Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula
“Love denied, life denies.” Don Pesavento
Dear reader, long after you and I have departed for the hereafter, Coppola’s Dracula will be watched in amazement. It is a classic: Something that withstandsthetest of Time. It’s amovie for adults, not kids. A cinematic, preternatural psycho-sexual tale of love, mutated desire, bloodlust, and profound spiritual-emotional loss, in which love denied, life denies. I commend Coppola for crediting Bram Stoker in the movie’s title, but the lion’s share of credit goes to himself. Unlike Stoker’s or Lugosi’s bi-dimensional Dracula who is unaccompanied with a credible Past, Coppola’s Dracula is a tri-dimensional, noble warrior-knight of flesh and blood, self-exiled to the Devil’s domain of the undead. Dracula does not pretend to be a perfect movie, but perfection does not exist among us mortals; only an idea of it that dwells in the mind where the imagination reigns supreme. For me, it is the most successful of all the vampire movies. I’m not referring to box office success. In the grand scheme of life, success is ultimately gauged by how true an artist’s art reflects its creator’s vision. The nascence of a classic movie, like most successful artistic endeavors, begins in idea, and comes to fruition though choice. And indeed, Director Francis Coppola chose wisely. He chose Gary Oldman for the title role. His performance is a thing of beauty, his licking of Harker’s blood from
astraight razor, andhis unique,glottal interpretativeinflections “Listento them, thechildrenofthe night. What beautiful (glottal caesura) music they make.”
Coppola chose Polish composer Wojciech Kilar who scored the lugubrious mood. The opening, dark maple-syrup ochre cello chords resonate like a primeval, amber-trapped honey bee, buzzing within our auditory canal. Few other musical moments of its caliber readily come to mind: the piercing pizzicato violins in Psycho’s shower scene, the discordant piano chords’ chilling cacophony in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Franz Waxman’s lugubrious clay-people like cavernous echoes, emanating moans during Dr. Pretorius’ contemplation of The Bride of Frankenstein. He chose the cinematographer whose magical flare illuminates the entire film, the opening battle scene’s puppet-like combatants, mutilated and impaled alive against a sunburnt blood-carnage sky, the out-of-sync shadow play of the Count’s silhouette against his castle walls and desk, the ink-spilled stain upon Mina’s picture, the eyes that appear while Harker reads Dracula’sletter onthe train enroute to Transylvania,thetransition from peacock feather-eyeto the train tunnel, the sped-up frenetic film-frame kinesis, up the stairs outside Lucy’s as Dracula’s attacks, and her exquisite crystalline-glistening glass casket. He chose the screenwriter “Look what your god has done to me!” The brilliant (Oscar-winning) designer whose bat and lupine-man metamorphoses triumphs over any Dracula costumes ever seen before, especially the sultry Monica Bellucci’s vampiric soul-seductress make-up and carnal choreography whose blood-wanton depraved depiction is superseded only by the unexpected and disturbing arrival of Dracula’s new-arrival offering.
But alas, dear reader, I fear I have overstayed my visit. From kid, to adolescent, to adult, I’ve savored all of Dracula’s mysterious journeys. And I count myself among the fortunate. I bid you a heartfelt adieu.
Dracula, 1931
I first encountered Dracula across the street during a sleepover at Frankie’s house at age 9. My Chicago Southside neighborhood resembled Ralphie’s in A Christmas Story. My friend Frankie was the skinny, dark-haired excitable boy, first generation Hungarian, Eddie Munster prototype who spoke with a strange accent. Pillow-snuggled up on an old, musty, thick-cloth cushioned sofa in his basement, we watched late night Marvin’s Shock Theater on black and white TV. That’s the first time I came face to face with Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula (Lugosi was Hungarian also). I slept with a Rosary around my neck for a week, frantically and futilely scouring mom’s kitchen cupboards for garlic to drape over my bedposts. Nothing worked. I woke up to see Dracula’s blood-glowing eyes, peering at me from my bedroom doorway. I stayed motionless and sweating (on the top bunk bed) until he reached out to grab me. I yelled “Mom!” and slept safe-havened in my parents’ bed for the rest of the night.
It has been theorized that memory reaches its peak ability at around age 23, and that as we age, our evanescent short-term memory brain cells deteriorate, thus, by default, leaving us with a surplus of long-term memory cells. That might explain why Old Schoolers can’t remember where they laid the car keys but can remember their first-grade teacher’s or grade school classmate’s name in an instant. I like to think that those early memories are so exquisitely profound because they have become the stuff of pure emotion. Since then, I’ve watched almost every Dracula-themed movie ever made, and still find one scene to be the most memorable, although now, on a more intellectual level. It’s the early-on confrontation scene where Lugosi’s Dracula (myth) elegantly points towards Dr. Van Helsing (science), and slightly turns his vampire hand clockwise, simultaneously demanding that the doctor “Come… here.” When Lugosi utters “here” he does so with a sublime subtlety. It’s as if millennia of the collective primitive, pagan, mythic, and preternatural voices of the Dark Ages are charismatically wooing Science to join them, to regress and slide back into an abyss of ignorance and superstition. Dracula and Van Helsing battle each other on a bloodless, Nietzschean battlefield, wielding weapons of the Will. At first, Van Helsing appears to relent, wavering forward towards Dracula and his seemingly superior supernatural Will, but the doctor comes to grips with that unseen power, opposes it, and stands his ground. Classic.