In its mythology, in its depiction of humans in relationship to the supernatural, "Dracula" remains within the polarized choices of Christian culture, although it speaks from the secular creative complex of Hollywood, of America. Like "Last Temptation," in spite of bizarre reversals of Jesus images, the effect of "Dracula" depends on traditional Christian assumptions about the world, about gender, about good and evil.
The Christ/Antichrist becomes the character through whom the confrontation between body and spirit, flesh and blood, evil and good, passion and mind is posed. The Christ must suffer for the confrontation between the supernatural and the human, which he causes. His conflict resolves only by an abandonment of the flesh, the carnal. The beatific vision, peace, comes in death. Death releases from the flesh to the spirit.
The Christ expresses his ambivalence dramatically in his sexuality. The resolution requires renunciation of heterosexual passion because Woman holds the Christ from his destiny as well as delivering him to it.
Linked always to the body and the blood Woman threatens the salvation of Man. Echoed here is the long standing threat developed in the West of menstrual and birth blood carried by women. Woman is material; therefore, we are appealed to by her in this movie. We are a culture rooted in beauty, in concern for the body, and in love with the pleasures of life. Nowhere is this exemplified better than in the television and film industry centered in Hollywood.
Woman is sinful. She is evil. Does "Dracula" invite us to judge the material, fleshly life as evil and to turn away? Or, does it simply pose the question? This is after all entertainment. Has Dracula spooked us by dredging up memories of our collective traditions that we have grown past, but can still be scared silly by?
The Woman of Hollywood is the agent of evil. In so far as she is lustful, sexual, she must be destroyed while at the same time her lustful sexuality sells. The only positive pathway that leads to resolution in the movie is asceticism. But such asceticism is not a real option in the world of commercial consumption that we require. Mina renounces her sexual self for the sake of her man, her transcendent love. There can be no child from the pure marriage of souls. In Christian story, Mary the mother of Jesus is allowed this option by miraculous virginal conception. Mina accepts the role of the Virgin Bride by the end of the movie. She remains a romantic, tragic image. Never an option for the world we create.
The landscape of the movie contributes to its mythic interpretation. The time is turn of the century England. The buildings, costumes, music, suggest a bygone era, an era of emergent modernity. In reality the time is now. The space of the movie is constructed according to contemporary imagination. The lurid colors and gothic setting exist as a landscape oriented to our current world.
One function of myth is the resolution of apparently irreconcilable conflicts in individual and group life. In its ancient context the Christ myth accomplishes significant resolutions. The story of the savior, who becomes a human, suffers death and lives again rising back to the heavens, dramatically reconciles life and death and transforms them into a story of salvation and peace. The linkage of this myth to the life of a person, Jesus of Nazareth, provides a dramatic crucible for continuous reflection. It allowed emulation and modeling in ancient Christian groups.
While Dracula appeals to this tradition of mythic resolution, it cannot reach reconciliation. It reaches the limits of Hollywood images and myth and cannot push beyond them. It fails because, like later Christian attempts to pour all conflicts into the Christ myth, it appeals to a myth that only deals with certain issues. The Christ myth is not the organizing principle for all issues, nor is Hollywood's myth of Woman.
We cannot continue the mythological stereotyping of Woman as a fundamental threat to Man's existence. Perhaps the frustration of myth in Dracula arises from the frustration and condemnation of a culture that no longer experiences the body.
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