Librari[d]an

You probably haven’t heard of the recent controversy spurred by the new Collector’s Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The color palette of the film has been drastically changed, darkness greatly increased, desaturated, etc. in comparison to earlier mass market releases. According to the motion picture archivist Robert Harris, this is because American Zoetrope has digitally matched the colors to those of the Francis Ford Coppola-approved answer print. According to fans it’s an unpardonable, deliberate revision of their favorite film incarnation of the Dracula story. I honestly don’t care about any of that… as long as consumers have a choice between the two.

My only lingering concern with the Collector’s Edition is that it has been accused of totally altering Eiko Ishioka’s Academy Award-winning costume designs. From very early on in Dracula’s pre-production, Coppola “decided that the costumes would be the set.” (Dworkin 17) When Eiko Ishioka realized “that the costumes would be the key factor in determining the quality of the film itself, I accepted the job.” (Dworkin 21) So that is what this post is actually about. Not the concern for color fidelity in film archiving, but those beautiful costumes - inspired by everything from the Symbolist movement to the Australian frilled lizard - that were conceived of and created by Ishioka. (Dworkin 19, 70)

One of the most memorable garments from the film is Dracula’s “red Oriental-Turkish robe”, which was created to “emphasize the androgynous quality in his character”, “a haunting aura of transsexuality.” (Dworkin 41) In the thematic color of red, Eiko had Dracula’s golden coat-of-arms embroidered on the breast.

This emblem is Dracula’s “identity, similar to the Japanese family crest. I designed a motif of various animals intertwined into a single form.” (Dworkin 42) These included a dragon, wolf, snakes, and birds, as well as fire. (Landau 37) The robe’s voluminous train was constructed to “undulate like a sea of blood.” (Dworkin 41) Not all of Dracula’s planned costumes made it into the film. Check out this sketch of a brocaded vest with red detailing/piping and handkerchief:

The designs for women are the cornerstone of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And why is that? It’s because the original, decentralized story found in Stoker’s novel - told through every character’s point of view except Dracula’s - has been appropriated for Mina. Screenwriter Jim Hart felt that “The key to writing Dracula was to make it Mina’s story.” (Landau 80) Instead of a fragmented narrative, Mina gives it unity and continuity. While it may seem that Mina’s story is framed by Dracula’s historic prologue, the truth is in fact the opposite. Dracula lacks agency. He can merely react as Elisabeta kills herself, as Mina abandons him to marry Harker, as she makes the decision to become a vampire, as she exploits their psychic rapport to assist her friends, and finally as she delivers them both from the unholy covenant Dracula forged with “darkness”.

Throughout the film, Mina’s costumes convey just as much of the story as the actress beneath all that silk. For example, the dress Mina wears in Rule’s Cafe (the absinthe scene) was colored red - Dracula’s color - to convey that Mina would soon be tainted by vampirism. (Landau 127)

Ishioka “carefully considered Mina’s role in the drama” before she chose green as Mina’s thematic color. (Dworkin 61) The color needed to compass the character’s intelligence, sexual naïveté, stoicism, sense, and strong will. Many of these attributes can be seen in the dress she wears on the streets of London and in the cinematograph. The pert hat represents her vivacity and fortitude, the manly lapels her status as a New Woman with a “man’s brain [...] and a woman’s heart“, etc. (Stoker 266)

Winona Ryder wearing the town dress. Photo by Ralph Nelson II. (Landau 80)

Sketch of the town dress by Eiko Ishioka. Photo by Keith Sherins. (Dworkin 60)

Most of Mina’s dresses - including her typing gown - also sport high collars to reflect her modesty and chastity:

Mina’s typing dress. Photo by David Seidner. (Dworkin63)

The high collar can also be seen on Mina’s three-quarter sleeve dress. This dress is rather domestic-looking because of the contrast between the apron and the skirt and wrap. It also lacks leaf embroidery (whose importance will be discussed later) and is almost always worn while in the presence or under the protection of Van Helsing.

Mina’s three-quarter sleeve dress. Photos by Ralph Nelson II. (Landau 129, 125, 141)

As you can see, Ishioka took a predominantly historical, orthodox approach to Mina’s costumes, only pushing boundaries with her creative embellishments. (Dworkin 94) However, “Costumes should be more than just items that explain the role of the actors who wear them”, she stresses. (Dworkin 27) A costume should challenge the actor, filmmakers, and audience. (Dworkin 27) An example of this type of costume is Mina’s wedding dress, which is featured only briefly in the movie. Rather than a virginal white, it is instead a sombre gray-green:

This type of implicit message can also be seen in the final act of the film, in which Mina wears a historically outmoded style. “I designed her cape in the last scene with a strong Renaissance flavor, a Pre-Raphaelite look.” (Dworkin 91) This costume foreshadows Mina’s realization that she is truly the reincarnation of Elisabeta, Dracula’s 15th century bride.

Mina’s Renaissance cape. Photo by David Seidner. (Dworkin 91)

Elisabeta’s gown, seen at the beginning of the film and later in flashbacks, contains the elements that draw the two (three?) central characters together: Emblazoned on the torso is Dracula’s crest. Elisabeta and Mina’s designs are relatively consistent: On the sleeves and skirt - and even her crown of laurel - is the foliage motif that is often also found on Mina’s dresses. Both have the theme color of green. While Elisabeta wears a farthingale, Mina wears a bustle.

Elisabeta’s gown. First photo by David Seidner, second by Ralph Nelson II. (Dworkin 79, Landau 14)

Ishioka’s desire to design museum-quality costumes and her overall perfectionism meant that making multiple copies of her garments for filming was financially impractical. Richard Shissler, the associate costume designer, said that “We probably should have had duplicates of everything, but we just didn’t have the budget [...] Eiko didn’t want to compromise, so we had multiples only when we really needed them.” (Landau 127) Mina’s costumes were constructed with silk taffeta, imported from France and Italy, by Dale Wibben, a freelance dressmaker from San Francisco. (Dworkin 94) Sally Ann Parsons from Parsons-Meares, Ltd. in New York did the more theatrical costumes for Dracula, Lucy, and Renfield while Vincent Costume, Inc. made the men’s clothing. (Dworkin 94) The elaborate embroidery on many of the costumes was done by Penn and Fletcher and Monogram West. (Dworkin 94)

In retrospect, upon seeing her handiwork, it’s no wonder that Coppola chose Ishioka. However, at the time it was a gamble; she had never worked on the costumes for a film before, only television. Coppola’s “strategy in hiring someone like her - an independent, a weirdo outsider with no roots in the business - it worked in the end. Because I could look at the screen and say, well, these costumes are truly irrational and artistic and absolutely unique.” (Dworkin 93)

If I revisit Bram Stoker’s Dracula again, it will be to talk about the one thing in in the film that is more beautiful than the costumes: Wojciech Kilar’s glissando filled love theme, “Mina/Dracula”. (You can hear it over at YouTube, in this video from 2:00 to the end.)

:: Bibliography ::

• Dworkin, Susan, ed. Coppola and Eiko on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. By Francis Ford Coppola and Eiko Ishioka. San Francisco: Collins Publishers San Francisco, 1992. ISBN: 0002551675.
• Landau, Diana, ed. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend. By Francis Ford Coppola. New York: Newmarket Press, 1992. ISBN: 1557041393.
• Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1989. ISBN: 0812523016.

Honestly, it just isn’t that good of a horror film. Sure it has some very nice jump scares, but it also has some pretty pedestrian ones as well. And the plot! It’s about as formula they come.

Laura has a nebulous backstory involving a beautiful old house. Guess what? It’s an orphanage and she’s moving back in. Genius! Did I mention that her adoptive son has been talking to imaginary friends? Throw in a séance scenario complete with freaky medium, secret rooms, chronic illnesses, a twist ending, etc. and you’ve got a pretty good list of everything you can expect from this type of subgenre film. Come now, the only haunted house cliché they didn’t use was having the place built on an ancient Native American burial ground! And they couldn’t… because it takes place in Spain.

Truth be told, there are many redeeming aspects to the film. The art direction is interesting, and rarely appears too highly contrived. (Tomás’ sack mask and ‘little house’ are not too creepy, yet still evoke a feeling of foreboding.) Darkness/obstruction of vision isn’t used as a crutch to hide ghosts for a final, menacing appearance. (Tomás’ hallway walk was brilliant. Very well done.) The writer rarely sports with the audience’s intelligence. (Not explaining the Saint Anthony medal was a nice touch. No need to club the viewer with its significance.) Belén Rueda gave a solid performance as Laura. (Audiences never laughed at her - unintentional humor is becoming a huge problem in contemporary horror - and she never sublimated her character to the archetype of “mother”.)

My fundamental problem with the film is the wishy-washy ending. Just when you think director Juan Antonio Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sánchez are willing to destroy Laura and the audience utterly - and I do mean utterly! - with the twist, they backpedal. Instead of brining the story to a conclusion that indicts both mother/father/viewer for their neglect of children in their care - Laura’s focus on children with special needs rather than Simón, Carlos’ hands-off parenting, Benigna’s selfish revenge, our obsession with the spectral children rather than the endangered living child - The Orphanage tacks on a bunch of feel-good scenes for a speedy dénouement.

As a child, I would often have dreams about a mysterious blonde, blindfolded and all in white, silently calling out to me for help. She would appear framed in mirrors, reaching blindly towards me, or dead in a ruined coffin. When I related the dream to a friend, he assured me it was not mine at all. Rather, the girl was my misty memory of an obscure live-action Disney film, The Watcher in the Woods. The “dream” was in fact several suspenseful scenes from the science fiction/horror movie, which features a girl who was accidentally sent into another dimension - switched with an alien - during a solar eclipse. Why I came to think of it as a dream was clear: Karen’s costume design was theatrical and symbolic in nature, a softening filter made the images hazy, and little to no sound heightened the suspense of the scenes.

In “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner”, Alison Landsberg relates Herbert Blumer’s scientific finding that the mass media can implant memories into audiences via film. (LM 240) Audiences do not simply associate themselves with characters in the film, but incorporate the images and sounds fundamentally into the self. (LM 242) Landsberg views this as an extension of themes developed in contemporary science fiction films dealing with “prosthetic” (i.e. synthesized) memory.

In her essay, the author argues that post-modern film analysis privileges the time before audience’s relationships to events were not so mediated that people could not differentiate between the real and hyperreal. (LM 243, 240) Critics such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard express nostalgia for this time – the “prelapsarian moment” – when it was still possible for viewers to experience and participate in true memory rather than inauthentic memory. Landsberg argues, however, that films such as Total Recall and Blade Runner work against this idea. The protagonists of both films don’t concern themselves with their past. This is because an authentic memory is not necessarily superior to a fabricated one, and because both memories exist. (LM 243, 244) Decker and Quaid forge their own identities based on the present moment. Thus, memory is less about the past than the present. (LM 244) A foil to this argument can be seen in the film Dark City. In the course of the narrative, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) attempts to unravel his memories to escape the strange people chasing him. As it turns out, these aliens have scrambled memories into a “cocktail” and literally inject them into men and women. By repeatedly changing humans’ identities in this manner, the aliens can keep them ignorant of their captivity. Only with the help of someone with authentic memories (Kiefer Sutherland) can Murdoch learn the truth (via injection of authentic memories) and liberate the humans.

In the “Postfuturism” chapter of Vivian Sobchack’s Screening Space, she also identifies the importance of the coherence of identify. (SS 272) In the postmodern era, Sobchack feels that identity is shaped mostly by space and surface rather than the temporal. Landsberg also asserts that an emphasis on the surface typifies postmodernism. (LM 244) Thus, continuity of time is less important. Science fiction films are either nostalgic or celebratory in regard to this fact. (SS 273) In the first case, the films draw on the past in terms of plot and mise en scène (such as the antiquated fashions seen in Dune). In the second, the films glory in discontinuity editing that confuses the viewer’s sense of time. The Watcher in the Woods is of the first type, as it uses gothic horror and antiquated locales to cleverly mislead the audience into thinking the film is a ghost story (rather than science fiction).

Thus, postmodern memory and its repercussion on how films conceive of time/space can be added to a list of the elements of science fiction film. While critics readily discern the genre’s predisposition to look toward the future, they often neglect the just as conspicuous tendency for the films to look into the past.

I’ve included some screenshots from The Watcher in the Woods. I thought they might be useful in understanding why I subconsciously found the scene so gripping. If you haven’t seen the film, I would suggest it. (Annabel, at the very least, got some laughs when she revisited it.) I think it really embodies the generic tension between horror and sci-fi that Sobchack identified, even more so than Metropolis. (More on that later.)

:: Bibliography ::

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Redmond, Sean. Liquid Metal. New York: Wallflower Press, 2004.

The Watcher in the Woods. Dir. John Hough. Perf. Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker, and David McCallum. 1980/1. DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment. April 2, 2002.

L’amour de l’étymologie is a feature exploring the etymology of English words. Today’s entry: the noun vertigo! You may rarely find this word spelled (vertego, verteego, virtigo) and pronounced (although this is the standard pronunciation) in any number of ways. If you’re feeling adventuresome, branch out and use related words such as the adjective “vertiginous”!

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Vertigo should not be confused with acrophobia, the fear of heights.

I have been consistently fascinated by the word vertigo since childhood, having seen Hitchcock’s classic of the same name at a tender age. Hypnotized by the film’s salient imagery, captivating score, and general pathos, I found myself returning to the term time and again. Only about a year ago I discovered that the title - Hitchcock’s personal favorite for the film - barely survived the journey to the marquee. (There were around fifty suggested titles ready and waiting to oust Vertigo.) In late October of 1957 the studio asserted that “No execs like Vertigo and believe it handicap to selling and advertising picture whether potential customers know what word vertigo means or not”. (Auiler 113)

This quote most likely explains why the original trailer for Vertigo opens with a shot of a dictionary. The book opens and the camera zooms in on a page as a quick dissolve takes viewers to a detail shot of the entry for “vertigo”. A voice-over informs the audience that the word means “a feeling of dizziness … a swimming in the head … figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror.” As the book spins and dissolves into one of Saul Bass and John Whitney’s iconic spiral motifs - known properly by the name “Lissajous spirals” - it seems reasonable to ask just how much of this definition is fact and how much is hyperbole.

In truth, the clever mind that thought up this educational prelude got the meaning pretty much right.

In the original Latin, vertigo meant “a turning around, giddiness”. The Romantic languages inherited this term, and it can be assumed that Anglophones adopted the word from either French or Spanish. The first known use of vertigo in English has been dated to 1528 in Paynell’s Salerne’s Regim, which describes “The heed ache called vertigo: whiche maketh a man to wene that the world turneth”. The main gist of vertigo has followed this pathological assessment. The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary entry: “A disordered condition in which the person affected has a sensation of whirling, either of external objects or of himself, and tends to lose equilibrium and consciousness; swimming in the head; giddiness, dizziness”. The term can also be applied to animals such as horses, sheep, and hawks–although any link between dizziness and these animals’ diseases seems tenuous.

All that jazz is without adding an article. You can slap an “a” or “the” before vertigo if you don’t mind sounding a bit backward. Similarly, using plural forms (vertigos, vertigoes, verteegoes, vertigines) may sound awkward to contemporary ears.

Figurative uses of the word came along later, with the first recorded use in 1634. Vertigo in this case means “A disordered state of mind, or of things, comparable to giddiness.” The OED quotes people who wrote that art, power, and intellectualism may induce this state.

The final use of vertigo is as a noun which encapsulates the “act of whirling round and round.” Although loaded with poetic potential, this usage seems relatively rare; the only historical quote the OED cites is 19th Century writer Thomas de Quincey’s use of the word to describe a top in his Autobiographical Sketches.

That’s all she wrote. Stay tuned for more etymologies and musings on Hitchcock’s Vertigo!

:: Bibliography ::

Auiler, Dan. Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. ISBN: 0312169159.

“Vertigo.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2008. 2 Jan. 2008 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=vertigo&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word>.