With another break from tradition, I’ve begun watching the Netflix Original Series Dracula to get into the spirit of the season. This is actually a (or, rather, another) British version of the classic tale, broadcast first on BBC One before taking its place on Netflix. The series certainly exudes a certain Britishness* and I mean that in a good way. The decision to watch was based, largely, on the prodding I received from Netflix. No surprise, this got me thinking about the business model.
Now, it would seem to me that the way Netflix makes the most money is to sell monthly subscriptions which then go unused. That way, they get all the revenue but they save on cost (minimal as it may be to support each individual view) and expense (I assume that they pay per-view royalties for their offerings).
If that is the case, why push shows on me? These days, I get blurbs and videos for films/shows that they feel might appeal to me whenever I’m logged on and then through email when I am not. I seem to get an email, every week or so, asking me if it isn’t high time I watched something on Neflix. Stranger still are the emails reminding me that I started watching something but haven’t finished yet (as if I hadn’t noticed). How does all this make them money?
Set aside, for the moment, it isn’t just one department running amok – creating technological solutions just because they can – I suppose I must have the business model wrong. Maybe part of the deal they make with any content creator (and even, perhaps particularly, in the case of “Original Content”, where contracts with developers and producers may be critical) has to do with guaranteeing a certain audience after they sign an exclusive with Netflix. Maybe its purely financial – more eyeballs means more royalties. Maybe it is a marketing thing. The creators of Squid Game surely will be making bank on their new found fame in ways that greatly exceed whatever it is that Netflix is paying them.
In any case, the combination of holiday spirit and Original Content incentivization meant I would see a splash for Dracula as I watched movie after movie on Netflix. Still, even this non-stop marketing blast probably wouldn’t have been enough to tempt me except that somewhere (maybe in print – Wall St. Journal?) I read a critical review of the mini-series that said it was actually worth my while. So, spirit of the season and all that.
But was it gay enough?
This is a TV production and that means we should only expect so much. My initial impressions were of an over-reliance on jump scares and excessively-loud orchestra swells – a plague endemic to the genre and not just its lower budget corner. While much of Dracula strikes me as well-written, the sheer length of the mini-series format starts to expose a weakness stemming from repetition and the over-reliance on certain crutches. For example, the leading roles of Dracula and Van Helsing are written to make these characters far more clever than those that surround them. Count Dracula, in particular, boasts of his superiority by constantly proclaiming in only-slightly-veiled language the secrets which he must keep. Naturally, those around him are too naive, too unsophisticated, and just too dull to understand his telegraphed warnings of their approaching doom. It’s a nice device and one that has been used to great success throughout cinema. It worked here the first time, the second, and maybe even the third.
By the way, did I mention that Van Helsing is a woman? Van Helsing is a woman. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
The 2021 Dr. Van Helsing makes me wonder if there is some sort of checklist that specifies a strong female lead, a supporting homosexual man, a highly-competent black – and so forth. It may be that compliance with said list is just another hurdle to clear in order to get things produced these days. There is certainly a range of “wokeness” that goes from simply hitting all the buttons in the course of telling your story up-to-and-including the woke being the story. To some extent, I even understand and support a few of the goals here. Why couldn’t there have been a beautifully-intersectional homosexual black man living large in Victorian London? And, if we’re going to tell about him in our story, shouldn’t he be a positive character – so as to counter all the negatives his predecessors have endured? For someone in the biz who looks at decades of reinforcement of traditional norms and outright prohibition of art when those norms are violated, such treatment would seem long overdue.
For the rest of us, though, I think we are still more concerned about whether or not we’re getting a good entertainment return on our time and money investment. Do the politically correct extras detract from that? In this case, I don’t think they do. I have no doubt, however, that the current state of entertainment offerings is all over the map. In this example, today’s world looks upon the story of Dracula (the book, now, rather than this show) for its allegorical treatment of sex, race, and sexually-transmitted disease. It seems a certainty that any modernization of Bram Stoker’s tale would necessitate a more modern look at these issues.
I’ll also mysteriously add that the twist, when it comes, felt very rewarding. I’ll not say much more than that because it’s worth not ruining for you if you don’t know. I guess it is kind of hard to avoid ruining it although I managed not to figure it out until it happened. This “new blood,” if you will, was enough to make up for most of the sins the piece committed in getting us there.
There are dozens upon dozens of Dracula and vampire-themed films out there. A few factors need to come together to justify making one more. Better production values, an up-to-date look, and a bit of twist are enough to make this one worth a watch for me being, as I was, in the mood for something Halloween. It’s still not great cinema. It’s not even great by the standards of the BBC miniseries.
*One bit of surprise came as I am also continuing along with my Ripper Street viewing, albeit now on DVD. The actor John Heffernan, who plays Jonathan Harker, showed up in Ripper Street the follow night in a recurring part as a lawyer. It was momentarily disorienting.