nationalist dawn, a Home Rule sun inexorable rising behind the old Irish Parliament...Running out of soil, this peculiar version of the absentee landlord in London will flee the light of day and be consigned to the only territory left to him that of legend." 11
If Dracula is an elaborate allegory of Irish anger about foreign landowners and their seemingly insurmountable power over the countryside, it is not commonly read that way and would be one more example of the colonizer and the colonized arriving at different readings of the same text. Likewise, there are problems with seeing Coppola's use of orientalism as racist and reactionary.
Glover senses the influence of Apocalypse Now on Coppola's depiction of another journey into an Eastern heart of darkness, this time situated in Transylvania--indeed one quick close-up of Dracula seems very intentionally to evoke a shot of Kurtz in camouflage. However, the film that might ultimately reveal more about Coppola's posture towards the orient would be One From the Heart. During the filming of Apocalypse Now, Coppola visited Japan from his base in the Philippines frequently. He became enamored with Japanese Kabuki theatre and the Ginza district in Tokyo. One From the Heart became his attempt at experimenting with the styles he began studying from that experience. In its postmodern play with surfaces and artifice, One From the Heart is perhaps Coppola's most uncharacteristic film, but also an interesting forerunner to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Coppola has also over the years worked on a screen adaptation of Goethe's Elective Affinities, which would transfer the structure of the story to an examination of the historic relationship between America and Japan. Coppola maintains close ties with Sony corporation and has been a spokesperson on their development of state-of-the-art video technology. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the battle scenes look like an homage to one of Coppola's heroes, Akira Kurosawa, particularly his film Kagemusha.
A major problem with Glover's view that Coppola uses Dracula's orientalism to play on racial fears, is that in fact Coppola, and indeed modern American popular culture in general, have come to see Dracula as hero of the piece rather than villain. Dracula in all its film versions is played by the strongest, most charismatic actor, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee to Frank Langella to Gary Oldman. The Harker character, and even the Van Helsing character, usually pale in comparison. Last Halloween no doubt saw many eight-year-olds coming to the door in Dracula costumes, as Sesame Street's "The Count" and the cereal box Count Chocula indoctrinate children to be quite comfortable with Dracula.
The Dracula of the novel, of course, is another matter. One of the biggest difficulties for stage and screen adaptations is that in fact the title character does not appear very often in the novel, mostly in the opening castle section and then a few brief glimpses before the final confrontation. The novel is really about how the fearless vampire killers bond together and respond to the results of Dracula's deeds. The novel very much is about interior, spiritual matters, as well as unconscious fear and trauma, but as Kracauer has written: "The cinema seems to come into its own when it clings to the surface of things." 12 Thus we must have a vampire on display, and most adaptations have the Count paying social visits in England before his vampirism is proven. Dracula's screentime is usually used to develop his personal charisma, his aristocratic social manner, and his sexual magnetism. Perhaps this is why many purists favor the Max Shreck/F.W. Murnau 1922 adaptation for its presentation of a horrible, ghoulish looking Dracula, far different from the great profiles that followed.
Coppola, through the wonders of state-of-the-art make-up, has a Dracula who in the initial castle scene is ugly and other worldly, as well as being socially graceless. When he presents himself to Mina in London, however, he is suddenly young, handsome, and charming. This is in contrast to his presentation to the more sexually active Lucy; to her he comes as half a man, half beast. As the film goes along, his presentation to the males of the story becomes increasingly demonic and at times reptilian. The movie's marketing states, however, "Love never dies." The strongest images of Dracula in the film's overall presentation are the romantic, attractive ones.
In the late Twentieth Century, as opposed to the Victorian era, we have become more comfortable about our attraction to monsters. If, following Freud, the monster represents what we have repressed, then in an era of greater freedoms and relaxed social mores, it should follow that the need to make the monster grotesque before his or her final destruction is lessened. Monsters, and villains who behave "monstrously," now have an attractive or sympathetic component. In Coppola's case, at the end of The Godfather when the cold-blooded killer, Michael Corleone, lies to his wife and shuts a door in her face, audiences cheer in a way that suggests the attraction of the monster is no longer unconscious. From King Kong to Godzilla to the Wolfman to Colonel Bill Kilgore to, indeed, Dracula, our impulse is to be fascinated with what conventional social ethics, or at least Victorian ethics, would tell us is monstrous or villainous.
Key to the more modern interpretation of the Dracula myth is the fluidity of vantage point, which can be brought to the interpretation of both the novel and film. In the earlier discussion, we have seen the political interpretations of the text shifting dependent upon the audience's position towards matters such as colonizer/colonized, or West versus East. The same point may be made of the text's sexual economy.
A number of articles over the last twenty years have noted the homoerotic aspects of the novel. Early in the novel Dracula chases the three vampire sisters away from Jonathan with the warning "This man belongs to me." 13 As the contest between Van Helsing, Seward, Holmwood, Morris versus the Count Progresses, Lucy Westerna is repeatedly given blood transfusions from the heroes. The symbolic penetrations provided by the transfusions become also a literal vehicle for transmission of bodily fluids to Dracula, who is draining blood from Lucy. Women in the novel become conduits of homoerotic competition between the male principles. Stoker leaves ambiguous whether Jonathan is actually vamped by Dracula prior to his escape, but there is a definite anxiety about the possibility, and a displacement to his rape by the three sisters.
The most interesting of these critical interpretations of the novel is Talia Schaffer's recent "Homoerotic History of Dracula." 14 Schaffer's analysis is a fairly convincing attempt to "out" Bram Stoker, or to prove that he was a closeted homosexual using his fiction as an outlet for the frustrations of concealing his true sexuality. Schaffer analyzes a wealth of detail suggesting that Stoker modeled Dracula closely on the events of Oscar Wilde's public scandal over his conviction for sodomy. Stoker's trauma over his friend and countryman's public humiliation provided the grist for the catharsis of writing the novel. Schaffer observes:
"The crisis of the closet in 1895 makes Dracula a horror novel; but Dracula's happy ending only shows that the closet is no longer a crisis but a state of complex, lived social relations whose inescapability--therefore, in a sense, whose normality--constitutes Jonathan Harker's hope of happiness. By the novel's last page, Harker has learned to love the memory of his internment in Castle Dracula, and has organized both a homosocial band of 'brothers' and a bourgeois family to revolve endlessly around that nucleus." 15
This interpretation of the novel does not really tally with subsequent film adaptations, which tend to focus more exclusively on Dracula as Lothario, a sexual predator who threatens to cuckold husbands. Filmic Draculas as a rule tend to be fairly heterosexual; Dracula's victims are usually women, with the exception of his ravishing of the crew of the Demeter, which features prominently in Murnau's Nosferatu.
The Coppola/Hart rendition, however, retains some of the novel's sexual ambiguity. Mina is initially presented as chaste in comparison to Lucy. The two friends giggle over a copy of The Arabian Nights with Lucy making the more knowing, sexually adventurous comments. When Jonathan prepares to take his leave of Mina to go to Transylvania, he is very stoical and formal towards her. She however, takes the initiative, pulls him aside, and begins to kiss him passionately. Does his lack of sexual aggressiveness suggest a reluctant heterosexuality that makes him prey to the Count's advances? And does it suggest a rationale for Mina's attraction to Dracula? Jonathan remains restrained towards her throughout the film. As many have pointed out, when Jonathan looks in the mirror, he expects to see Dracula but instead sees only himself, suggesting a fusing of the two. In the film, when Jonathan finally allows Mina to leave with Dracula to stake Dracula's heart and put his soul to rest, the implication is that she is to give up her passionate lover to return to a rather sedate monogamous marriage.
Far more energy seems to revolve around the "Crew of Light" as Christopher Craft has called them. 16 Of this lively band of male adventurers, Schaffer, following Eve Sedgwick, observes: "men can express their homoerotic energies through rivalry over a woman." The Coppola version's Seward, Morris, and Holmwood exhibit these energies frequently. As the American Morris and the British blueblood Holmwood ride their stallions up to the house, Morris comments; "And may I say that Miss Lucy is hotter than a June bride riding bareback buck naked in the middle of the Sahara." To which, Holmwood responds: "I would watch my colonial tongue if I were you." This is said while Seward is inside kissing Holmwood's fiancée. As with the novel, the men's real fulfillment is in bonding together to go on a chase after their other rival, Dracula.
We are no longer in the Victorian era, however, and women's erotic desire fairs better in the film version than in the novel. The film Lucy positively relishes her juggling of her three suitors. A quick cut early in the film even suggests a hint of lesbian sexuality between Lucy and Mina. The most passionate love scene in the film is between Mina and Dracula. Many have argued that Dracula's biggest danger to Victorian society was that he unleashed female sexuality. But rather than being a story about women becoming reconciled to sexless men, Coppola's film takes female sexuality as a pleasure of the text. It should come as no surprise that it was Wynona Ryder who initiated this project, or that cults of female worshippers of Dracula have sprung up, as recently depicted in an A&E documentary on Stoker. While Schaffer may be right that "Dracula explores Stoker's fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde's trial," 17 this does not prevent heterosexual readings that focus on Dracula's sensuality and appeal to men and women, particularly in his film reincarnations. Dracula's signifiers are extraordinarily slippery, which has much to do with the enduring appeal of the myth.
Finally, Coppola does not really attempt to reconstitute Bram Stoker's original vision of vampire sexuality amid Victorian England. Coppola effectively refigures the tale for a late twentieth century audience. That Coppola changed a horror story to a tale of redemption through love and unapologetic female sexuality says something about the artistic conscience of the man. Rather than making Dracula a reactionary horror epic about bodily fluid exchange for an AIDS aware audience, Coppola crafted a more optimistic piece with compassion for the disease carrier and a less polarized view of good and evil. This kinder, gentler Dracula, like Willard at the end of Apocalypse Now, depicts a leaving of the horror rather than a wallowing in it. It speaks of human possibilities rather than limitations, despite all the marketing claims about a return to Stoker's original nightmare vision.
Endnotes:
1. Coppola's adaptation strategies are treated in depth in my Hollywood Auteur: Francis Coppola (New York: Praeger, 1988). [up]
2. David Thomson and Lucy Gray, "Idols of the King," Film Comment (Sept./Oct. 1983), 270-271. [up]
3. Christopher Frayling, ed. The Vampyre: Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula (Victor Gollancz LTD: London, 1978), particularly Frayling's introduction, pp. 9-85. [up]
4. Kathleen L. Spencer, "Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis," ELH 59 (1992), 209. [up]
5. Spencer, 212. [up]
6. David Glover, "Travels in Romania: Myths of Origins, Myths of Blood," Discourse, 16:1, pp. 126-144. [up]
7. Glover, 130. [up]
8. Glover, 132. [up]
9. See, for instance, Spencer on page 209 and 213. [up]
10. See the first chapter of: Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula (Michael Joseph: London, 1975). [up]
11. Seamus Deane, "Land and Soil: A Terrible Rhetoric," History Ireland v.2, n.1 (Spring, 1994), 33-34. [up]
12. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, (Oxford University Press: New York, 1971), 285. [up]
13. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Wordsworth Classics: Hertfordshire, 1993), 42. [up]
14. Talia Schaffer, "'A Wilde Desire Took Me'": The Homoerotic History of Dracula," ELH 61 (1994), 381-425. [up]
15. Schaffer, 382. [up]
16. Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (Fall 1984), 109. [up]
17. Schaffer, 381. [up]
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