NBC's Dracula - A Postmodern Potpourri of Things

 

Dracula is ubiquitous in the 21st century. By the time 2015 rolled around, vampires had become a massive pop-cultural phenomenon and the infamous Count had not only returned to the stage, singing his heart out in Frank Wildhorn’s musical adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, he also appeared in games, had cameo appearances in films and TV series, and Hollywood even created, with Dracula Untold, another origin story for the big screen. More than 100 years after Dracula first appeared in England, he even managed to pierce the very heart of the British nation when Prince Charles in 2012 half-jokingly admitted in an interview that he was the heir to Dracula’s bloodline.

For our purposes, we will take a closer look at a specific retelling of Dracula in the 21st century, a product of the post-Twilight vampire craze: NBC’s Dracula, written by Cole Haddon and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the titular role, to try and find some insights into the question: What is Dracula in the 21st century?

The synopsis of Haddon’s Dracula reads: It’s the late 19th century, and the mysterious Dracula has arrived in London, posing as an American entrepreneur who wants to bring modern science to Victorian society. He’s especially interested in the new technology of electricity, which promises to brighten the night – useful for someone who avoids the sun. But he has another reason for his travels: he hopes to take revenge on those who cursed him with immortality centuries earlier. Everything seems to be going according to plan… until he becomes infatuated with a woman who appears to be a reincarnation of his dead wife.

Dracula – The Many Identities of the Count

Before actually discussing Cole Haddon’s post-modern reinvention of the Prince of Darkness, it is worth looking into Bram Stoker’s original from 1897 and how the titular character is portrayed. What is most striking are Dracula’s abilities to transform at will. It is this unfixed nature as a vampire that came to represent a variety of cultural fears. As a metaphor for late Victorian anxieties he was linked to the rising threat from the East, various invasion fantasies and troubled masculinities. As the embodiment of evil and temptation he stood for, among other things, sexual aggression, sin, the Anti-Christ, nobility or, as Christopher Frayling in his preface to the 2003 Penguin Classics edition would have it, the “cosmic racial conflict between the modern Anglo-Saxon race and the ancient bloodline of Attila the Hun.” As a multi-faceted and multi-faced monster who is mostly absent from his own story, he lurks in the dark gaps of the fragmented text and creates a sense of “dread”, “unease” or even “horror” in the reader.

Cole Haddon’s 2014 re-imagining of Dracula’s legend tries to fill these gaps, creating a post-modern mix of old and new that inadvertently turns the horror story into a cross between a love story and a revenge plot with Dracula at its centre. By making Dracula the centre of his own story, screenwriter Haddon not only follows current trends in vampire fiction. As he forces the protagonist out of the shadows and into the light, he constructs a complex triple-identity for the Count that connects both plotlines and grounds Dracula in more or less historically accurate details about the life of the 15th-century Romanian folk hero and his dubious involvement with the Order of the Dragon – which Haddon in an interview described as a “crazy fundamentalist organization” of “religious zealots who wanted to spread a holy war across the world and destroy the Ottomans.” Thus, the eponymous hero of the series is initially introduced as “Vlad III, Prince of Valachia, second son of the house of Basarab, also known as Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler” – or simply a man with a long list of names.

Via flashbacks over the course of the entire first series both Vlad’s past and biography, as well as his motives for taking revenge against the Order of the Dragon, are slowly unravelled. As a former member of the Order of Draco, he was at some point betrayed by his comrades and accused of heresy. In a flashback the viewer sees Vlad’s wife Ilona burn at the stake while Vlad’s voice-over comments: “In my past they [Order of Draco] asserted their will more directly via the cross and the sword, slaughtering entire villages, branding men and women as heretics, burning them alive and watching them burn, screaming for a God who never came.”

We later learn that he has supposedly denounced that very God and was punished for his defiance by his former brethren who have “made him a monster … condemned to endless night … condemned to be undead.” So in Haddon’s universe it seems Vlad became the first and oldest vampire, resurrected as an undead monster who is now called Dracula by his enemies. He seems to have toured Old Europe, sired others like him in an attempt to undermine the power of the Order, before he was somehow captured and contained in a metal box, where he spent the next 100 years until 1881, when Van Helsing raised Dracula from his grave as the first step in a complex revenge plan that connects both men in their desire to eradicate the corrupt and secret shadow rulers of the Order of the Dragon.

With this second resurrection Dracula not only gains a new ally in his fight against the Order of the Dragon, but also a new identity. He becomes the American industrialist Alexander Grayson who made his early fortune in the American West and has now returned to the country of his great-grandparents as a “visionary” whose geomagnetic technology is “leading the charge in a technical revolution that will change everything.” This second beginning of the series re-introduces Alexander Grayson as a “new light-bringer” to an “Old Europe” which “is on the precipice of a great change.”

Transforming Dracula into a Villain-Hero

So “Dracula” has obviously undergone many transformations not only in terms of genre and medium. His portrayal in Western culture has morphed from the one-dimensional monstrous villain and sexual predator to a more sympathetic villain-hero who may every once in a while fall off the bandwagon, brutally slaughtering innocent bystanders in the Victorian London setting, but with a troubled past, a somehow justifiable thirst for revenge and his fight against an even greater evil that lurks in the shadows of a fundamentally corrupt Victorian society, the audience’s sympathies never really waver from the demon who is surrounded by an aura of righteous vigilante justice.

Adding a love triangle and the story of star-crossed lovers to the mix, Haddon allows the viewer to delve even further into the consciousness of the now humanized but not entirely “defanged vampire” (Susannah Clements). The monster turned avenging angel morphs into a romantic hero of the non-glittering variety. Through his continued association with Mina, who bears a striking resemblance to his late wife, his long dormant conscience re-awakens. He knows he poses a certain danger to Mina but he continues to, as Renfield puts it, “bring the woman into your orbit … seek to draw her in”, but Dracula professes his hesitation on “moral grounds” because “to lose her twice would be more than I could bear.” He desires her but cannot bring himself to “turn her into such as I am [– it] would be an abomination.” Although he is quite firmly set on a war path against the Order, the presence of his resurrected wife makes him deviate from his initial goals.

Although it might have been wiser to let her go (Renfield), Mina is also his one chance at redemption. Throughout the series Dracula’s memories of Ilona continue to resurface and merge with his present-day feelings for Mina. Although he keeps reminding himself and the viewer of his evil deeds past and present, he is determined to overcome his vampiric nature – with the help of Van Helsing’s “anti-solar vaccine” he is able to step out of the darkness and into the sunlight (at least for short periods of time) and eventually he stops preying on human blood. By the end of the first series he seems to have become someone with a potential for redemption who is determined to use his power, money and charisma for a greater good.

The Conflict of the Ages – Central Theme of Constructedness

This transformation and positivisation of Dracula is underlined by a strong emphasis on performance and performativity – Vlad – Dracula – Alexander – which serves as a reminder of the constructed, artificial nature of the series’ main character, who is ultimately a discursive product supposed to transcend time and space. Therefore, it is worth looking into how Haddon’s construction of Dracula’s world departs from the novel. Although the series is set in late Victorian London (in 1896) and Haddon keeps intact most of the novel’s basic character profiles and functions, he largely de-Victorianizes his main characters concerning questions of social and moral conventions, codes of conduct, and religious beliefs.

This constant evocation of the old icons of the past, sometimes in mockery, sometimes in reverence, playfully juxtaposed with new and at times quite anachronistic elements, runs through the series and echoes its central theme: “the conflict of the ages” (Haddon). In his interview with Harker, Alexander Grayson’s comment about his return to Europe could, on a meta-level, be read as a comment on the construction and conception of the series:

“In a way Europe speaks to me like no other place does. You know we call it the old world for a reason. And yet her people seek the new wherever they can. I understand this struggle. I myself am descended from a very old family, but my mind … always fixed on the future. I surround myself with things that speak to both: the ancient and the new.” (Dracula)