Wednesday, October 29, 1997 |
Wednesday, October 29, 1997 |
LEADING MAN: In the century he has been undead, Count Dracula has assumed many guises. Two of his more successful cinematic manifestations have been in the forms of Christopher Lee (above left in Dracula has Risen from the Grave) and Gary Oldman (above in the 1992 movie, Bram Stoker's Dracula). Dracula lives JUST SOUTH of Hollywood, the picture-show vampire's resting place is awash with crosses, its clover-encrusted grass mercifully undisturbed. The sun, that lethal sun, shines unremittingly on the lush hillside where, barring the unexpected, he will spend eternity. So fear not: though he was buried in the cape and cowl that made him famous, Bela Lugosi, beloved father, 1882-1956, the man many mortals picture as Dracula incarnate, is very -- and permanently -- dead. The same, of course, cannot be said of Dracula himself. A century after an unadorned, mustard-yellow volume marked his debut, Bram Stoker's virile creation is one of popular culture's most enduring portraits and the dark father of a thousand myths, some medieval, others very modern. From Stoker's literary line drawing, myriad images have sprung to life -- movies, comic books, art, role-playing games, club kids in white makeup, a children's breakfast cereal. The vampire's accoutrements -- fangs, widow's-peak hairline, black cape with a blood-red lining -- are staples each Halloween. Dracula, a Carpathian nobleman born dead from an Irish author's imagination, today remains paradoxically and persistently alive, a gothic holdout connecting tradition with modernity, resonating in a world of horrors his Victorian creator could never have imagined. "The story of Dracula is an empty vessel," says David J. Skal, a horror scholar whose most recent book is V Is for Vampire: An A-Z Guide to Everything Undead. "Dracula doesn't reflect in the mirror and invites us to bring along our own reflection. And that's what we've been doing for 100 years," Skal says. FOR A CENTURY, Dracula has been studied, worshipped, lampooned, adored, condemned. And quite understandably so. Consider: Dracula is the perfect man. He's mysterious, dark, brooding, doesn't stutter nervously or embarrass you in public. He leaves you alone during the day. He wouldn't be caught dead in anything but the best-tailored clothing. He'll never, ever demand that you cook for him; and he doesn't drink ... wine. Seriously, the Dracula myth taps into some universal human issues. Men -- those in the novel and in film -- perceive him as a threat to women; he'll turn their wives into the zombie-like undead. But is that all? Within Dracula lurks a dark sexuality, a compelling animalistic vibe that makes men feel inadequate and wonder: Could this man-beast offer something compelling that they can't? Could he release an unhinged, threatening sexuality in the women he victimises? "This is an elegant creature," says James Hart, who wrote the screenplay for the 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula, with Gary Oldman in the lead role. "Dracula is an alternative sexual experience that nobody has ever had," Hart says. "This is a man with great pride, enormous charisma, who commanded nations, commanded armies -- a very elegant, very proud man who went looking for love." Conventional wisdom lionises Dracula's restraint: though the blood feast is the centre of his world, more subtle elements of the hunt -- implied romance and take-what-he-wants control -- are just as important to the vampire narrative. Dracula, quite literally, seduces his victims to death. The gore is often less important than the compelling possibility of attack and victimisation. And the suggestion eclipses the reality. "The mixture of body, mind and soul is what produces pure terror," says Leonard Wolf, a vampire lore scholar and author of, most recently, Dracula: A Connoisseur's Guide. "Horror," Wolf says, "is wet. And terror is dry." And "Dracula," he concludes, "is moist" -- because of its adept blend of the two extremes and sexuality. Strangely enough, though, it is science as much as sex that renders Dracula immortal -- a product of the late Victorian age and a harbinger of the future. "This book ushers in the 20th century," says Stephen King, the horror writer. In Salem's Lot, he conjured a New England town where a vampire from Europe, seeking fresh blood, is converting good old Down Easterners into the undead. "Today," King says, "we have such a flood, such an influx of knowledge that everything is wrong. In this, the worst of all possible centuries, people will do anything. Dracula really started all that." Indeed, Dracula straddles two centuries. It is filled with old sciences, old beliefs, mixtures of holy and rational. But though its horrors are irrational and hellish, it is Dr. Van Helsing, science's embodiment, who eventually prevails. For reasons such as these, Dracula is often juxtaposed with his equally unearthly 19th-century twin, Frankenstein's monster. Though seven decades separate Bram Stoker's novel from Mary Shelley's, today the creatures are inseparable. Frankenstein is created by science and beaten by the faith of steadfast humans, while Dracula is created by faith -- anti-faith, really -- and defeated by science. "They're the prototype icons," says Stephen Jay Gould, the zoologist and popular science author. And, Gould is quick to add, when it comes to Dracula, "science can be a powerful force in that particular battle". Consider Vlad Tepes, a skinny tyrant with a Wicked Witch of the West jawline and a ratty moustache that resembled a Persian cat's hair ball. Tepes, of the House of Dracul, wasn't the kind of guy you'd really want as a next-door neighbour, even in the 15th century. He tortured and killed between 40000 and 100000 people. He enjoyed impaling them, alive, upon spikes. Thus his nickname, Vlad the Impaler. Serious stuff. Serious enough that Bram Stoker drew liberally upon the Vlad Tepes legend for his 1897 novel, Dracula. So how is it that today, 100 years later, Vlad the Impaler's progeny include Count Chocula, a breakfast cereal; The Count, a pinkish muppet with a tortured Euro-accent; Grandpa Munster, a wisecracking undead guy from Brooklyn; and Bunnicula, a children's book about a rabbit suspected of being a vampire? Mass culture in the 20th century decriminalises. It takes the forbidding and the forbidden, neuters it into acceptable images, then circulates those images in nonthreatening ways. So in short order, the callous killer of tens of thousands is rendered part of a balanced breakfast with 11 essential vitamins and minerals. "The culture creates knowledges that are different from the primary knowledge. That's how folklore works," Wolf says. Stoker took his first notes on Dracula on March 8, 1890, according to his biographer, Barbara Belford. The lead character, originally "Count Wampyr," was dubbed "Drac" by Stoker in later notes. Stoker proved up to creating a legend. He was meticulous; he cited 32 reference books in his notes. "He did an amazing amount of research," Belford says. "Why so much on this particular book?" -- a book that Stoker himself described as "only an atom in the intellectual kingdom". Perhaps the author realised the epic nature of his creation. "Stoker saw it as the triumph of good over evil," Belford says. On the screen, Dracula has been Nosferatu, played by Max Schreck as a ratlike, peacoat-wearing stick figure in the 1922 German expressionist film of the same name. He has been Alucard (spell it backwards), the count's son, played by Lon Chaney Jr. He has been incarnated in the debonair, continental restraint of Lugosi, the fanged bloodlust of Christopher Lee and the erotic, misunderstood vampire of Oldman. There's more: --Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, a 1965 horror-Western starring a desiccated John Carradine. --Blacula, released at the height of the "blaxploitation" film craze of the 1970s, featuring an African prince stalking the streets of Los Angeles. --Dracula's Dog (its wonderful alias: Zoltan: Hound of Dracula), really needs no explanation. --Love at First Bite, with a wisecracking fast-talker played by an understandably less-tanned-than-usual George Hamilton. --The 1991 X-rated film Bite, in which we follow the sexual exploits of a vampire with a dime-store cape, played by a porn actor named Buck Adams, and his coterie of young, pliant lovelies. And today we have the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a teen-angst drama about a high-school ingenue (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who battles the undead between trig and study hall. Ludicrous? Sure. But, like everything from Count Chocula to Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire and its sequels, still a carrier of the Dracula torch. OTHER UNEARTHLY villains of Dracula's age are gone, neutered by real-life horrors. Dorian Gray's terrible youthfulness is all but forgotten in our plastic-surgery culture. Mr. Hyde has little relevance in a world of Charles Mansons and Jeffrey Dahmers. And Frankenstein's monster -- well, we've outdone him forever with our RoboCops and Terminators, our Mr. Datas and Six Million Dollar Men. The monster still walks among us, but only as an ancestor of our ever-ascendant technophobia. Yet, still there is Dracula -- "creature," Jonathan Harker wrote, "in the semblance of man". Truly alien in a way that leaves us blameless, but too human for us to ignore. "Why do we keep wanting him ... when all of his contemporary monsters have declined into quaint mementos?" asks Nina Auerbach, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Our Vampires, Ourselves. Perhaps the answer lies in a moment shared between Bela Lugosi -- he of the clover-covered grave in Holy Cross Cemetery -- and Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing in the myth-establishing 1931 film. Van Helsing opens a cigarette case to show Dracula, who recoils, eyes snarling, at the contents -- a mirror, the one in which Dracula casts no reflection, "This is the wretched thing that has done the mischief," Stoker's count says of the mirror. "It is a foul bauble of man's vanity." In the absence of reflection, an image nonetheless lingers in that mirror -- one that, whether it be a club kid with ghostly white makeup, a Hungarian-accented Muppet or a sugary breakfast cereal, is recognisable. After 100 years of ever-evolving shapes, the face in the mirror is still the face of our oldest -- and newest -- fears. -- Sapa-AP Film festival diary
0930:Vukovar 1200: Underground 1500: The Brylcreem Boys 1800: Breaking the Waves 2100: The Eighth Day Get checked - cancer can be prevented THE NUMBER of new cases of cervical cancer being treated a week at the Cecilia Makiwane Hospital was a matter of great concern -- to both the doctors and nurses involved as well as members of the local community. This was the disturbing reality revealed at a recent workshop organised by the National Multicentre Cervical Screening programme. Statistics showed that half a dozen, sometimes more, of the cases being treated a week were inoperable, according to Dr Gary Dorman, who addressed the issue of morbidity and mortality surrounding cervical cancer. The number one priority, therefore, was education so that members of the community would learn to have pap smears on a regular basis, to prevent the cancer advancing to an untreatable stage. "The way to reduce the mortality is to reduce the incidence," Irish-born Dr Dorman stressed. While the women most at risk included those who had early sexual experience and those suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, the most prevalent cause in the South African context was the tendency towards sharing different sexual partners. "In Northern Ireland, the incidence of cervical cancer is about one in 100 women, while in South Africa the rate rises to about one in 20," Dr Dorman warned. In order to reduce these alarming statistics, the local community should practise "avoidance therapy", he said. "Take this message to your friends," he said, "don't have multiple sexual partners, especially without protection, and don't avoid coming in for regular pap smears". The good news was that in the majority of cases, when treated in the early stages, cancer of the cervix was "very amenable" to treatment through surgery and/or radiotherapy. However, the number of sexually active -- and pregnant -- teenagers being admitted to the Cecilia Makiwane Hospital was "very worrying". Referring to the cervix as "such a small organ, but so very important as it brings life into the world", programme facilitator, Mrs Virginia Dunjwa, emphasised the need for community education. Guest speaker, Ms Mandisa Sonqishe, the national co-ordinator of the cervical cancer prevalence survey currently being conducted countrywide, referred to the "cancer crisis". The tragedy was that, while cervical cancer can be cured, it was reaching "epidemic proportions" in South Africa today, she said. After visiting rural communities in all nine provinces, researching the problems, the results of the cancer screening programme would determine official government policy in 1999. This pilot programme interviewing thousands of women over a two-year study period was only one step towards motivating women to take care of their health, she stressed. "Why do we allow this to happen to us?" UK-educated Ms Sonqishe asked, referring to the time when "all South African women were taught to do was to be domestic workers". "We're empowered now," she said, to roars of approval from the appreciative audience, "so we can write our own research books and study our own health needs ". Empowerment, education, motivation . . . even the sensitive issue of remuneration, were all topics discussed at the workshop. Besides the problems, such as lack of finance, equipment and staff shortages, the workshop ended on a buoyant note: "A lump in your breast needn't cause a lump in your throat", the women were told to tell the community. |
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