Posts Tagged 'books'

Count Dracula has become such a deeply ingrained part of our culture that at first glance he looks more like a cliché than a character.  He appears in pop songs, candy commercials, and newspaper comics.  Variations adorn cereal boxes and teach children math.  According to IMDb, he’s been portrayed in 217 movies and television series, starting with 1922′s Nosferatu.  He’s so ubiquitous that it’s easy not to think about him at all.  Recently, though, I’ve been thinking about him a lot.

The catalyst was a viewing of Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.  Maddin’s collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is a totally unique film, despite tackling such a well worn story.  It’s not the usual sort of recording of a staged ballet; it’s a silent film in which dance is used in place of conventional acting.  That’s not to say that no acting goes on.  The dancers excel at capturing emotion in their faces, it’s just that they also express themselves through their bodies in ways no non-dancing actor could.  Zhang Wei-Qiang is a fantastic dancing Dracula, and Tara Birtwhistle is probably the most memorable Lucy I’ve ever seen.  Refreshingly, the film takes for granted that the audience knows the basic story by now, which enables the action to dig deeper into imagery and symbolism than would be possible while making room for exposition.

In his DVD commentary, Maddin says, “I don’t think Dracula really exists.  He’s just an embodiment of female lust and male jealousy.”  It’s a hard theory to disagree with.  Count Dracula is a Victorian English nightmare of a dangerous foreigner whose unwelcome presence lures formerly chaste women away from their respectable English husbands.  He’s simultaneously cultured and animalistic, irresistable and yet tainted with ill-defined disease.  Of course, it’s not just women who are drawn to him.  In some takes on the story, Dracula only seduces Jonathan Harker to get to his fiancé Mina, and in other versions it’s the other way around.  Regardless, he clearly has his way with both of them, not to mention Renfield and Lucy along the way.  He keeps a harem of three beautiful female vampires, but seems to use them mostly to lure in male guests, like the stereotypical gay predator with a stack of playboys in his drawer.  He’s not bisexual so much as haemosexual- if there’s blood in your veins, that’s enough to get Dracula going.

There’s a vulnerable side to Dracula too, although Maddin chooses not to explore that.  In Bram Stoker’s novel, though, there are hints of it.  Count Dracula is a relic of time long gone, who finds himself in a world that’s changing at an ever-increasing rate.  After centuries in his castle in the undeveloped East, he moves to England because that’s where things are happening.  In the Dark Ages, an established vampire could stay in one place indefinitely, picking off untraceable travelers and uneducated peasants who would never dare come after him with torches and stakes.  After all, as a member of the nobility, the Count had the authority to take whatever he wanted from his subjects, even their blood.  With the spread of industrialization, everything begins to change.  Dracula’s doing his best to adjust, to keep up, to try new things, but change isn’t easy for a man whose heart stopped beating centuries ago.

In Bela Lugosi’s legendary performance in Tod Browning’s Dracula, we see a count who is imposing while still seeming immaterial.  He moves and speaks at a different speed and rhythm from those around him, as though living partly in a different dimension.  Some of this is certainly just Lugosi being an oddball and not too good at English, but that’s why he’s synonymous with the part.  He’s sad and angry and lustful all at the same time, but beneath these recognizable emotions lurk more primal and unfathomable motivations.  He’s part ghost and part animal, and still working on teaching himself to act like a man.

Of course, there have been plenty of other interesting Counts between Lugosi and Zhang.  Christopher Lee was the reigning cinematic Dracula for nearly two decades, and he brought a masculine ferocity to the role, but all of the movies were sadly lacking.  Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, and Frank Langella all did Draculas that are worth checking out, although none of them stand up to the classics.  Gary Oldman is quite good in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, despite being hampered by too many make-up changes and a miscast Jonathan and Mina.  The first Dracula I have memories of was Duncan Regehr in The Monster Squad, who does a great job embodying the composite Dracula who exists in the imagination of every American child.

As many cinematic Draculas as there have been in the past eight decades, there will certainly be many more in the future.  It’s doubtful any will make the same kind of impression as Browning and Lugosi, but hopefully a few will offer a variation as unique as Maddin and Zhang.  After all, the greatest thing about characters who penetrate the cultural consciousness and stick around forever is that once we’ve learned who they are, we get to see how many different ways we can look at them.

It makes sense to start with Philip Marlowe, since he’s on the banner and gives the blog its title. But Philip Marlowe is a term that needs defining. You can’t talk about Marlowe without establishing which Marlowe you mean.

The original, Raymond Chandler’s literary Marlowe, reinvented the idea of the fictional detective. Or at least he completed the reinvention that had started with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. He has an intellectual side, but plenty of street cred. He’s good with women, but he never lets himself get too involved. He plays chess, drinks whiskey, makes fun of cops, makes out with widows, throws a punch here and there, and gets hit in the head and knocked out pretty regularly. He maintains a cynical facade, but there still seems to be some idealism left in him. His only real co-star in the novels is the city of Los Angeles.

When Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in Howard Hawkes’ film of The Big Sleep, he solidified the public’s idea of the detective’s appearance, despite being several inches shorter and several years older than Chandler’s descriptions. He is great at Marlowe’s sarcastic dialogue, though, particularly in his scenes with Lauren Bacall. More than anything, Bogart’s Marlowe is an extraordinarily efficient detective. The plot of The Big Sleep is convoluted to the point of absolute incoherence, and yet somehow he’s still always one step ahead.

My favorite Marlowe, on the other hand, presents just the opposite image. Elliott Gould’s Marlowe, as seen in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, is almost Columbo-esque in his shuffling, half-asleep demeanor. He only seems to own one suit, and the bar where he hangs out is the closest he has to an office. But Elliott Gould in this role might be the coolest guy there’s ever been. In the face of a violent nutball gangster, a paranoid alcoholic grizzly bear of a writer, or a bunch of asshole LAPD cops, Marlowe never seems the least bit excited or concerned. He doesn’t seem to be paying attention to anything, but he takes everything in. He even takes pity on the young hood who’s tailing him, giving the kid fashion advice and the address where he’s headed. He only loses his cool once, at the end of the movie, when he realizes that his oldest friend and his newest friend have both betrayed him, and he’s the last idealist on Earth.

There are, of course, other Philip Marlowes. Dick Powell’s Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet didn’t do much for me, but then of course that movie’s source material is the only Chandler novel I didn’t enjoy enough to finish. I don’t have high hopes for Robert Mitchum’s two outings as Marlowe, but I’m curious enough to have them in my Netflix queue. I’m also interested in Powers Boothe’s television version from the 80’s. I liked Boothe on “Deadwood,” and the idea of him as Marlowe intrigues me. As I meet more Marlowes, I’ll let you know what I think.

I know I’m far from the first to say this, but I’m so excited about the Where the Wild Things Are movie that it makes me uneasy. When I first heard about it, I thought it was an awful idea. I mean, the Dr. Seuss adaptations of the last few years are troubling examples of what happens when you try to make full-length Hollywood family films by adapting classic picture books. There’s just not enough story to go around, and of course what the studio hacks come up with is never near up to par. So when I heard that WTWTA was getting the live-action treatment, I was not enthused. It’s my favorite children’s book, and probably the single most flawless book ever written.
But then I saw the trailer:

I could probably gush incoherently about this for hours, so I’m to try to organize my thoughts into bullet points.

• The visual style is a perfect match for Sendak’s artwork. The colors are muted, and the settings have character without being the kind of bright green CGI forests that we’re used to seeing in children’s films.
• Every one of the Wild Things is recognizable from the book. There’s the chicken-headed one, the smaller goat-looking one, the one with long hair, etc. And they all look exactly like they did in the book, and yet somehow exist believably in three dimensions.
• James Gandolfini’s voice. I wouldn’t have predicted him for a Wild Thing voice, but now that I’ve heard it, I can’t think of any actor who seems a more intuitive choice. After all, Tony Soprano, in his own way, was a cuddly monster.
• “Wake Up” by the Arcade Fire. Like basically everyone else in the world, I’ve listened to this album maybe a few too many times in the past five years, but this really is an amazing song, and it gives the trailer a nostalgic, bittersweet flavor.
• While it’s true that there are many scenes in the trailer that resemble nothing in the book, none of them feel instinctively “wrong,” or like a betrayal of the book’s themes. We see Max being an excitable kid who’s dissatisfied with the real world, and we see Max having fun with the Wild Things. No sign of an unnecessary “origin” sequence, and no hint of any human other than Max having any interaction at all with the other world.

It’s certainly possible that I’ll eat my words and regret my enthusiasm when I actually see the movie, but I really hope that’s not the case. If anyone’s out there reading this, how do you feel about the trailer, and how much is that opinion affected by your feelings about the book?