Now Playing in Your Living Room: Dracula, the Series

It’s no surprise that we at Castle Burchfield would watch the opening episode of the new Dracula miniseries, broadcast on NBC on Friday nights. Since then  though, I have failed to take a second look. Not much surprise there either.

Dracula the series is definitely a lavish, eye-filling concoction. The producers chose to set this one during the time of Stoker’s novel, the opulent peak of the Victorian era. The first hour resembles the perfect coffee table book—with accompanying slides and viewfinder--you might buy for a history buff relative. Lovers of Victorian bric-a-brac will sigh. To the eyes, this Dracula is gorgeous.

Dracula fans, though, may find the rest to be pretty thin-blooded. Oodles of changes have been made to Stoker’s narrative; nothing wrong with that, but the changes, while interesting to ponder, turn out rather uninteresting in practice. Some of them play to woo-woo Twilight fans. Others are willful and arbitrary rather than thought through.

Among the most significant is that Van Helsing the Vampire Hunter is now Van Helsing the Vampire’s Ally (played by Thomas Kretschmann). It seems both he and Dracula have one epic bloody axe to grind with a secret society called The Order of the Dragon and have teamed up to destroy it. The Order is a centuries-old Hellfire Club that has evolved from wielding power with the sword of the supernatural to wielding it with the sword of Gilded Age capitalism and new technologies borne of the Industrial Revolution, such as gas and oil.

Not one to stay behind history (which he always has before), Dracula has refashioned himself—peculiarly, I have to say—as a wealthy Gilded-Age, Andrew Carnegie type American—really, what is up with that?—named Alexander Grayson.

Grayson is developing wireless electricity as a means to not only achieve the power and wealth he needs to destroy his enemies—why an American fer chrissakes?—but also to enhance his nocturnal existence, so he will no longer need rely on moonlight and candles to find his way around. His future will be a world sorely lacking in shadows, that’s for sure. Not one any serious supernatural being would care to haunt.

Jonathan Harker, meanwhile, has become a crusading investigative journalist while Mina Harker his fiancé, is an ambitious medical student, her sights set on breaking the glass ceiling into the then exclusively man-castle of professional medicine. No sign of flailing Quincy Morris, yet; or Dr. Seward.

Where Mina and Dracula are concerned, the show hearkens back to the 1990s Coppola version by making Mina the reincarnation of Dracula’s wife from 1490s Transylvania—wait a minute’s he’s an American? I guess it’s a disguise, but . . . .

Most interestingly, the series solves the Renfield Problem simply by making Renfield into the most dutiful—and clinically sane and competent--African-American butler any wealthy white American of that time could wish for. At last, Dracula has found his Jeeves.

Given its backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern science—and the powers it brings—what is Dracula, who should always have the Greater Powers of Darkness at hand—doing here in the first place? He’s never needed no stinkin’ electricity, that's for sure. Why does he need it now and what does that do his supposedly supernatural powers? To me, it diminishes them to near irrelevance. This a Dracula who embraces modernity, absurdly I think and becomes even smaller. He should be turning on the lights by simple force of will.

Stylistically Dracula is as sleek and cinematic as we could wish, but the first episode made gestures that seem merely distracting. The grand opening ball sequence features the guests dancing like stick figures to an avant-garde tarantella-like waltz as might be conjured by Ennio Morricone instead of Strauss or Tchaikovsky. Cute, but how proper Victorians could even dance to this without breaking their spines requires explanation.

We’re also treated to a slow-motion, acrobatic wired sword fight, derived from Chinese action cinema, which has devolved to an annoying tic used in movies with no real excitement in them. It’s a trick to keep that young demographic from switching over to Highlander reruns. No real thrill or urgency here at all.

Finally, there’s the star of the show, the great compelling void whose cruel whirling gravity drains the light from the whole world around, namely Dracula. The show falls short here, too. Real short. Jonathan Rhys-Meyer as Dracula is more than dourly handsome enough for Twilight fans, but he’s also a cool cipher with little power and presence. Dracula needs more than sexual allure. He needs a compelling fearsomeness that Mr. Rhys-Meyers, who tends to fade whenever he shares the screen with anyone else, lacks. Not even the wolves would heed his call.

(re-edited 11/7/13)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has just completed BUTCHERTOWN , a 1920s gangster shoot-'em-up. He can be “friended” on Facebook and tweeted at on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Cacophony, Quick n' Dirty

A quick one for San Francisco Bay Area readers:

The late 1980s: It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times (to mock Mr. Dickens), but I, at least, did squeeze out some good times pranking about with the legendary San Francisco Cacophony Society, one the pioneering groups of urban adventurers and pranksters (the spawn of an even earlier group, the San Francisco Suicide Club).

Their alternative antics eventually gave direct birth to Burning Man (I attended the first one held at Baker Beach in 1990, though the cops closed it down before even a plank was laid. After that I went home, turned into Ozzie Nelson, and never went back.)

Just this year, two of Cacophony’s founders (and longtime friends of mine), John Law and Carrie Galbraith, published Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society. It’s a lovely colorful book, jammed-pack with photos, illustrations and, best of all, a short memory work by me about the Thomas Pynchon Midnight Tour through San Francisco I co-led in 1988 with Carrie, Steven Black, and John.

I could have contributed a few more memories (including a white-robed invocation I delivered for a Doggie Diner head one debauched Saturday night on a Sonoma County farm), but that time remains otherwise blissfully vague. There are also many memories I swat away like pesky flies and little yapping dogs.

And with publishing new books comes publicity, for which I will happily stand aside to allow the most kind-hearted and honorable Mr. Law to step forward:

Chaos Cacophony and the Commonwealth Club of California

Please join Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society co-authors Carrie Galbraith and John Law in conversation with Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk moderated by Business Week (!) Executive Editor Brad Wieners.

Monday the 23rd of September, doors 7PM

Castro Theater, Market at Castro Streets, San Francisco

Please check out the detailed description at www.johnwlaw.com

I shall not be attending the festivities at the Castro, as the mountains of Wyoming are calling me hither (ten years married to Elizabeth!)

. . . in fact, I won’t be here again until October. 

Until then, stay happy, find peace, be kind to each other. 

Copyright 2013 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by John Law (Who else? Wouldn't catch me dead, nope . . . .)

Thomas Burchfield has just completed BUTCHERTOWN , a 1920s gangster shoot-'em-up. He can be “friended” on Facebook and tweeted at on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Joyland" by Stephen King

Joyland  (Hard Case Crime) seems at first a change-up by genre master Stephen King. It has many qualities found in his other books, but violates fan expectations in ways that are very pleasant and surprising. Joyland  is not really a genre novel at times, but a slice-of-life novel, a warm-hearted carnival picaresque of times gone by.

At least for a while.

Some readers may feel misled, considering the reputations of both Big Steve and Hard Case Crime, the publisher highly regarded for its pulp catalog of both new and vintage novels. Pulp fans should be warned, for what the lurid cover promises is not quite what awaits them inside. Joyland is not a novel for the hard-boiled.

Joyland is a novel of Summers past, a lazy reverie, a tender reflection on lost youth. It may be dedicated to Donald Westlake, but I was much reminded of another poet of American boyhood, Ray Bradbury.

King takes us to North Carolina, Summer of 1973. Devin Jones, a college student suffering from a miserable breakup and sliding toward slackitude, takes a summer job with Joyland amusement park, a mid-sized carnival of a kind seldom seen now: colorful, and grubby; cheap, dowdy, charming, run by an elderly, benevolent owner and a crowd of lifelong carny misfits. We Sell Fun is their proud motto. It’s all they care about, all they need to care about.

For much of the way, Joyland and Stephen King sell fun better than anyone. The first three-quarters of this sun-splashed novel are sheer delight, full of the finest, most playful and relaxed writing I’ve ever seen from King, full of melancholy love for carnivals past, and the gritty folks who worked them, all evoked with careful details and spiced with a dictionary’s worth of tasty carny lingo (some of it well-invented by the author.) King captures the everyday details and rhythms of carnival life with easy, familiar poetry. Joyland  may make you sorry you didn’t run away with the carnival when you had the chance. It may a little sorry I didn’t stick with theatre (but just a little).

Older readers may be reminded of another Summer-of-My-Youth classic The Summer of ’42 (a novel actually derived from a hit 1972 film). It has an honest nostalgia for youth balanced with insight into its anguish, confusion, humiliations, and frailties. It’s written with an older man’s mixture of tender memory and wise disdain. A sense of “I know better now, but wasn’t it sweet then?”

But then, as it must, Summer ends. And once Joyland’s Summer ends, the plot begins. Too bad, because once it raises its musty, familiar head, the story world fragments into a predictable chain of not-so-suspenseful events, involving murders and ghosts, tricked out with an element from The Shining.

It’s saved by a good ending, but I was left wondering if, for once, King might have conjured a different plot or jettisoned plot altogether and let his weave of events conclude at season’s end. There was enough magic in its setting and characters. It needed no more. As the Summer closed, I wished the book had closed with it.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield has just completed BUTCHERTOWN , a 1920s gangster shoot-'em-up. He can be “friended” on Facebook and tweeted at on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.