Dracula!

Our book today is Dracula, Bram Stoker's immortal, undead, paradigm-shifting 1897 novel that has changed the shape of Western pop-culture more than anything published since. The book was a gigantic financial hit for Stoker virtually from the instant of its publication, and it's been imitated, parodied, adapted, and interpolated endlessly ever since.

I think there are three reasons why the concept Stoker hammered out and popularized caught on with such unprecedented drama (aside from the awkward, furniture-upsetting vigor of his prose, that is): first, he gives us a jim-dandy cast of characters - a good girl, a bad girl, a cowboy, an intellectual, a bland good guy, an aristocrat, a crazy old Yoda-figure, and of course the world's greatest villain, the perfect combination of plotting fiend and ravenous beast; second, he gives us that most emotionally satisfying of all plot under-structures - the invasion story ... Dracula has one goal in mind from the book's onset -- he wants to infect England with his undead virus, wants to begin turning the country (as I've done many times in the past, I whole-heartedly recommend Kim Stanley Newman's Anno Dracula, a book that has its own killer premise, that Stoker's novel is itself an alternate history, that in reality Dracula's plan worked), with only our band of heroes standing in his way; and third, he gives us a bad guy who's offering something just a little bit alluring. True, newly-turned undead must serve Dracula - but they get to live forever, outside of conventional strictures of morality. I've always considered it one of Dracula's rare important weaknesses that we never really see that allure championed properly - the Count's foremost servant, Renfield, is insane, and Lucy is a dimwit. But Lord knows, subsequent handlers of Stoker's material have spared no effort to show us that allure in all its dark glory (including most recently and most famously the Twilight saga, in which the winsome heroine pleads with her undead suitor to turn her, so she can be "free").


Sometimes, when I really love a book, I find my appreciation increases just a bit with every really good or interesting edition I find, and that's certainly true of Dracula - it's apparently endless commercial viability guarantees a fresh crop of repackagings every year, and some of them are worth having. Of course there's the Oxford World's Classics paperback with its great binding and its great notes (and the apparently requisite photo of Bela Lugosi on the cover), and there's the dorky old Magnum Easy Eye edition (also with Bela) for those who scorn any kind of scholarly apparatus.



At the hilariously, frantically overdone other end of the 'scholarly apparatus' spectrum, there's Leonard Wolf's epic 1975 Essential Dracula (it's got a still from Nosferatu on its cover, but don't worry - it's dedicated to Bela), which features the text of the novel onto which an encrusting, clambering moss of footnotes has clapped with joyful tenacity. Wolf footnotes absolutely everything in the book, and unlike so many equally annotated volumes of other classics (and the recent annotated volume of this one, which is as thorough as it is boring), Wolf's notes are always bristling with opinions. Sometime they very nearly end up being more interesting than the passages they explicate, like this little swipe at the token American:

Quincey Morris is a frequent window gazer. Presumably, this is part of his frontier American heritage. Stoker, no doubt, meant the trait to imply a huntsman's alertness. Ironically enough, this man of action rarely accomplishes anything.

Or this, about the recurrent wimpiness of Jonathan Harker, the book's main protagonist:

Mina here takes note of a pervasive weakness in Harker. The reader, more than Mina (one supposes), has seen a good deal of Harker lying passive and supine: most notably, of course, in his nearly flirtatious lassitude in the presence of Dracula's women; his swoon; his doze; and for a full six weeks he lay bedridden in Budapest. Mina, on August 24, reports that he was "so thin and pale and weak-looking ... He is only a wreck of himself ..." It is with this wreck that Mina spends her wedding night.

(fans of Buffy the Vampire-Slayer will read that "nearly flirtatious lassitude" and immediately think of Giles' own encounter with Dracula's women ... and, recalling it, most likely laugh out loud)



Dracula has naturally had countless adaptations to more visual formats over the years. The character had a long and very entertaining run in a Marvel Comics adaptation drawn by the great Gene Colan, and Mike Mignola's four-part comics adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is so visually stunning it almost compensates for the idiocy of the movie itself. And there've been many, many illustrated versions of the novel. Penguin brought one out in 2006 featuring both color and black and white drawings by an unusually restrained Jae Lee, and just last year Sterling kicked off its All-Action Classic series with graphic novel adaptation scripted by Michael Mucci and drawn with distinctive, idiosyncratic energy by Ben Caldwell.




And there'll be more, that goes without saying. Stoker hit upon the same creative gold that was found by Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Rice Burroughs did with Tarzan, so interpretations and re-interpretations will always be with us. This can usually be extremely frustrating - it's frustrating that Tarzan is currently creatively quiescent, it's more frustrating that Holmes is about to be debased beyond recognition into a gay kickboxer, and probably it'll be equally frustrating when details of the 2011 Hollywood version of Dracula come to light (I'm guessing the Count will be played by somebody under 25 - Michael Pitt's my frontrunner at the moment).

With any luck, in the meantime there'll be a nice meaty BBC TV production to sink our teeth into.

SteveSees! Life-sucking fiends of sci-fi!

Yes, gentle sentients, you read that right: SteveSEES!

Call it a little experiment, nothing more. If I enjoy this sort of thing half so much as I do the other, perhaps I'll do it more regularly.

Certainly there are fewer groundrules than obtain at Stevereads! There, I am an all-knowing, even saintly overlord both feared and beloved, incapable of error or contradiction.

No so here! As some of you may know, I watch a great deal of TV - shows, repeats, VCR tapes, DVDs. And it's not mere background noise for writing or reading - I'm a full-throated enthusiast of TV, have a very high regard for the very large number of very talented people who do work in the medium (I came close to JOINING such people, a long time ago, when a friend of mine invited me to join the writing staff of a now-forgotten show called "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" - I quite sensibly declined, since in addition to deeply disliking the climate of LA, I'm also not that funny).

I hate the snobbery of 'Kill Your TV' bumper-stickers in Cambridge. I hate the knee-jerk snobbery so many people show toward the medium. I can understand if people more pressed for time than I am (I sleep freakishly little) rule it out of their lives for practical reasons. I'd argue that these people ought to train themselves to concentrate on more than one thing simultaneously - it's not a hard trick to learn (or I couldn't have mastered it myself), and it can double the amount of things you get DONE in an evening. But still, I understand if people want to cut it out of their lives just so they'll have time for homework and socializing and, in the case of the pretty people, even sex.

As with books, so with TV: I sift and sniff all the time for good stuff. TV doesn't have any MORE crap than any other medium - at least, that's my steadfast belief - and it's not the fault of anybody working in the industry that their overlords are venal and stupid. Most of us have venal and stupid overlords, after all - it doesn't make US venal and stupid. Good people everywhere are always trying to do good work. I like to look for their work on TV.

Fair warning: I also like crap, for its own sake.

Unlike over at Stevereads, here I'm not infallible. True, I've watched a very large amount of TV. And true, I put faith in the tenets of my own aesthetics (as everybody does). And true, I'll very tenaciously make my case for anything I like. But there's no authority here, only gamesome debate.

There's a good reason for this. The best TV critic I've ever read (the best pop culture critic just in general, and oh my, far and away the best movie critic) is currently silent, fed up with the litigious cynicism of the age.
In the meantime, here I am! Fallible, contentious, and happy to be both!

Our opening fair dates from last Sunday and is very comfortingly situated in the realm of science fiction, which suits me right down to the ground.

The extreme old-school science fiction (I trust none of you will commence a-quibbling about what constitutes science fiction! Listen carefully: if the AXIAL PREMISES on which your fiction depends are a) internally consistent and b) in any way different from the laws of observable reality, you're writing science fiction - and yet, I'm aware of the fact that under that definition, there's no difference between science fiction and fantasy... that's because there ISN'T any difference between the two) and the extreme new-school science fiction, head-to-head!

First up was 'Masterpiece Theater's new production of 'Dracula.'

As many of you will know, I deeply love Bram Stoker's novel, and I'm always eager to see it get adapted, especially with a special effects budget.

Although, even without one, Bela Lugosi managed to be the quintessential Count, urbane yet threatening, his malevolent face plastered on the covers of all the BEST editions of the novel.

'Masterpiece Theater' is to be commended for the idea of embracing science fiction, especially since their track record is so different. These are the people, after all, who gave us 'The First Churchills' and 'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'Brideshead Revisited' and 'I, Claudius.'

Their 'Dracula' is a curious affair. An almost complete dramatic failure, but a curious affair.

With a work as frequently dramaticized as 'Dracula,' you have to ask how many points there are in favor or against any new rendition. You gradually accustom yourself to the fact that your beloved work will NEVER be fully realized on any kind of video-screen, and you start counting casualties from that moment.

(Oh! The high hopes I had for Francis Ford Coppola's 'Dracula'! A strong, unconventional cast - by anybody's reckoning, Gary Oldman is an interesting choice to play the Count - a director capable of greatness, a comparatively unlimited special effects budget ... and when I saw it in the theater, I was bitterly disappointed. The directing is awful, the acting is mostly awful - of course leading the pack is Keenu "I know where the BASTUD sleeps!" Reeves, but there's also Anthony Hopkins, hearing and completely missing every cue he's offered, and Winona Rider, trying - and failing - to act like somebody who HASN'T been having sex since she was 8 - and the special effects were, well, weirdly used. But every subsequent viewing has made me like it more, so maybe Coppola knew what he was doing after all)

In Bram Stoker's perpetually underrated novel, the truth of the matter is PLENTY dramatic enough: an undying Carpathian count has set his eyes on England and is (legally, Stoker's little masterstroke) buying up derelict properties all over London, places that will serve as nesting-spots to house an increasing brood of undead.

You'll scarcely find any of that in the Masterpiece Theater production. Instead, there's a Count who's the focus of some kind of evil religion, and there's a Lord Holmwood who agrees to finance the Count's move to London because he's been lead to believe a blood transfusion from the Count will cure him of his syphilis - because as long as he's infected, he refuses to sleep with his new wife.

Stoker's plot is of course much better than this nonsense. In the original, Dracula's wants are elemental: he wants a new hunting-ground, one he can eventually come to rule as absolutely as he did Castle Dracula.

In this new 'adaptation,' it's extremely hard to know exactly WHAT Count Dracula wants. He detains Jonathan Harker at his dilipidated keep in Transylvania (this production has no idea what to do with Harker, so he dies early), but all he talks about is how Englishmen don't really believe in God anymore.

There's no good acting in this production (a shame, since David Suchet - who gets the here thankless role of Van Helsing - is entirely wasted), and that's curious in and of itself. Tom Burke turns in the most reliable (though still mediocre) performance as a thoroughly heroic John Seward (although since this production lacks Renfield entirely, it would have a hard time accounting for Seward's presence - if it bothered to try, that is) Dan Stevens shows a precocious predilection to chew scenery as Lord Holmwood.

And the biggest curiosity of all is in the center role: Marc Warren as Count Dracula.

Some of you will remember Warren as Private Blithe, from the great, the epic 'Band of Brothers.' Blithe lost his ability to see, temporarily, because he couldn't stand the things he was seeing. Blithe was a perfect 'wise fool' for the 'Band of Brothers' universe (at least, as long as such a simplistic contrivance could last in that universe), and Warren is wonderful in the role.

He's not wonderful as Dracula. This is no doubt the fault of the material, but nevertheless: this is a Count you're never either afraid of or sympathetic with. During the show's setpiece scene, where the Count erupts from Lucy Westerna's bed to, um, pleasure her right next to her sleeping, fully clothed new husband, the viewer has NO idea what's going on or what to think ... sad for her? Happy for him? Sad for both? Happy for both? Icky for watching?

It doesn't matter anyway, because there's no drama in the production. You're never for a moment compelled to watch. And sure enough, in due time and without much effort, Dracula dies (along with a requisite and clunky 'or DOES he?' final scene that's easily the worst thing in 'Masterpiece Theater's history). There's never any of the best parts of the novel - the ineluctable sense of growing doom, the gradual, seduction-like process by which Dracula infects his female prey, and most of all, the growing sense of comraderie between Van Helsing and his young friends against an evil neither they nor the world has ever seen before.

But fortunately, this tepid Dracula wasn't the only consumer of men's lives and souls on offer last Sunday, because as all of you should know, Sunday night is when 'Battlestar Galactica' airs.

Ah, I can hear the groans from here! All you Cantabridgian TV-snobs out there, matched in your legions by all the science fiction snobs out there!
Nevertheless, that's exactly what I'm talking about: 'Battlestar Galactica,' the best show currently airing on TV.

In last Sunday's episode, the Fleet takes on large number of refugees, including a great many Sagitarrons, who don't believe in modern medicine.

The refugees start falling seriously ill, and in their midst is a Caprican doctor played (with customary aplomb) by Bruce Davison, a doctor on a personal vendetta against Sagitarrons, although it requires our heroic Lt. Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) to detect it and root it out.

Far be it for me to criticize a true-blue (well, true-maple) Canadian actor who embraces science fiction (ulp ... where would ANY of us be without Captain Kirk?) (and certainly he has big - literally, they're enormous - shoes to fill in the whole Canuck-on-board-Galactica contest, after our late long-lost Billy was killed off, Billy played by goofy Canadian stoner Paul Campbell, who's currently enjoying the benefits of Youtube - snippets from his new pilot "Nobody's Watching" can be seen there and led - unprecedentedly, I believe, to the show's being given a shot at the fall lineup) but it bears pointing out that Penikett can't really hold his own with Davison, Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama, and the indomitable Donnelly Rhodes as Doc Cottle.

No matter, though - the episode is great enough on its own to swallow any such quibbles. As usual, Davison brings depth and plausibility to a role that could, in other hands (coughDeanStockwellcough), have been one-dimensional ethnic-cleansing, with a little mustache-twirling thrown in. And Richard Hatch continues to surprise and delight as Tom Varek - in this case worrying about the effect on the Fleet if Baltar is given a high-profile trial.

At the mention of such a trial - which, we're told, will be followed by hanging the guilty man - viewers can't help but hear a deliberate echo of Saddam Hussein's sham-trial and scandalous execution. That's the glory of this new revamped 'Battlestar Galactica' - it tackles big, real-world issues with exactly the wit and terrier intensity that's a hallmark of the very best science ficiton.

Come to think of it, that might have been what the folks at Masterpiece Theater were thinking, when they imported the whole foreign-religious-fundamentalism theme into their new 'Dracula' ... if so, they, like everybody else, could have benefitted from a close viewing of 'Battlestar Galactica.'