Dracula

The discourse on the character, and sometimes term,“Dracula” has been flawed from its inception. Williamson agrees with Parry and states, “it is largely due to Stoker that we owe the popular image of the suave, opera cloaked bloodsucker now so familiar in films and television shows” (5) Not only does it carry baggage of a white Eastern European male stereotype but it also drags along critical theories on race, class, gender, and sexuality as well as their relation to history. Milly Williamson describes the issues with previous media critics’ tendencies to assume an audience of male, white, middle class readers. By ignoring the responses of female, working class, and or poor readers, critics left their own Dracula and generic vampire theories with exposed necks. By adding the views of other theorists, including Linda Williams and Barbara Creed, on the concept of vampire discourse/s, it proves there is possibly no one, static, vampire study. The ability to pick one’s own concept of the “vampire” and its symbolism becomes a macabre playground that draws cultural theorists from different backgrounds.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrays a melodramatic Gary Oldman Dracula who’s appearance ranges throughout the film from a Spartan-like warlord resembling Frank Miller’s 300 to a John Lennon-esque metro-sexual Victorian foreign prince to a dramatically aged effeminate, supernatural, melodramatic man ( with a heart shaped hair style and long fingernails for added emphasis). While many filmmakers portray Dracula in different forms, they are usually one human form, one supernatural monstrous figure, mist, and or an animal. Coppola gives the audience an almost schizophrenic representation of the “prince of darkness”. The various representations of Dracula in human form call to question the idea of a singular representation of the character.
Dracula is placed within different eras and countries, as different studies have also placed him. He is portrayed for a good part of the film as the alluring prince in a Victorian setting, set to woo Mina. This embodiment of Dracula is similar to the vampire stereotype Anne Rice endorses. Williamson quotes Dijkstra’s view of vampires, “all vampires represent the female body in a distorted monstrous form”. This metrosexual, sexually ambiguous Dracula represents this view. Dracula is at one of his more effeminate dispositions at this point. Dressing in expensive clothing, with draping, sweeping wardrobes and long wavy tresses it is easy to see him as the monstrous feminine- an active, sexually motivated predator. This form of Dracula, while this is a generalization, is widely accepted by heterosexual female audiences. When the television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, devotes an entire episode to Dracula it is this embodiment that is used. Dracula in Buffy, Lestat and Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, and Coppola’s Dracula in the metrosexual “John Lennon” form are attractive, sexy, mysterious figures that turn more heads than just a heterosexual female demographic. The use of this form of Dracula also questions the accuracy of filmmakers’ positions relating to James Twitchell’s argument, Williamson states, “the only masochism he acknowledges is female; the female audience, like the female victim, secretly wants to be violated.” (11)
Using current examples, as given above, it is interesting to see the more widely used form of Dracula, and vampires in general, are sexually ambiguous, mysterious, and sexy. If the vampire is analyzed through a feminist film theory lens, then “what men really fear is active female sexuality- vampires in Dracula symbolize that fear.” This leads to a murky territory of actual representations of fear the figure of the vampire brings. If one of the larger questions is do women fear Dracula or desire Dracula, then in turn, do men fear the vampire, desire to be the vampire, or secretly desire the vampire?