The Infinite Mirror of Dracula

 

The Infinite Mirror of Dracula: A Fairy Tale in the Form of a Myth
(After viewing Nosferatu 1922)
It is an old and slippery superstition that myths belong to the ancient past, preserved in ossified form by scholars and storytellers, like insects trapped in amber. This, as Claude Lévi-Strauss once reminded us, is an error of both history and imagination. A myth is not a fossil; it is a living pattern, forever reproducing itself in new configurations. “A myth,” he wrote, “involves all instances of itself.” In this sense, even a parody, even an episode of The Simpsons or a Mel Brooks comedy, if it touches upon the shape of the myth, becomes part of the myth. Its substance is not diminished by laughter or exaggeration. It grows.
Let us consider Dracula, the vampiric prince of darkness, not as a character from a specific novel or film, but as one of those mysterious and mutable structures that inhabit the dreaming mind of humanity — a fairy tale, a myth, a meme, an idea. In the labyrinth of our cultural memory, Count Dracula is not confined to the pages of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, nor to the shadowy silhouette of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, nor even to the elegantly caped figures of Lugosi, Lee, or Oldman. He is all of them — and more. He is also Leslie Nielsen. He is the cartoon bat, the cereal mascot, the brooding figure in teenage fan fiction, the coded fear in Cold War films, the decadent aristocrat, the metaphor for plague, for desire, for invasion, for addiction, for time.
He is, like the Minotaur or the Fisher King, endlessly reinterpreted. And in this way, he reveals himself as a creature of myth.
In one telling, the original Nosferatu (1922), he is a parasite — a kind of un-king, reigning not through order but through decay. Where Arthur or Aragorn restores the broken land, Dracula flourishes in entropy. The more diseased the world, the stronger he becomes. The Arthurian land becomes the wasteland when the king is wounded. Dracula’s kingdom is the reverse: he is most alive when the land is most dead. He is the king of rot.
In such a cosmology, the figure who confronts Dracula must not only resist him physically but metaphysically. She must restore the order of the world, and to do so, she must act with the clarity of someone who sees beyond the veil — a veil which, in the modern world, is tightly woven. The veil is skepticism, science, the bureaucratic order of modernity. And it blinds us.
In “Nosferatu”, Thomas Hutter, a young clerk in a real estate office, is of this world — a modern man, armed with rationality, unimpressed by peasants’ superstitions, perhaps amused by their use of garlic and their prayers. He is the scholar, the logician, the clerk — the one who stumbles, unprepared, into a world whose logic is older and more terrifying than syllogisms. He sees the two marks on his throat and dismisses them. He reads the book that explains everything and throws it aside. He cannot believe that the impossible might be real, even when the evidence gathers around him like a rising mist.
But Mina, the city girl that Dracula desires, is different. She reads the same book, sees the same signs, and understands. She has felt the pull of dreams, the strange knowledge of things not learned, and in that moment of reading, something ancient awakens in her. She sees that the book does not speak in metaphor. It speaks in truth. She realizes that she is already part of the story.
Here, we arrive at a fundamental distinction in the fairy tale: the receptive soul versus the skeptical one. In Nosferatu, Hutter is warned again and again. But he does not listen. This too is the logic of the fairy tale. Warnings abound. Only the wise — or the faithful — heed them.
But what is most profound in this myth, as it appears in its many forms, is not the fangs, the castles, the crosses, or the coffins. It is the sacrifice.
In the myth of Dracula, at least in its most archetypal versions, there is a moment in which the protagonists — often the couple — must give something up. In American cinema, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has noted, the end point of many narratives is the creation of the couple. Romance is the ultimate reward. The music swells. The camera cranes. The kiss signals closure. But Nosferatu does not permit this ending.
To defeat Dracula is not to escape with one’s beloved into a private happiness. It is to relinquish that happiness — to offer it on the altar of the collective good. The woman gives herself, knowingly, to death, to darkness, to danger, not to save herself but to save others. She becomes, in this sense, a Christ-like figure — a martyr who redeems the land. The modern couple must die so that the ancient evil may be undone. Love must be undone to restore life.
It is in this reversal that we glimpse the mythic core of the story. It is not only that Dracula is ancient, that he is evil, that he drinks blood. It is that he embodies a principle of corruption that spreads from the self to the social to the cosmic. He does not simply kill. He transforms, distorts, perverts. He takes the couple and turns it into seduction. He takes the town and turns it into fog. He takes reason and bends it into madness.
And so, the response must be total. It is not enough to kill him. One must confront the idea of him. One must see the book, read the book, and believe the book. One must step out of modernity and into the mythic logic of the fairy tale. The fairy tale, that most ancient of human inheritances, requires recognition. Its world is not ours. But it touches ours, again and again, at the moment when reason fails and belief begins.
All stories of Dracula — from the sublime to the ridiculous — are variations in this infinite mirror. The myth does not demand purity. It welcomes distortion. It survives parody, because it includes parody. It survives mockery, because mockery is still acknowledgment. A fairy tale, to persist, must be retold. And every retelling, even the absurd ones, gives it new life.
In this sense, Dracula is eternal. Not because he drinks blood, but because we keep dreaming of him. He is not dead because we laugh at him. He is not undone because we understand him. He is, like all great myths, both more and less than he appears. He is an absence, a hunger, a symbol, a warning.