The character:	Count Dracula
The actor:	Gary Oldman
The movie:	Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

“I have crossed oceans of time to find you,” Dracula tells Mina. It’s been more than four centuries since he lost Elisabeta to suicide, and now he sees her, her face and body restored, something of the Romanian noblewoman within the bourgeois Edwardian Englishwoman. The kind of person who refers to the intervening years as “oceans of time” is not someone who counts the years. He is not an actuary or a historian. He is a Romantic. If his true love is missing, then nothing can persevere, let alone fulfill, let alone satisfy. What I can only refer to as “the sex stuff” in Dracula stories has no more forceful exponent than this film, whether that’s oceans of time or brides of Dracula or the turned Lucy Westenra or Winona Ryder, a victim of the gaze that even Laura Mulvey could forgive the use of.

Yet Francis Ford Coppola plays into a truly Shakespearean perspective, one that actually has roots in his plays and is not used merely as a way to say “dramatic.” Shakespeare knew as well as anyone that a person overcome with his passion for another person is not so far from expressing that passion to murder. Romeo, Othello, Hamlet, and unhappy Troilus come to mind, who never does manage to off Diomedes. Dracula falls into a similar category with these tragic figures. His love makes him comprehensible. His violence against the innocent makes him reprehensible. The role of the Van Helsing character in these movies is not to mentor Harker and Holmwood as they try to track down their women, nor is it to do the work of killing vampires. It is Van Helsing’s job to remind us that the vampire is a damned figure, one who is no longer beloved of God, someone less than a devil but also less than a man, immensely powerful but living a cursed life for all that capacity. In other words, someone has to tell us that it’s not cool, actually, to be Dracula, just like it’s not cool, actually, to do drugs or drive fast cars.

Coppola dares us to do what no one else, not even the masters preceding him, ever really dared to do. The Dracula/Nosferatu story must either reckon with the whole penetration thing, the woman infected with carnal desire, or must ignore them to the film’s own detriment. F.W. Murnau and Tod Browning looked to the charisma of the vampire first; perhaps we ought to include Werner Herzog here, for as much as he does attempt to foreground Nosferatu’s desire for Lucy, Klaus Kinski is as intrusive as Bela Lugosi. Dracula looks nothing like these Nosferatus, not even when he plays about in his aged form. Oldman’s Dracula is effeminate, like an old woman escaped from some Louis XV bedchamber, still in a dressing gown, hair in a heart shape with the crack at the top. It is all the more shocking when he appears in fin-de-siecle rockstar attire, sufficiently rejuvenated to restart the courtship that has eluded him, mistlike, for centuries in which he has only fomented great evil. The film demands that we identify with Dracula, and when he dies, we feel a relieved sorrow for him more than justifiable triumph. He is a Romeo or a Hamlet, with blood on his hands/lips, but he is no less an icon for those of us who love not wisely, but too well.

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