In a way, this is a companion piece to the ‘in name only’ post from last week. ‘In name only’ adaptations are one way to modernize a tale - or, at least, they can be. Yet, if you wish to modernize an old tale - be it a fairy tale or a story that is already in public domain -, there’s one big thing to keep in mind. Stick to its core.
It’s not that much of a problem to put an old tale into a more modern setting. Stories are usually very versatile when it comes to the setting and it’s a rare case in which the story will only work in a certain time and place. What needs to be preserved is not so much the setting, but the core of the story - the main plot, if you will. The relationships between the main characters, the main struggle, the main problem of the story.
You can set “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Snow White” in the modern world. You can put “Robin Hood” and “King Arthur” into the corporate world where it’s no longer about kings and local rulers, but about CEOs and managers and their troubles. The core of the story is not compromised in such cases. The first thing you have to do, though, is to explore the core.
Let me use Dracula again - let’s have a short look at the novel, the ‘in name only’ Hammer movies, the Francis Ford Coppola version, and the Steven Moffat series.
The novel is, of course, the original version of the tale. This is what we have to work with. Dracula is written in epistolary style, meaning it reads like a collection of diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, etc. Like this, it is more ‘real’ and looks like someone put together what all the parties included found out - yet, one might wonder how they all managed to even keep all the conversations in mind to put them down verbatim. The story in Dracula is a slow burn and the title character, the count himself, is absent for most of the book. He features strongly in the beginning, but only has a few strong scenes in the latter parts. In case of Dracula, this works very well, because it keeps him distant and makes sure he’s the threat in the shadows who might jump out at the heroes at any time. The focus of the novel lies on the characters - the future hunters and the future victim Lucy (who writes her own diary entries).
The Hammer series pushes most of the characters introduced in the book aside - Jonathan Harker arrives at the count’s castle to kill a vampire (and fails), the Mina/Lucy hybrid is the sister of another main character based on Arthur Holmwood, but van Helsing is there, now Jonathan’s superior who sent him to the castle in the first place. And that’s just the first movie. Unlike in the novel, where Mina takes an important role in the hunt, the Mina/Lucy hybrid is there to be the threatened girl who gets killed, giving her brother some strong motivation (and man-pain). The showdown in the end is between van Helsing (who gives the impression of being more experienced with vampires here) and Dracula himself. So … how was this done right? It was done right by keeping the threat level of Dracula high. He’s dangerous, sending out his minions and acting himself, giving the impressions of being ahead of the hunters until the very end. In the fight between him and van Helsing, he also seems to be winning for quite a while. Therefore, his destruction (in gory Hammer glory) is a satisfactory reward. That actually works with most of the other Dracula movies which feature Christopher Lee in the title role. He manages to make Dracula threatening and thus challenges the heroes of the movie in question. Even though the movies have little to do with the book, they can hold their own and still are Dracula movies.
Francis Ford Coppola claimed to make a ‘book true’ version of Dracula, even going far enough as to call it “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” right on the posters, but that is not the case. He connected Dracula to Vlad Tepes, a real-life Romanian ruler, going so far as to include the suicide of this man’s wife as a major plot point to create a love story where none was meant to be. For this, at least, he has kept all characters by name, yet most of them, such as Dr. Seward, van Helsing, Lucy, and, worst of all, Mina are very much not like their book counterparts. While the major scenes are still there, even those we rarely see in other movie versions (and this is one of very few which include Quincey Morris), the movie takes a serious turn for the worse with the added romance. In the book, there is no question that Mina and Jonathan are in love and ready to fight and die for each other. This coupled with Mina’s strength in the book (within the constraints of Victorian womanhood, Mina is an over-powered badass) makes it absolutely impossible that she’d start an affair with Dracula while her fiancé is missing. Here, the book was added to and the addition fell flat, because it didn’t take the original characters into account.
Now for the Moffat version. Coppola already made the mistake of making the count more human and putting him into a more central position, creating that love triangle between him, Jonathan (the ‘this man is mine’ line is in the movie), and Mina. Moffat went a good deal further by making Dracula the ‘hero’ of his series and focusing completely on him. Not only does that mean that most other characters are ill done-to, it also means that he’s trying and failing to give the original monster depth it was never meant to have. Dracula was conceived as a personification of ‘outside evil’ - a horror principle where the main character or characters are drawn into a confrontation with something evil without having done anything to provoke that (while ‘inside evil’ stems from actions of the main characters, as seen in “Frankenstein” or “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”). Turning him into the main character demands depth he doesn’t possess and which can’t be read out of the book, because it was never intended. Dracula doesn’t need motivation, wants and needs and fears, and other means of defining him. He’s there to threaten the main characters and force them to act and grow. Moffat’s version doesn’t do that, of course - only Dracula gets his moment of growth when realizing that sunlight can’t hurt him (which, in the novel, it never could - Dracula is seen outside during the day, sunlight only diminishes his powers).
What does that mean? Well, Hammer studios and their authors understood the core of Dracula - the outside evil which was represented by the count. This principle isn’t bound to one time, either, the last two movies of the series are set in the then modern world. Putting Dracula in the 21st century wouldn’t be much of a problem. Details will change, but the general threat Dracula presents stays the same. Coppola, for some reason, felt the need to add a romance where none was supposed to be, making Dracula more human. Even though the movie as a such is fun to watch, this development didn’t help any of the characters involved. Neither did the connection to Vlad Tepes help in any way - while Stoker might have heard the name ‘Dracula’ in connection to the Romanian ruler (whose father was a member of the order of the dragon, so Vlad Tepes was the son of the dragon - Dracula), he never researched this character and certainly didn’t model his vampire on him. He just liked the name. Moffat wanted to make Dracula a hero who is a monster at the same time and failed because there wasn’t enough depth to make Dracula more than the monster. All the gore and blood was in vain and couldn’t save the story he told. On the other hand, the anime and manga “Hellsing” did well with turning Dracula into even more of a threat by making him something akin to an eldritch horror.
The core of Dracula is the threat he presents, the way his very existence threatens the people who meet up with him. The core of Robin Hood is the man who fights for the poor by robbing the rich. The core of King Arthur is the uniting force which, in the end, fails to unite for good. As long as a story about Dracula, Robin Hood, or King Arthur keeps that core, you can change the setting as you wish without destroying anything. Lose the core and you end up with something which doesn’t even deserve being called ‘in name only.’
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