{"id":814,"date":"2011-08-18T08:43:21","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T13:43:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=814"},"modified":"2022-02-09T15:32:38","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T20:32:38","slug":"staying-alive-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/staying-alive-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Staying Alive, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Fright-Night-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-815\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Fright-Night-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"351\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Fright-Night-1.jpg 500w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Fright-Night-1-300x210.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>What I have to explain this time round is a little strange, and the road we\u2019ll have to walk to get there is, I think, even stranger. I should note first that I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about vampire movies, about which we might, after rooting around, be able to say something that no-one else has ever said. And if you are to understand this New Thing About Vampire Movies\u2014except it\u2019s not a New Thing; it\u2019s an Old and Secret Thing\u2014then you are going to need to watch a short clip from a movie you\u2019ve almost certainly never heard of, and when you watch it, you\u2019re not going to think that it could possibly hold the key to <em>anything<\/em>. The movie is so obscure that I could only find the relevant scene dubbed into Russian, and even that sentence, once written, requires two intensifying corrections: I didn\u2019t <em>find<\/em> the clip so much as fluke upon it while chasing down some other hunch. And the movie isn\u2019t exactly <em>dubbed<\/em> into anything. It features some Russian language-school dropout\u2014one guy; alone; an unaided Petersburg grumble\u2014spot-translating all the dialogue, with the original soundtrack still running audibly in the background, such that he has to shout. Running this clip will be like trying to watch television in the company of a mean drunk. Plus it\u2019s not even a vampire movie, which is what you were just promised. This is all pretty discouraging, I realize, but you\u2019ll see: The clip does weirdly <em>speak<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The film is Ken Russell\u2019s <em>Valentino<\/em>, as in Rudy, as in hair anointed with jelly and liniment. It\u2019s a biopic released in 1977, and starring Rudolph Nureyev as Rudolph V. At issue is a short scene in which Nureyev takes Carol Kane out onto a ballroom floor to dance the tango. Give it sixty seconds, and you\u2019ll have seen everything important:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Valentino - 1977 - Rudolph Nureyev Dances\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wXeDNfIC1ek?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A spare cinematic minute\u2014and yet the clip demands our attention by putting on display three things at once, three things that are intertwined even outside of this movie but whose intertwining is here oddly visible, as though lifted up for our examination. I\u2019ll just count them off.<\/p>\n<p>#1) The first thing you\u2019ll want to bear in mind is who Valentino was. The basic facts will do: that he was Hollywood\u2019s first superstar; that he was considered the prettiest man of his generation; and that he wasn\u2019t American\u2014he was born in Italy. The important point is that nothing in this thumbnail is wholly innocuous. A lot of people were unnerved by Valentino. Each of those bare data can and did yield something uncanny. That he struck so many American women as desirable was unusual precisely because he was Italian. He was the first non-Anglo man, after the big wave of southern and eastern European immigration, that large numbers of Americans deigned to think of as beautiful. People remarked on that a lot; the term \u201cLatin lover\u201d was apparently coined for him, even though, given the racial ductility of early Hollywood, he was most famous for playing an Arab. And there was if anything even more handwringing about Valentino the lover than there was about Valentino the Latin. Lots of male commentators said he wasn\u2019t manly enough to represent their kind: that he was a dandy; that he was too polished; that he looked too soft; that he was a screen David sculpted out of talcum and pomade\u2014and this, not as compared to John Wayne or Clint Eastwood\u2014but as compared to Douglas Fairbanks, who agreed not to wear tights only when offered pantaloons.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-Shirtless1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-Shirtless1-e1313670477855.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>But then the resentment of the nation\u2019s swashbucklers did nothing to dent Valentino\u2019s popularity. We\u2019ve become accustomed, I guess, to how overtly libidinal the culture of female fandom is; we don\u2019t much pause to remark on the orgiastic qualities of Justin Bieber\u2019s every public appearance, their improbable pre-teen staging of the Dionysian Mysteries, but it might help to pretend that you\u2019ve never seen archival footage of the Beatles and are thus having to face the squalling girl-crowds for the first time.\u00a0When Valentino died unexpectedly in 1926\u2014he was 31\u2014there were riots in the streets of New York City. Lady fans started smashing windows and battling the hundred or so cops who were called out to restore order. Reports went out that women were killing themselves. That someone also ordered four actors to dress up as Italian blackshirts and tromp around the Upper East Side, to make it seem as though Mussolini himself had personally sent over an honor guard in Valentino\u2019s memory, begins to sound like one of the day\u2019s more pedestrian details.<\/p>\n<p>#2) This should all help explain what anybody who\u2019s just watched the clip will already have noticed, which is that Ken Russell has plainly instructed Nureyev to play Valentino as though he were Dracula: He silences the band just by raising his magical, mesmeric hand, tearing the sound from the very air&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-grabs-air1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-829\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-grabs-air1-e1313670960632.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"340\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;he activates what seem to be laser eyes; he leads a transfixed woman away from her circle of helpless male guardians and onto the dance floor, where he strut-hunches over her, arcing his shoulders into an insinuated cape&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-cape.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-832\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-cape-e1313671188227.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"376\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;he mimes various attacks upon her neck.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-neck.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-834\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Valentino-neck-e1313671349711.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"367\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A complicated series of observations follows on from this: We\u2019ll want to say that the figure of Valentino has been filtered back through Dracula, and we can feel the force of that revision if we point out that Valentino was actually half-French and generically Continental-looking\u2014you would not pause if someone told you he was German\u2014and seems to have been typecast in Moorish roles only on account of a Mediterranean accent that no silent-moviegoer would ever hear anyway. Nureyev, on the other hand, is sweltering and Slavic and basically looks way more vampiric than the man he\u2019s playing ever did. This could all easily seem like Ken Russell\u2019s inspiration\u2014to recreate, for audiences in the 1970s, the lost effect of Valentino\u2019s magnetism by wrapping it in the easily read conventions of the vampire movie, with which, after all, it was roughly contemporaneous. You make one icon of early Hollywood intelligible by translating him into a second. It would be like deciding to make a movie about Greta Garbo, but then scripting her as Steamboat Willie.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s clearly something to this. But if we adhere tenaciously to that line, what are we going to say about the following images?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-3.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-837\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"162\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-3.jpg 500w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-3-300x97.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-838\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"196\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-2.jpg 500w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Lugosi-2-300x117.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Dracula-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-840\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Dracula-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"339\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Dracula-1.jpg 500w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Dracula-1-300x203.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There is no mistaking the issue. Tod Browning\u2019s <em>Dracula <\/em>came out in 1931, just five years after the Sheikh\u2019s passing, and the stage versions that the movie was based on were running throughout the 1920s, when the oversized head of Valentino was first smoldering greyly down upon the bodies of American women. We can say that Nureyev was, in 1977, playing Valentino as Dracula, but we have to set against this the observation that Lugosi was already, in 1931, playing Dracula as Valentino. This is itself strong evidence that people were once scared of Valentino, but then we already knew that people\u2014some people\u2014were scared of Valentino, because he flaunted that off-white and insufficiently rugged form of masculinity, and because American women were really into it\u2014or they weren\u2019t just into it\u2014they seemed hypnotized and made freaky by it. So the 1977 movie makes Valentino look more like a vampire than the real man actually did, but that\u2019s because someone involved in the production intuited that Valentino had been one of the inspirations for the screen vampire to begin with. <em>Heartthrob <\/em>could be the name of a horror movie.<\/p>\n<p>This all matters, because it helps us specify the contribution of Lugosi\u2019s Dracula to the vampire mythos. This isn\u2019t as easy as it sounds. Nearly everything that makes the 1931 movie tick was taken over directly from Stoker\u2019s 1897 novel, and for most purposes, you would be better off bypassing the movie and going straight to the source. The most efficient, if not perhaps the most perspicuous, way of naming Stoker\u2019s achievement would be to say that he turned the vampire story into an ongoing referendum on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. For real: Nearly every vampire movie that has ever been made is in one way or another a meditation on Nietzscheanism, deliberating on the idea that some people, the rare ones, might yet overcome morality and thereby form a new caste\u2014or race or even species\u2014a breed that never even pauses to consider what ordinary people think of as right and wrong.\u00a0 Here\u2019s all the Nietzsche you need:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u2022The great epochs of our lives come when we gather the courage to reconceive our evils as what is best in us.<\/p>\n<p>\u2022Every exquisite person strives instinctively for a castle and a secrecy where he is <em>rescued <\/em>from the crowds, the many, the vast majority; where, as the exception, he can forget the norm called \u201chuman.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u2022We think that harshness, violence, slavery, danger in the streets and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, the art of seduction and experiment, and devilry of every sort; that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and snakelike in humanity serves just as well as its opposite to enhance the species of \u201cman.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Enhanced and predatory un-humans living in castles, exquisite people who have turned wickedness into a virtue or an accomplishment\u2014if you\u2019re in an intro philosophy class, and you\u2019re trying to make sense of <em>The Genealogy of Morals<\/em> for the first time, the easiest way to get a handle on Nietzsche will be to realize that he wants to turn you into a vampire, which is <em>superman<\/em>\u2019s nearest synonym, another word for <em>\u00dcbermensch<\/em>. Or other way around now: Modern vampire stories work by mulishly literalizing Nietzsche\u2019s language, making you stare the superman in the face on the expectation that you will be sent running by his anaconda grin.<\/p>\n<p>This should all become clearer if we break Stoker\u2019s Dracula back into his component parts. What are the several things that the classic vampire story wants you to be scared of?<\/p>\n<p>\u2022Stoker\u2019s novel wants you to be scared of aristocracy. This is perhaps the most glaring point\u2014that vampire stories are the one horror genre driven by naked class animus. The novel makes Dracula seem wiggy even before he starts doing anything supernatural, and it does this simply by making him lord of the manor. His comportment is excessively formal. He is, the first-time reader is surprised to note, seldom referred to as Dracula; the novel almost only ever calls him \u201cthe Count,\u201d as though the key to understanding the character lay in his title. It is the very existence of the old-fashioned nobleman that has come to seem unnatural, which no doubt has something to do with his literally feeding upon the blood of the poor, peasant children stuffed into sacks. The movie updates all this, in some pleasingly goofy way, by putting the vampire in \u201920s-era evening wear, the lost joke being that he never wears anything else, that he sports white tie <em>everywhere<\/em>\u2014a tail-coat to play softball in, an opera cloak for when he\u2019s bathing the dog\u2014as though tuxedos were the only threads he owned. Dracula is the character who, having once put on the Ritz, can never again remove it. The vampire, we are licensed to conclude, is our most enduring image of aristocratic tyranny, generated by a paradigmatically liberal and middle-class fever-dream about the character of the old peerage, and anchored in the simple idea that it isn\u2019t even safe to be in the same room as an aristocrat, so driven are such people to dominate others, so unwilling to tolerate a partner or co-equal. \u201cCome here!\u201d: A duke is the name for the kind of person who barks orders at free men as though they were his subordinates. That\u2019s a routine observation, and it\u2019s what ties <em>Dracula <\/em>back to the early Gothic novel or even to Richardson\u2019s <em>Pamela. <\/em>But what\u2019s peculiar all the same about Stoker\u2019s novel is its timing, since by the 1890s, the traditional aristocracy in England was, if not exactly obsolete, then at least much weakened. The novel actually registers this historical turn, since the vampire famously lives not in a castle, but in the <em>ruins<\/em> of a castle, in the rubble of a superannuated class hierarchy, and\u2014this really is an inspired flourish\u2014he has no servants: he drives his own coach, carries his own bags. The Count is what they used to call come-down gentry, accustomed to apologizing to guests for serving them dinner on chipped porcelain. And the threat he poses is therefore <em>not<\/em> the menace of one who actually possesses power\u2014this is how he is unlike Richardson\u2019s Mr B or William Godwin\u2019s Falkland\u2014but of one who might yet regain it, the name for which regaining would be \u201creaction\u201d or \u201ccounter-revolution.\u201d Stoker\u2019s <em>Dracula <\/em>is the greatest of right-wing horror stories, scared of foreigners and queer people and women and sex in general, but it nonetheless harbors a certain curdled Jacobinism, the exasperated sense that the European aristocracy should be dead but aren\u2019t, and that the French Revolution is going to have to be staged over and over again.<\/p>\n<p>So much for aristocracy. About those others\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2022Stoker\u2019s novel wants you to be scared of foreigners. This goes back to a simple plot point: Dracula sneaks into England from abroad\u2014hides on a ship\u2014slips past customs officers and curious locals. The vampire, in other words, is an illegal immigrant. You might object that this last is a late twentieth-century category, illicitly projected back onto the 1890s, and that\u2019s true\u2014but \u201cstowaway\u201d isn\u2019t an anachronism, and neither is \u201csmuggling.\u201d What\u2019s more, Stoker expressly aligns vampires, via their bats, with colonies and the Third World. Such creatures come from the \u201cislands of the Western seas\u201d or from South America. One character is pretty sure that <em>this is no English bat!<\/em> It \u201cmay be some wild specimen from the South of a more malignant species.\u201d Perhaps most important, the screen Dracula is the figure who has single-handedly made life miserable for generations of Eastern European immigrants, who have had to endure endless rounds of \u201cI <em>vant<\/em> \u2026 to <em>sahk<\/em> \u2026 your <em>bludd<\/em>!\u201d in roughly the same way that teenaged Asian-American girls have been, since 1987, routinely subjected to obnoxious white boys quoting \u201cMe so horny.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u2022Stoker\u2019s novel wants you to be scared of sex in general, though we can also make the point via the film: The first time we see Dracula attack a woman, all he really does is lean in for a kiss, though the street is dim and London-ish, and his victim is a flower-girl-for-which-read-prostitute, and these details inevitably summon overtones of Jack the Ripper, especially if you think Jack was a gentleman or the Prince of Wales.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Dracula-flowergirl.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-842\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Dracula-flowergirl-e1313673430302.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"306\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The point is extended when, later in the film, one weeping survivor uses rape language to describe her evening with the Count:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Survivor: After what\u2019s happened, I can\u2019t\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Fianc\u00e9: What\u2019s happened? What\u2019s happened?!<\/p>\n<p>Survivor: I can\u2019t bear to tell you. I can\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>At this point we need to make a careful distinction. Those scenes both trigger images of sexual <em>violence<\/em>. And yet one of the vampire story\u2019s more remarkable features is that it communicates a fear of sex even when that violence is largely removed. Indeed, an encompassing fear of sex\u2014and not just of rape\u2014is coded into some of the genre\u2019s most basic conventions. Nothing in the entire history of the horror film is more iconic than the vampire bite, which, if you pause to think about it, is entirely peculiar: Imagine that vampire stories didn\u2019t already exist \u2026 and now imagine trying to convince a Hollywood executive to greenlight your new movie about a creature who kills people by giving them hickeys, an honest-to-Christ Cuddle Monster, but scary, you promise him, enemy of scarves and turtlenecks. Or ask yourself for once why so many movies allow vampires to be repelled by garlic. That\u2019s a simple extrapolation from the idea that if you eat too much spicy food\u2014if you go to bed fetid, the reek of sofrito still on your ungargled breath\u2014no-one will want to sleep with you.<\/p>\n<p>But there\u2019s more\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2022Stoker\u2019s novel wants you to be scared of sexual women in particular. There\u2019s an underlying point here that is worth reviewing first: Most viewers think that vampires are foxy, which makes them really unlike other classic monsters. If that point is the least bit unclear to you, you might take a moment now to close your eyes and pretend briefly that you are making out with a zombie. But the most clarifying difference is the one we can draw between the vampire and the werewolf, both of whom are canonically shown perpetrating savage violence upon the bodies of women. What I\u2019d like to bring into view is that both werewolf movies and vampire movies deviate from what is perhaps the most routine scenario in a horror movie\u2014a rampaging monster lumbering after a panicked victim\u2014but they deviate in opposite directions. Werewolf stories are the one horror genre that has a certain reluctance or regret or stop-me-before-I-kill-again shame built right into them. Slashers, who otherwise resemble werewolves, never wake up the next morning hating themselves for what they\u2019ve done. No-one casts a chainsaw to one side in self-loathing. But in a werewolf movie, not even the monster is wholly willing. In a vampire movie, then, the point just gets flipped, in that not even the victim is wholly unwilling. Vampire victims collaborate in their own destruction, for the simple reason that men in capes have game. This means that certain types of utterly common horror sequences are largely excluded from the vampire film: People almost never flee from vampires, which means that the vampire flick is the horror subgenre least likely to borrow from action movies; most likely, in other words, to commit to a languid pacing\u2014no chase scenes!\u2014or rather, if a vampire movie does for once break out into a chase scene, you can be pretty sure it\u2019s the vamp and not the victim who is on the run.<\/p>\n<p>What we can now say is that this little myth about willing victims is most often told, in the vampire classics themselves, about women. The form\u2019s conviction that highborn men are predators is counterbalanced by its confidence that this is exactly what many women want\u2014to be preyed upon. The he-vamp awakens the woman to sexual rapaciousness, and the audience is expected to find this creepy. The survivor does sob and say \u201cI can\u2019t bear to tell you what happened,\u201d but she has also just said: \u201cI feel wonderful. I\u2019ve never felt better in my life.\u201d In Stoker, the woman who proves most susceptible to Dracula\u2019s advances is the one who has already asked, even before the vampire has made his move: \u201cWhy can\u2019t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?\u201d More important, the novel makes it clear that becoming a vampire is one good way of getting that wish granted. Once she turns, the sexual woman does indeed get <em>all the men<\/em>\u2014every major male character in the novel willingly opens his veins to give her blood transfusions\u2014she becomes a kind of sponge, allegorically loose, soaking up all this male donation: a \u201cpolyandrist,\u201d one of the men calls her. When the men, bearing whale-oil candles, go to visit her in her crypt, they \u201cdrop sperm in white patches\u201d across the floor, like pornographic bread crumbs. They finally put her to rest by assaulting her as a group, standing in a circle while one of their number \u201cdrives deeper into deeper\u201d into the \u201cdint in [her] white flesh.\u201d In the novel\u2019s opening sections, three women stand over a young Englishman in the Carpathians: &#8220;He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u2022Stoker\u2019s novel wants you to be scared of deviant sex above all. One point can be made without qualification: <em>All<\/em> the vampires in the original <em>Dracula <\/em>are gender-benders. That this is true of those kiss-hungry <em>Transylvaniennes <\/em>should be immediately apparent, since it will be true of nearly any she-vamp\u2014these lady-penetrators busting the jugular cherries of straight men.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/She-vamp.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-844\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/She-vamp.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"468\" height=\"404\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/She-vamp.jpg 468w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/She-vamp-300x258.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 468px) 100vw, 468px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The vampiress is how the very possibility of a certain rather sweeping gender reversal comes out into the open\u2014becomes visible in everyday life, available for the contemplation of suburbanites and middle schoolers. She and her male victims are pop culture\u2019s only iconic image of pegging. In Stoker, the man \u201cwaits in languorous ecstasy\u201d while he assesses for the first time the feeling of \u201chard dents\u201d against his \u201csuper sensitive skin.\u201d The point will seem accordingly less clear with regards to Dracula himself, since a man-vamp sinking into a crumpled woman preserves orthodox sexual roles. That Dracula\u2019s manhood is nonetheless unstable discloses the intensity of the novel\u2019s preoccupation with sexual confusion: In one of the book\u2019s more striking scenes, its several heroes bust into the bedroom of a woman they\u2019ve been guarding and find Dracula clasping her head to his naked breast, which he has just gashed open so that she can lap at his blood. The image is not <em>only <\/em>a riff on oral rape\u2014though it is that, too: a forced blow job. It is also\u2014and rather more literally\u2014a breast feeding, a demonic nursing, with the vampire willing to set aside all his usual male roles in order to take up the position of the monstrous mother, with a chest that runs red and a child at his bosom struggling to be reborn.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s a dense set of associations\u2014aristocracy, foreigners, sex, women, and queer people\u2014and the film does a reasonably good job of preserving this tissue of meaning, a much better job than, say, Whalen\u2019s <em>Frankenstein <\/em>does at protecting the many-sided allegory that had originally been built up around its monster. But the movie isn\u2019t just a translation, because to those established associations it adds one of its own. The screen Dracula isn\u2019t just an aristocratic holdover. The vampire is the movie star himself, and in all the famous images of Lugosi we see early film beginning to mediate on itself and on its own eerie power. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, not that Browning\u2019s <em>Dracula <\/em>has simply added a new association to Stoker\u2019s list, but that it has found an innovative way of encapsulating that list\u2019s concerns. The Valentino vampire isn\u2019t just a supplement to or replacement for the queer and foreign aristocrat; he <em>is <\/em>the queer and foreign aristocrat, issued in a new format. What we see in <em>Dracula <\/em>is film recoiling from its new modes of supercharged male charisma, and you can begin to make sense of Lugosi\u2019s performance if you think of it in terms of any film set\u2019s hierarchy of actors: Van Helsing kills Dracula; Edward Van Sloan, who you\u2019ve never heard of, kills Bela Lugosi; a character actor kills the leading man on behalf of the drab, male masses for the overriding reason that the women who\u2019ve come to the theater with them find him too dishy.<\/p>\n<p>#3) So those are two of the things that the Nureyev clip intertwines: Valentino and vampires. The third thing has everything to do with Carol Kane\u2019s hair.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Carol-Kanes-hair.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-845\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Carol-Kanes-hair.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"344\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Carol-Kanes-hair.jpg 500w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Carol-Kanes-hair-300x206.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s real a problem here. The movie has been careful to give Nureyev a tallowy comb-back; he would hardly be credible as Valentino without it. But what\u2019s striking about his partner\u2019s tresses is that they are so obviously of the 1970s. The movie, after all, is set in the 1920s, whose iconic hairstyles for women were all short\u2014bobs and Dutch boys and such\u2014but Carol Kane\u2019s hair has been frizzed and teased into fiberglass\u2014it is simultaneously long and fro-like, a headdress of cotton candy. For comparison&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Valentino-and-Natacha-Rambova-9.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-847\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Rudolph-Valentino-and-Natacha-Rambova-9-e1313673764861.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"374\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">Valentino with Natacha Rambova<\/p>\n<p>The biopic dancer&#8217;s most unflapperish do, in other words, breaks the movie\u2019s historical frame, anchoring the production in its own present of 1977 and allowing that decade to worm back into the Coolidge era. More precisely, it tends to transform the ballroom into a disco and the tango into a proto-Hustle. Look again at that shot of Carol Kane and especially at the lighting: One doesn\u2019t typically think of the 1920s as spangly. What we can say now is that Nureyev isn\u2019t just playing Valentino as a vampire\u2014that idea, at least, we\u2019ve been able to explain; he is playing Valentino as a <em>disco<\/em> vampire, and this is going to reopen the puzzle of the clip. We know that some people really hated disco, but was anybody actually scared of it? This brings us to another movie\u2014the movie we actually need to be thinking about\u2014which is 1985\u2019s <em>Fright Night<\/em>. Disco, they once said, sucks.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/movies\/staying-alive-part-2-1\/\">PART 2 BEGINS HERE&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Disco-vamp.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-852\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Disco-vamp.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Disco-vamp.jpg 500w, https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/files\/2011\/08\/Disco-vamp-300x199.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; What I have to explain this time round is a little strange, and the road we\u2019ll have to walk to get there is, I think, even stranger. I should note first that I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about vampire &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/staying-alive-part-one\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,73],"tags":[11445,11446,4055,18423,4054,4024,18424,4027],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-movies","tag-1920s","tag-1930s","tag-bela-lugosi","tag-bram-stoker","tag-dracula","tag-horror","tag-rudolph-valentino","tag-vampires"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1651,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions\/1651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}