A Lesson From Fifty Shades, via Twilight: Take A Famous Protagonist and Tie Her Up.

A Lesson From Fifty Shades, via Twilight:  Take A Famous Protagonist and Tie Her Up. 

I swear I wasn’t looking up stuff on Twilight.  Never want to get near it again, after that last movie (sure, I watch; it’s a guiltier pleasure than the books).  Unless Meyer writes another one—then one side, kids, I was here first.

But I did discover, in researching another hit novel in a totally different genre, one of the ways writers, like vampires, feed on one another, duplicating one success with something even more outrageous.

I’m not talking about teen vampire novels; those are going the tired way of all played-out phenomena.   

There are some fine vampire books out there still, and some great stuff by (and about) teens, but duplicating Meyer’s success at this stage is a waste of whatever writing talent there is left.  

I went to a Writer’s Conference a year ago.  It was really pretty much a series of commercials—they called them workshops—for whatever publishing ploy or product they wanted to sell unsuspecting authors; there wasn’t much literature being discussed, that’s for sure.  They had a workshop devoted to teen and vampire plot combinations that just might be successful in the wake of the Meyer saga. 

One author in particular was convinced he’d be rolling in the green stuff when he sold his novel about—get this, guys, this is such a great idea—an entire school of vampires!   Can you believe it?  Can’t wait for that one.   Maybe I don’t have to, I think it came and went.

All this says to me is: go your own way, and don’t try to duplicate a success by imitation.  Your imitation, no matter how hot, will be old news by the time it’s published.  No big green stuff there. 

Nevertheless, I did discover that one ingenious fan took Meyer’s characters of Edward and Bella and wrote her own version of their story, putting them into some wild bondage (and by “some” I mean a whole lot)  and numerous sadomasochistic scenarios, making them go through the most incredible master-slave relationship I’ve ever (breathlessly) read about. 

But then the author, whose name is E. L. James (maybe), having fed her hungry posts with the ever-popular characters of the dominant male and the submissive female, changed the names of her blog-post characters to Anastasia and Christian.  She took her blog, which had been drooled over faithfully by her mostly female readers (with, I’m guessing, a gratifying increase in kinky sexual activity when their significant others came home), and named the whole shemozzle Fifty Shades of Grey.

Thus the hit of the summer arose from the ashes of the hits of two, three and four summers ago.  

I’m going to try something like that.  I don’t expect the kind of success James had, but just as an intellectual exercise and challenge, adding bondage and lots o’ sex to a familiar protagonist’s life sounds dauntingly invigorating. 

How’s this:

 “The spent and gasping whore, reamed inside and out by the tender yet brutal thrusts of the sailor’s manhood, had, even while chained to the bed, experienced a sexual ecstasy she could not name and had never come close to in all her sodden and love-starved life before.  Nevertheless, she summoned enough strength to wave at the sailor’s crotch-swollen departing figure, remembering the true, warm and sensual wonders of the seaman (no pun intended), and call out, “When you get back to this town again, call me, Ishmael.”

I just know it’ll be big!   The book, I mean. 

Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her

Part Three   (plot spoilers)

There is one woman character in horror films whose movie death I really cared about, even though I know I wasn’t supposed to; the movie was designed for me not to care because it’s the kind of movie where no audience member cares who dies.  They just care how.

Gotta be the Saw series, right?  It went from a taut, tense and ingenious first feature (with Cary Elwes’ memorably sawing off his foot—offscreen—for a rousing finish) to basic horror-porn comedy.  I don’t know anyone who watches the Saw movies for their tension or suspense.   We watch to see how people die—we just wanna see the Rube Goldberg death devices. 

Don’t get me wrong—I have a soft spot for these, just as I do for the Final Destination traps they keep springing on dumb teens.  These scripts are such retreads that by now they must be written in Mad-Libs format:  “Seven people escape death in a __________________ but die one by one anyway, killed by a__________________, a ___________________, a ______________________, two ___________________  (fill in the blanks with “girder,”  “falling car,” “vibrator,” “E-Z-Bake oven” etc.).  More complicated deaths than these are not easy to find, and, like Saw, these movies have a sly sense of misdirection (you thought he’d get killed by the falling wall safe, but the rabid mole got him!)

Saw sequels are retreads too, but they did an ingenious thing midway in the series, replacing Jigsaw, who has a sense of ironic justice and occasionally allows for escapes, with Amanda, who shows no irony and allows no escapes, but still has an Old Testament sense of justice—we’re ALL guilty, so we all die.  

Two classy actors (Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith) ground out these nemesis scenarios for ordinary people with fatal failings (Smith’s a sharp comedienne, too—check out reruns of Becker), and the body count ran into the dozens. 

But what about the one death I cared about?  It happened in Saw 3, which also has the changing of the guard from Bell to Smith, and the death that got to me was the killing of Dr. Lynn Denlon (Persian actress Bahar Soomekh, also terrific in Crash two years earlier).   Her death at the finale absolutely wrenched me, and I cannot explain why.  I have inklings, though.

Part of it is Soomekh’s talent; she has been quoted as saying that playing the part was close to the knuckle for her and that, unlike other performers who find horror parts a lark, she got right into the character’s emotions and they thoroughly depressed her (read her insightful interview for her own explanation of the emotive process).  

Part of it was the “will they-won’t they” seesaw (yes, I’m aware of the pun) of the ending, where it looks like she is indeed going to escape—maybe—no—yes?—nope.  I haven’t been that tense (and not pleasurably either) since Kate Capshaw was raised and lowered over the lava pit in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and I knew those thugs were not going to kill her.  

Dr. Denlon was another matter, though. 

I think where Jigsaw really got to me was in choosing the crime for which she dies.  She is depressed.  That was all; her estrangement from her husband Jeff makes her dead inside, the life drained from her.   It took me back to Emily Dickenson: “you, who were Existence, yourself forgot to live.”  I think everyone in the audience cringed at that a little—some of us asked ourselves:  “Why are you sitting in this movie when you should be out DOING something?”   She is depressed, and her punishment is death. 

She is strapped into a collar of shotgun shells; her ex Jeff tries valiantly, but fails, to save her.  This really is a cheat, because he actually passes all his tests, but jealous Amanda kills her anyway.   And all the while, Dr. Denlon is surrounded by that damn collar, affirming her love for Jeff, and her renewed need for life.  This is not just whitewash to escape; we can tell she means it.  She’s been reborn—do you really kill someone just reborn?  

Well, yes, you do if you’re Amanda. 

Now why does that death, out of all the ones I’ve seen in Saw (did you see Saw?  I saw Saw) hit me where I live?

Well, I was depressed at the time I saw it.  Just went through a divorce, and I experienced it as the loss of a loved one.  I had failed (at least emotionally) to save someone who was counting on me to come through, and that is a truly deep-seated fear for some, as it was for Jeff. 

Well, hey, maybe Saw 3 wasn’t the best movie to see in my state of mind.  But I wasn’t the only one in the audience with that fear.  Divorced or not, depressed or not, it’s universal, and in that moment of finality, a movie that was supposed to be fun, horrific escapism went right to my heart, armed with a collar of shotgun shells. 

The horror was there in plenty, but the horror-porn comedy of such movies, seeing people you don’t know or care about meet their exotic deaths, was gone.  

If I ever get too dismissive of Saw and Final Destination movies, which remind us, as Freddy and Jason used to, that death is out there and it’s only a matter of time before he gets us, all I have to do is think of Dr. Denlon.   You nailed me, Doc, you really did.  

Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her, Part Two

Time to get sad (OK, just me, you’re fine as you are) over a couple of fictional characters dying, as I prove my own theory about killing women onscreen being OK as long as we don’t get to know them. 

I (and the rest of the audience) briefly get to know Sarah, the ill-fated girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone’s buddy in the 1993 adventure Cliffhanger, in the three minutes or so she’s onscreen: she’s pretty, just had sex with the best buddy that morning and is no good at climbing, but she goes along because the boyfriend wants her to.   Mountain arm candy. 

Then her dumb son of a bitch boyfriend gets her into an untenable position on a mountaintop, from which Sly tries to rescue her.  

And in an unbearably taut sequence, her harness breaks apart (the scene is suspenseful all right, but not pleasurably so, because of the audience’s dread of what’s about to happen), and, despite Sly’s muscled grip and her heart-rending cries of “I don’t want to die, please help me, please help me”—whoops!   She falls to her death, screaming all the way down.

Am I a pussy for feeling bad about a movie character’s death?  Yes.  Do I realize that the scene was there just to give Sly some psychological underpinnings?   Sure.   But I cannot escape the fact that I would NOT have given a damn if the male best friend had been the one to fall.  But if the girl falls screaming, I’m affected by it.  We in the audience expect the box-office talent to keep a frightened girl safe, it’s that simple.

Some members of the audience were upset also; at the screening I saw, some were talking afterwards about the “cruel , heartless” edge of the scene.  Most of the complainers were women.  We had 100 minutes of derring-do and thrilling adventure after Sarah’s death, and that opening scene still made the movie a downer. 

It didn’t help much that a mountain-climbing expert pointed out to me, about a week later, that no harness would ever give way as Sarah’s did.  A real life death like that was well nigh impossible, he said.  Sorry, Sarah, you died just ‘cause you had to. 

The other woman whose cinematic death I keep remembering is that of Melanie, a press secretary in President Harrison Ford’s entourage in 1997’s Air Force One.  The bad Russian terrorist (Gary Oldman, that acting god among villains) has a gun to her head, and is calling to the president to come out of hiding or he’ll shoot her.  He’ll count to ten.   Remember, this is a woman he’s threatening to kill. 

When, in all the history of movies, has a bad guy ever pulled the trigger on a woman?  We in the audience knew he wouldn’t.  We knew Harrison Ford wouldn’t stand for it.  He is also Han Solo, he is also Indiana Jones.  So we knew it would work out for Melanie. 

The president would surrender (and find some other way to defeat evil) or he’d come up with a snazzy way to distract the gunman.  Besides, Melanie was sweet and pretty and we had gotten to like her.   If it was a guy being threatened, like the idiot negotiating with Alan Rickman in Die Hard, we would have worried.   It’s a girl, no sweat. 

The president doesn’t come out.  He doesn’t come up with a snazzy distraction.  The baddie reaches ten and, unbelievably, pulls the trigger.   We were stunned into silence.  

Cliffhanger and Air Force One were box office hits. 

These two filmed deaths were done by actresses who, of course, did not die.  They wrapped up the shoot and are still out there acting (Melanie—Donna Bullock—is on One Life to Live, Sarah—Michelle Joyner—appeared recently on Bones). 

And yet, their onscreen deaths affected me as if they were real. 

I’m absolutely convinced it was because both scenes depicted the deaths of helpless women. 

I have one more murder to discuss (no, I’m not Hercule Poirot, it’s just one more film), and my theory as to why these scenes are what they are, and what they’ve led to—that movies are so new they’ve gone back to really old ideas. 

 

Tell you about it next time. 

Go Ahead and Kill Her, as Long as We Don’t Care About Her, Part One

Remember Siskel and Ebert, before the one’s death and the other’s mouth cancer all but silenced them?  

I was a mere kid in 1986 when they broadcast their “thumbs down” review of the Rutger Hauer psycho-killer flick The Hitcher, and you’ve never seen such righteous wrath in your life as those two served up. 

Both thought the film was an outrage, with gratuitous and needless violence; one crowning act had them both traumatized during the viewing.  Siskel afterwards said something to the effect that “since we believe in artistic freedom, we think a film like this should be allowed to be made, and then not seen by anyone.” 

What were they so horrified about?  The killing of Jennifer Jason Leigh.  She played a waitress, an innocent drawn into the cat and mouse game of Hauer and the protagonist, C. Thomas Howell.  She is just a sweet girl trying to help a guy in trouble, acting out of pure human charity.  And she dies for it.

And this is no ordinary death.  Hauer chains her arms to a stationary pipe and chains her legs to the back of a semi-truck.  And after an insufferably long session tormenting Howell with the threat of her death, he actually hits the gas, effectively pulling her apart.  

Siskel and Ebert had never seen such a death on film before; probably no one had, except the viewers of snuff films.  Check out www.kindertrauma.com for a brief discussion of it, where the author of the blog admits it still bothers him, decades later.  Maybe it really shouldn’t have been seen by anyone.  

The irony is that it wasn’t.  The actual dismemberment took place off-screen; the sounds of screams (and, as I remember, tearing flesh) fed the imagination well enough.  As long as the imagination gets fed, the horror hits home. 

The Hitcher was not a big hit (the 2007 remake with Sean Bean in the Hauer role was an even more resounding flop), but the 1986 film’s producer had a different reason, the polar opposite of Siskel and Ebert’s.   He thought the film would have done better box office if JJL’s killing had been shown.   His rationale was that people need to see a horror that is promised; that it cheats the audience when you don’t show it. 

Speaking of feeding the imagination, Stephen King once evinced that we have alligators in our minds.  He figured that you can be a civilized, outstanding non-Hitcher type who does good and never harms a fly “as long as you keep the gators fed.”   Feeding the gators probably includes the catharsis of watching violence, but it’s interesting that Siskel and Ebert’s view, over time, has grown silent, while producer’s view has grown more prophetic.

Some major studio releases have shown some fairly horrific deaths, in box office blockbusters, no less.  And in common with JJL’s killing,the victims were all women, innocent and young, and regrettably well known to the viewer. 

Why was it “regrettable” that we got to know them?  Who were these unfortunates?   And why did these films succeed where The Hitcher didn’t?  

That’s for part two.  

Vampire Women: I Want One, Please.

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head . . . I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

No, that’s not from a pornographic work, nor a “racy” book from back in the day.   

It’s from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and if it reads like a man about to passively submit to oral sex, that’s not surprising; Stoker realized early on the ravenously strong link between vampirism and sexuality, far better than any of his predecessors.  Nowadays, there's scarcely a vampire in literature or film without an erotic subtext; it comes with the fangs, I guess. 

In Stoker's Victorian age, open sexuality was unacceptable (at least as conversation) in polite society, and a woman who was known to be sexually active was a social outcast.  

And what are vampires?  Social outcasts, blood-drinking children of the night.  

What better way to exemplify the “forbidden” nature of sexuality than by cloaking it in a work of fiction as nocturnal blood-letting murder? 

Notice also that the narrator, Jonathan Harker (if you know the book, you’ll remember he has a fiancée and romantic commitments at home), is extraordinarily passive, “waiting with beating heart” like a virginal teen on prom night.   The force of the near-rape (the Count interrupts it before it can be consummated) does not rest with the man but with the woman, and the man’s commitments to  a previous lover vanish; he is happy to let them go in the face of a strong woman. 

Gender-reversal statistics aside, rape has always been classified as a male fantasy or male activity--even, in some cultures, a male prerogative.   Stoker’s novel presented readers with a new kind of monster, but he did something more; by pouring erotic wine into the wine-skins of fantasy literature, Stoker ruptured the skins. 

The novel doesn’t confine sexuality to the denizens of the castle.  Both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker (yes, Jonathan marries her; that vampire woman at the castle meant nothing to him, I’m sure) become stronger, more fearful and much more interesting when the Count puts the bite on them. 

Lucy, already in the throes of vampirism and speaking to her fiancé Arthur on her death bed, is “voluptuously” begging for a kiss.  Mina, once bitten, develops second sight, as well as extraordinary courage in facing the vampire women: “None safer from them than I am,” she says, thus declaring both her defiance of the powers of darkness and her affinity to them. 

If vampirism can do that to the pale, pallid and defenseless heroines of the Victorian age, imagine it inflicted on a girl with modern sexual and social sensibilities today! 

For some reason, I have seldom seen that metamorphosis in film or on TV.  True Blood was once a possible exception; now it only liberates human women to become vampire participants in a soap opera that long ago abandoned its source material.  The transformed girls still have little power above and beyond what they had as humans, but the sex is a little better.   There is none of the frightening strength and sensual role-reversal that Stoker crafted so subtly. 

In fact, vampirism in movies doesn’t seem to change most characters at all, except for the fangs.  Most fictional female victims, if they are sexually active, turn into sexually active vampires; if they are pale and repressed, they become pale and repressed vampires, pathetically uninteresting (no, I must be wrong; I’m sure Edward will love her forever just as she is). 

The best filmed depicition of the liberating force of vampirism was, I think, all the way back in 1966, with Hammer Films’ Dracula Prince of Darkness.  

The character of Helen, played by the inimitable Barbara Shelley, began the film as a repressed spinster; once the Count (the irresistible Christopher Lee) had put the bite on her, she turned into a free-wheeling sexual force, in scanty night dress, lovingly fanged and showing a lech for her sister-in-law (when Sis asks for her husband Charles, Helen says, “you don’t need—Charles”).  

A real vampire woman, like Helen in Prince of Darkness, like the women in Castle Dracula, is someone every man wants, and every woman wants to be, whether they will admit it or not.  She has strength, she stands up to the male population, she is the rapist rather than the rapee (if it should come to that) and she’s sexually relaxed and happy about it.

In the Stoker novel, when the Count confronts the vampire women and rages against them, they answer with “ribald coquetry”—they laugh like defiant happy hookers, with fangs.  

I want a vampire woman, please.  Any age, any time.  Soon, though, I'm not getting any younger.  

Is Twilight Bad Writing?  Part Two

Readers of a blog like this will inevitably sharpen one of two axes—the fans who love her work are waiting to pounce; folks who hate her are waiting to attack me as a literary softie who’s too indulgent.    

 Both sides should attack, really, since this column is about what Stephanie Meyer got right—NOT what she “got write.”

 I do not say she writes well, since there’s not much to recommend there.

 She is guilty of all the things the previous blog covered—too much verbiage, overwrought style and jaw-dropping diction  (my favorite example is Bella saying: “forbidden to remember, terrified to forget.  It was a hard line to walk.”  It’s also a hard line to read without breaking up). 

Beyond that, as a storyteller she doesn’t bring much to the party, since her characters seem to have no sense of self-realization (or self-effacing humor).  What do we say about an author who presents Bella (in Eclipse) begging Edward, for dozens of pages, to make her a vampire, then when he agrees on condition that she marry him,  has her say, “I don’t know if my mother will approve."

I’m not in the mood for puncturing written work, however, and there are endless blogs with endless barbs about the overbearing male characters in Meyer’s works.   There have been massive protests about the anti-feminism in her schema.   And there are continuous forums about the fact that her protagonist is a woman who is treated like shit by her lover.

So what did Stephanie Meyer get right?

She wrote four books about a woman being treated like shit. 

That is the most powerful element in her storytelling, and, like it or not, that element is enormously popular in literature and film.  It has always been enormously popular. 

Just to name a recent example, in the big summer blockbuster this year, The Avengers, the male superheroes, including that self-absorbed womanizer Tony Stark (Iron Man), got the lion’s share of the action, and all the good lines.  

It’s hard to remember anything the lone female superhero Black Widow got to do (or say), but she was certainly right there for her share of the “women-are-good-for-one-thing-only” jokes.   Virtually every female in every kick-ass action film is in the same predicament.   Woman-hating?  Sure.  Big box office?   Absolutely. 

Consider a recent, and massive, internet literary hit, Fifty Shades of Grey.   It began as author E. L. James’ blog, a continuous serial about a literature student who encounters a brilliant, gloriously handsome man who treats her like shit (in explicit sexual ways).   

Some reader have made feeble protests about this one—nothing major, because I suspect they, like all the other readers caught in James’ sadomasochistic web, are too busy gobbling up the details of Anastasia Steele’s incredibly erotic, utterly submissive relationship with Christian Grey.   

Go back even to the classics; pick the greatest authors around.  Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is about a good woman guilty of a single sin, whose community treats her like shit (and she never really gets to redeem herself).  Shakespeare’s Othello is about a jealous man treating his wife like shit, and as a punching bag (before he kills her).   

Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester treats her like shit; Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights) treats Cathy like shit; Pearl Buck’s Good Earth protagonist Wang Lung treats his miraculously devoted wife O-Lan like shit.  Let’s not even get into the spousal abuse of characters such as Estella (Dickens only gives hints of wife-beating in Great Expectations) and of Nancy (much more murderous and explicit in Oliver Twist). 

Even in Jane Austen’s novels, her intelligent, strong-minded and mildly rebellious females, who are some of the finest, sharpest characterizations in all of literature, submit to marriage with men who are beneath them, at least in intuition and intelligence.   Their marriages are celebrated, since, in Austen’s society, women were incomplete until they were wives. 

Oprah may disagree, but the fact is that none of these works were written to make women stronger.  

None of them had feminist agendas (not even Austen).  None of them take women out of their social boundaries (although Austen satirized those boundaries while Dickens and Buck lamented them).   

In most of these works, the women are moths to the men’s flames. 

That’s discouraging, and it’s also hot.   Readers hate dominance, yet they love to be dominated.   The guy who says, “Treat a woman like a whore in bed” elicits the response from women: “What a terrible thing for a man to say!  What’s his number? “

Everyone from Stephanie Meyer to Shakespeare has understood, wittingly or unwittingly, that inside most readers—enough to make the bestseller lists—is a masochistic child who wants to be dominated, told what to do and then punished or abandoned, often for no reason, without a hint of moral uplift to any of it.   Readers gobble it up, from Desdemona to Harry Potter. 

Why does Bella suffer and whine?   Because she ought to, and so should we.   

That is why Stephanie Mayer is a terrible writer of terrible books, and I can’t wait for her next one.  

What a shame the series ended at four.    

Is Twilight Bad Writing?   Part One

In my secret other life as a teacher, I attend a lot of seminars on English literature and on writing; I’ve found two things to be true about Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight phenomenon, still going strong after all this time. 

One is that the “intelligentsia” among educators hated the books.  Hated them with a passion.  They deplored them as having “horrible diction” (word choice), “elephantiasis of the pen” (she uses 500 words where 50 would suffice—even her fans concede that one) and ludicrous “I-love-you-so-much-it-hurts-he-groaned” writing style. 

The other one is that a lot of people at the conventions were, and still are, reading Twilight or one of its three sequels.   Some teach it in their classes. 

The first attitude, hating the books, is easy to cop:  Stephen King did it, and the King of pop horror should know whereof he speaks.  He calls Stephanie Meyer someone who “can’t write worth a darn . . . not very good,” and contrasts her with the equally successful J.K. Rowling, “a terrific writer” who is yards beyond Meyer.   He does concede that both authors are “speaking to young people” but it’s a night/day polarity.    

And of course he took a lot of flak from Twilight fans, but he had to have expected that.

At one teachers’ gathering I caught a good friend (I’ll call her Nancy) reading Breaking Dawn.  I was more than a little surprised to see her reading the fourth book (meaning she had read the series) and asked her why she was exposing herself to the ridicule of others by reading something like that at a writing convention.

“I read what I like,” she replied. 

I asked her why she liked the books.

She paused a moment and said, “Stephanie Meyer paid attention in English class.”

No, she hadn’t had Miss Meyer in her class, so don’t write Nancy for an autograph. 

She was referring to the one thing that Stephanie Meyer got RIGHT. 

First let’s look at what her critics say she got wrong. 

Her books are accused of having horrible diction.  She’s not alone; another author who has a spectacularly famous reputation has been accused of that same flaw by none other than Harold Bloom, Shakespearean authority par excellence, author of Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and a number of other critical works, all dealing with good, well-written literature. 

He considers this really famous writer to be guilty of “horrible diction” and concludes that many of his pieces are “unreadable.” 

The author?  Edgar Allan Poe.  (Bloom hates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, too, by the way). 

If you’ve read many of Poe’s works, with their overly ornate and busy sentences, you may concede Bloom’s point; Poe’s sentences are indecipherable or, at the very least, make for difficult reading. 

Tons of readers, especially young ones, still idolize him. 

The second problem is elephantiasis of the pen:  she uses far too many words. 

Well, Mozart, perhaps the greatest composer ever, at his first opera Abduction from the Seraglio, was told by Emperor Joseph II of Hungary that he used “too many notes.”  

Stephen King has said about his own work, in his autobiographical On Writing, that when he opens his mouth “all [his] guts fall out”; he has written some seriously wordy stuff in The Stand and It, so he’s as guilty as Meyer of letting the words flow. 

The greatest writers of all time have excess verbiage on their plates: Melville, Hawthorne, Chaucer (not all of them, of course—Dickinson’s poetry is always close to the bone, and some—not all—of Hemingway as well).   Even Shakespeare’s plays are usually performed cut. 

As for Stephanie Meyer’s writing style, however, having finally read the books, I think I’m in a position at least to comment on her writing, and the traditions from which her books spring.  Bad or no, she paid attention to the most important element, and succeeds with large audiences because of it. 

In part two, I’ll talk about what she got right. 

It didn’t make her a good writer, but she got it right.  

Dracula Gets Killed a Lot, but Never the Right Way  Part Two

Christopher Lee didn’t end it there on the library floor, blowin' in the wind. 

He returned eight years later (it apparently took Hammer Films screenwriters that long to figure out how) in 1966’s Dracula Prince of Darkness.  


The interest in vampires, and Lee’s star power, showed no sign of waning, so back he comes in a shower of blood (literally, as the corpse of an unlucky traveler is suspended over his ashes, and the throat slit).  


The flood of ketchup that cascades onto the dust signaled a new era for bloody excess in Hammer and other film companies.  (Although to be fair, Mario Bava had already shown some gorgeous gore of his own, six years earlier, in 1960’s Black Sunday, with nail-ridden masks driven onto human faces.  It was a black-and-white movie, though, which helped us keep our distance). 

The vampire king rises and puts the bite on Barbara Shelley (a great screamer and Hammer favorite at the time, who later admitted her screams in the film were dubbed by co-star Suzan Farmer), then he’s driven onto a frozen moat, where ice is shot out from under him (one idea Tonya Harding never thought of) and he drowns.  Why?  Running water can kill a bloodsucker, says the Van Helsing surrogate, Father Sandor (Andrew Keir underplayed him nicely); it’s the first time that particular rule was found in the undead canon.  

He rises again when a priest shatters the icy tomb in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave; Drac’s demise in this one is spectacularly preposterous.   Under his command, the heroine (Veronica Carlson) removes a massive crucifix that bars the gates of Castle Dracula.  The Christian monolith is hurled over a cliff and jams into the earth.  Of course, in the struggle with the hero, Dracula falls onto the same spot, and dies impaled on the crucifix.   Talk about deus ex machina. 

He is revived by black magic in Taste the Blood of Dracula, only to be reduced to bloody dust; in Scars of Dracula, the ashes are blood-resuscitated yet again, and Drac falls from the castle tower, struck by lightning.  And in the modern day versions that followed, Dracula A.D. l972 and Satanic Rites of Dracula, he’s simply back in action, with no resurrection scenes or explanations.  And he dies staked in each one (in the latter, crucified by a hawthorn bush).  

Lee grew rather naturally impatient with the repetitive nature and monotonous re-animations of the Dracula series, and Satanic was his last Drac.  Two years earlier, Lee had done a faithful but sadly very cheap Dracula for Jess Franco in l970, which returned to the intentions of Stoker’s original, as far as the budget allowed; no resonance there, though, and it’s pretty much a forgotten, and forgettable, film.  

But Dracula didn’t end there—he never ends, of course, as long as he makes money.

The most notable incarnation of him, before the Coppola version, was the Louis Jourdan opus for PBS.  It’s notable because it’s the first Dracula who is genuinely attractive and sensual (heavily so, for PBS), as well as being coldly sophisticated and powerful.   


Stephen King, in his must-read horror review Danse Macabre, holds Jourdan’s Dracula in esteem as a definitive performance.  One strong point for his supreme masculine sensuality is that for the first time onscreen the Vampire King embraces and teases the vampire women (who were mere ghostly presences in Bela Lugosi’s castle), enfolding them in his massive cape and suggesting an orgy without flesh, in the shadow of the grave. 

Another interesting incarnation around this same time was Jack Palance’s version of Dracula, directed by Dan Curtis, using the familiar zoom shots, quick cuts and ranting acting he’d patented in TV’s Dark Shadows.  Palance was stuck with a fillip that inevitably reduced the Count to a less formidable figure—the screenplay by Richard Matheson gave him a provenance, a warlike history with a thwarted love story.  Mina, of course, reminds the Count of his lost love, and off we go. 

Other than Karloff’s The Mummy, has there ever been a successful movie about lovers reincarnated?  The idea is as threadbare as having an amnesiac for a protagonist of a movie (Random Harvest, yuck). 

That brings me to Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker's Dracula.   The ending of which sucks. 

The movie is jeweled in cinematic pastiche, a gorgeous red-toned study in blood and obsession, its prelude set in a metaphorical Romanian kingdom where cut-out style representations (like the old silent silhouette film Adventures of Prince Ahmed) showed the battle of the Count’s forces against the Turks.  


Coppola then either worked off or added to his Catholic guilt by having Dracula’s beloved (Winona Ryder), believing him dead, drown herself; the church condemns her soul, and Drac (as Vlad) impales The Cross with his sword.  Blood gushes forth, and it’s on; for once the vampire has all the good will on his side as he rallies against the alleged evils of Romanian Catholicism. 

There follows the bizarre encounter with Jonathan Harker (Jesus God, Keanu Reeves?  Really?), where the warrior Count seems to have gone all out for floor-length silken robes, like Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, and he wears what look like curved crullers on his head—the most bizarrely disfiguring outré coiffure since Princess Leia’s cinnamon rolls over her ears.  

Gary Oldman is the Count; Oldman plays him as a frustrated romantic, a basic good guy turned evil through loss of love.  This doesn’t turn out to be such a hot idea.  Oldman is marvelous at dangerous eccentrics (like the Ming-like gambling boss Zorg in Fifth Element, the hoarder Carnegie in Book of Eli or the psychotic Russian in Air Force One) as well as trustworthy straight arrows (Sirius Black in the Potter films, Commissioner Gordon in the Batman series).   


But he’s wearing romance's face (as Dimmesdale in Demi Moore’s abortive Scarlet Letter or as Dracula here), he’s intense but colorless; he’s a sufferer for our sins, right up there with Jim Cavaziel’s Jesus, and that’s nobody’s idea of a good time. 

The ending of the Stoker novel (see Part One) depicted Dracula’s riproaring death in a few scant, powerful sentences.   It took Coppola ten minutes, as Mina (the reincarnation of Drac’s former love, natch) drags him to the altar he desecrated and forgives him.  She does drive the knife all the way through in one beautiful stroke, but we’re already too tired to appreciate it. 

Some may feel that I’m spitting on The Coppola Cross (a Romanian one at that) by disliking this movie, but the Dracula story goes peculiarly wrong in Coppola’s film—our sympathy for the Count inevitably weakens the horror.  It’s like seeing Jaws as a cute little minnow before you’re asked to be scared of him as a full grown shark; it simply doesn’t work.  Dino De Laurentiis said, “Nobody cry when Jaws die.”   Some may have cried at Dracula’s death in Coppola’s version, but there’s the problem—he’s supposed to be a figure of horror, and they never got to be scared of him in the first place. 

That’s my point: the best monsters, the ones we fear because we can NOT understand or analyze them, have the best and scariest—and most cathartic and satisfying—death scenes.  And that’s because they had a novel’s worth, or a movie’s worth, of terrifying, inexplicable life in them. 

Dracula Gets Killed A Lot, But Never the Right Way    Part One

As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.

It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.

I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.   

–Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Final chapter. 

This is the death of Dracula, from Bram Stoker’s novel.   Every time I read this passage, I’m affected by the fury, wonder and, ultimately, the peace these few words give, and so compact is the imagery that it takes moments to look at and hours to consider.   The book is a classic penny-dreadful. 

No movie has ever filmed this ending as written, and I can’t imagine why.  

The PBS Dracula with Louis Jourdan came close with a sunset confrontation (although it was Van Helsing using a stake, no knives, and there was no shot of the vampire after death), but no one has ever filmed Dracula’s end as the author intended.  It’s as if somebody made numerous movies of Moby Dick, and in one the whale rolls belly-up, in one he is beached and in one he winds up in a tank with Shamu, fighting for females. 

Consider the most famous version still, the Bela Lugosi 1931 version.   For its climax in Carfax Abbey, Jonathan Harker (David Manners, God help us) and Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, scowling and ever-lastingly brusque) find Dracula’s casket (Quincey Morris never appears in the film).   Harker runs to find and comfort Mina, and Dracula dies like this:

The sound of a casket being opened (offscreen). 

The sound of a stake being hit (into wood, not flesh) (offscreen).

A groan. 

Aaaaaaand that’s it. 

It practically defines the word “anti-climax,” but producer Carl Laemmle Jr. may have been nervous; this tame, nearly music-bare, stagebound movie is actually on the list of the Forbidden (see *Dawn Sova’s marvelous work Forbidden Films for a splendid article on it), having been condemned by the PTA, the DAR and even the father of the studio head!   Sr. told Jr. he shouldn’t release a picture with an offscreen groan for a death.  Talk about father issues.  

Fast forward to l958: Christopher Lee as Dracula pops up in Hammer Films joyau de l’cinema gothique, and boy, is that picture a doozy.   Mood, atmosphere, classy actors, ravishing color, fonts of blood and a magnificent dissolution at the end, all in 82 minutes (the length of a Universal horror film; sadly, Hammer would never be this compact again). 

 

A very different ending here—Jonathan Harker is long dead (still no Quincey Morris anywhere), and only Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, ubiquitous and eternal) is left to pursue the vampire into Castle Dracula in a furious race through the castle halls (a neat sound effect—Dracula’s footfalls make no noise).  The two confront each other in the library, there’s a great near-strangulation and then Van Helsing makes a Douglas Fairbanks run to the curtains and pulls them down. 

Dracula, caught in the sunlight, howls as his foot disintegrates; Van Helsing seizes two candlesticks as a makeshift crucifix and pushes the vampire into the rays.   The monster mutates into a dusty skeleton and, gurgling grotesquely, dies, his chest literally collapsing. 

This was all the special effects handiwork of Syd Pearson and Les Bowie, who rigged an extraordinarily effective dummy skeleton for the final shots.  Most everyone knows as well about the ongoing controversy about an incomplete Japanese print discovered with extra footage, including Lee peeling his face off—!!—before his reduction to ashes; Hammer apparently made a separate version, considerably more bloodthirsty, for Japan.  It is still lost, although supposedly unprojectable segments of the disintegration scene exist. 

It's all fast, furious, muscular and a great use of inexpensive effects.  The entire sequence is still remarkable, over 50 years later.  And it still was not faithful to the ending of Stoker’s novel (published May 26, Peter Cushing’s birthday). 

This version is a lot more forgivable than the Lugosi one, what with all the blood and thunder they added, and Lee is the most physical vampire ever seen up to that time. 

And he was sexy, without even trying, with a cold, aristocratic mien that treated the women in his life (vampires or no) with utter contempt.   Damned if they didn’t want him even more. 

But they never once got his death scene right.

Next time, we’ll look at the finale from the bloodiest and in some ways least fortunate of any version of Dracula—Francis Ford Coppola’s.  Coppola really didn’t get it right. 

READ THIS: 

*Sova, Dawn B.  Forbidden Films.  New York: Checkmark Books, 2001. 

SEE THIS:  Chris Lee’s sun-transfixed death:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gBRe2XMljg