TWENTIETH-CENTURY GOTHIC 115

unity, coherence, identity and cleanliness into evil’s double, another alluring figure in a diabolical repertoire of signs, the series’ playfulness evokes both laughter and horror: it just plays games, and yet, there seems to be nothing but narrative games, no position outside or determining them, no frame that is not, itself, caught up in a web of duplicity and ambivalent effects that contaminates all cultural boundaries and distinctions.

THE END OF GOTHIC

The much-publicised return of Dracula to cinema screens of the 1990s, for all its claims to authenticity, does not evoke the horror capable of expelling the evil, contaminating ambivalence of duplicitous images in which it, too, is enmeshed.

Contamination, literal and metaphorical, is a contemporary horror that remains ambivalent in the Gothic of the 1990s. Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992)

aims at a more authentic rendering of the story, billing itself as ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. The simulation of authenticity is signalled in the reconstruction of Victorian decadence in Dracula’s dress, the London settings, the lurid sexual images, the luxuriousness of the Westenra’s house and ornamental garden, and in Dr Seward’s drug habit. Even Van Helsing’s uncharacteristic earthiness and appetite for food gives him a less than priestly aura. In the film’s magnified shots of blood cells seen through a microscope, the novels link to diseases of the blood is prominently displayed: the 1990s, like the 1890s, is terrorised by the lethal link between blood and sex, syphilis becoming AIDS. The authenticity of the films return to images of the past reinforces the link between vampires and sexuality, combining fears in the present with figures from the past. Sexuality, linked to violence and death, again threatens humanity with the sublime and vampiric spectre of its imminent dissolution: both global and microscopic, the threat is simultaneously internal and external, crossing all borders with impunity and uncanny effects. Invading from without and destroying from within, the AIDS virus breaks the cellular defences of individual organisms and leaves its sufferers in an emaciated limbo.

The patterns of repetition and the condition that repetition implies are belied by the films artificial claims to authenticity. In the frame story to the film the novels narrative is supplanted by a pseudo-historical account of Vlad the Impaler’s tragic love. Dracula is not simply an object of sublime horror. The film also plays down the male bonding so prominent in Stoker’s novel and climaxes, not with a hunt delivering the purgative sacrificial violence which restores a patriarchal and domestic order, but where it started, with Mina standing in for Dracula’s dead wife in the chapel of the castle: she, rather than Jonathan and Quincey, delivers the cleansing blow that kills him. In Coppola’s version Dracula is not coherently or consistently presented as a sublimely imaginary figure of evil, despite the melodramatically demonic dress and the bat costume that seems to be inherited from Batman, another ambivalently Gothic hero. Not entirely an antichrist, vicious aristocrat, bad father or beast, Dracula is less

116 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GOTHIC

tyrannical and demonic and more victim and sufferer, less libertine and more sentimental romantic hero. The new frame provides the differently divided form in the way it explains his passions and violence as an effect of being tragically robbed of love by the untimely and unnecessary death of his wife. His anger and anguish and the curse he casts on all holy forms cause him to become undead. Bereft of an object of love he preys upon humanity until he sees Harker’s miniature of Mina, the very image of his lost love. In the course of the film this is the identity Mina increasingly assumes in her various secret meetings, including dinner, with Dracula. In the final scene Mina kills Dracula in an act of humanitarian mercy and human redemption rather than sacrificial violence, the act taking place in the chapel where, centuries earlier, ‘they’ were married.

The new frame turns Gothic horror into a sentimental romance. ‘Love never dies’ was the epigraph to posters advertising the film. ‘Bram Stoker’s’ Dracula

is merged with another popular romanticisation of a nineteenth-century novel— ‘Emily Brontë’s’ Wuthering Heights—as a tale of excessive individual passions,

of a love enduring beyond all social forms and history, beyond the grave. Like the end of Wuthering Heights, Coppola’s film mourns a lost object, a lost story

of passion and human, secular love. It does not affirm a unified set of values in a moment of sacred horror and sacrifice like Dracula. The vampire is no longer

absolutely Other. In moving from horror to sentimentalism Coppola’s film, appropriately enough for the ‘caring 1990s’, advocates a more humane approach to vampirism, one based on love, tolerance and understanding. Dispensed by and embodied in the figure of woman, these values attempt to replace horror and violence, not so much with laughter and parody but with care and mercy, exemplified by the concerned killing of Dracula.

In the movement between the 1890s and the 1990s, between horror and love, expulsion and tolerance, contradictory and ambivalent impulses disclose radical differences in the relation of one and other, past and present and in the incommensurable narratives in which meaning becomes multiple rather than singular. Human identity and humanist narratives again emerge as duplicitous. Mina, the double of Dracula’s wife, assumes that role at the end and thus becomes an adulteress, unfaithful to her other husband, Harker. It is a strange call to monogamy in an age of safe sex. Dracula, as victim and villain, inhuman yet human, is also divided. His love and the love which he inspires in Mina is also violent and passionate and the cause of others’ suffering. The doublings of narrative make human stories empty repositories of lost and impassionate signs: in the chapel, the last act of love is surrounded by sacred icons that have become empty symbols, their imaginary power and unity, like Dracula’s horror, decomposing in the gap between two narratives. The closure of the film is also emptied of Gothic effect: no climax, no solution, no sacred or rational expulsion of mystery, terror or duplicity. The film’s grand themes of individual love and death are haunted by a pervasive sense of loss, the sacred nature of humanity trickling away in empty images and hollow signs: the evanescence of one of modernity’s most powerful myths fading like a drawn human face in the sand,

TWENTIETH-CENTURY GOTHIC 117

erased by tides of different histories and narratives and unable to reconstitute itself. In not repeating the sacrificial violence by which Gothic forms reconstitute a sacred sense of self from the undead and spectral figures of humanist narratives, Coppola’s film mourns an object that is too diffuse and uncertain to be recuperated: it remains, reluctantly, within a play of narratives, between past and present, one and other. Drained of life, a life that in Gothic fiction was always sustained in an ambivalent and textual relation of horror and laughter, sacrificial violence and diabolical play, the romanticism of Coppola’s Dracula presents its figures of humanity in attenuated and resigned anticipation of an already pervasive absence, undead, perhaps, but not returning. Unable to do anything but half-heartedly tap the last nail in an old coffin, to accidentally squeeze the final stake through the heart of an all-too human figure, the film gently awaits a merciful release from the uncertainties, accidents and excesses of

forms whose multiplicity and mobility seem imponderable and meaningless. With Coppola’s Dracula, then, Gothic dies, divested of its excesses, of its

transgressions, horrors and diabolical laughter, of its brilliant gloom and rich darkness, of its artificial and suggestive forms. Dying, of course, might just be the prelude to other spectral returns.