more ranting. tw for mentions of drugging, sa themes, and suicidal ideation
in the book, it’s likely that renfield was ill when he became entangled with dracula, and that dracula preyed off his illness and isolation. like real abusers do. alone except for a doctor who scrutinizes him like an insect under a microscope, he turns to someone who he thinks is the better option in a desperate bid for freedom, immortality, and the strength to never, ever be subjected to this again. he knows dracula targeted lucy, but lucy is an abstraction to him, because he’s lost faith in humanity. after meeting Mina, he reconnects with human kindness and realizes that he cannot allow his savior to enact that suffering on others. he chooses humanity, and is repaid by dying alone.
in the 1931 movie, renfield takes jonathan’s place in traveling to dracula’s castle, where dracula charms him, intoxicates him, and feeds on him while he’s motionless on the floor. if this reminds you of sa, it should, because it reminded the studio enough that browning got asked to cut the scene because of sexual connotations but he kept it anyway. the trauma of the attack, the violence aboard the demeter, and dracula’s influence drive him to a total breakdown, and he oscillates between helping dracula and revealing vital information to van helsing. he does not want to help dracula, but he cannot find it in himself to break away. he fears and loves dracula, wordlessly communicating with him through a mental link, held in an emotional hostage situation. he attributes his inability to leave dracula to his “weak mind,” for which he blames himself. in the end, dracula kills him for leading the others to carfax abbey. renfield says it wasn’t on purpose. but his last words are “punish me, torture me, but let me live. I can’t die with all these lives on my conscience, all that blood on my hands.”
book renfield and 1931 renfield are vastly different characters. one is the old cynic trapped between two abusive circumstances, picking what he thinks is the lesser of two evils, only to change his mind in an effort to spare another. the other is a young person whose life is ripped out of his control when an abuser intentionally drives him to a breakdown. I find both of them compelling.
but it’s an insult to 1931 renfield to claim that he and 2023 renfield are one and the same. 2023 renfield is not served drugged wine and attacked while unconscious. he signs into dracula’s plan willingly, abandoning his wife and daughter. 1931 renfield is attacked in part because he’s alone; dracula makes sure no one knows where he is. this is probably not a married man. 2023 renfield ends up in a relationship— because that’s how it’s framed— that gradually gets worse and worse until eventually dracula is physically violent with him, forces him to relocate frequently, and tears down his self esteem. all of this is real, actual abusive behavior, but it isn’t what 1931 dracula does. 1931 dracula takes renfield with him on the demeter (renamed the vesta for no real reason), where he kills the crew and lets renfield take the fall as the sole survivor found onboard, allows him to be institutionalized, and attempts to alternately terrorize and bribe him into compliance. The idea of a dracula who manipulates someone with a regular life into self-isolating, becomes gradually more abusive, and employs more stealthy psychological warfare is intriguing, but it bears more resemblance to book dracula than to 1931 dracula. I suppose the writers thought that this dynamic would be more relatable than the one of the original movie, which may be true for many viewers. if the movie hadn’t taken such pains to insist that 2023 and 1931 dracula were one and the same, I might cut it more slack
but I still will not and cannot cut it slack over erasing the theme of ableism with renfield. whether it’s a persistent chronic disorder or a trauma-induced acute nervous breakdown, the defining feature of the character, in my opinion, is that he is isolated and pathologized due to mental illness. the 2023 movie doesn’t even touch on the literal century of honest to god ptsd the title character would’ve accrued after spending decade after decade being tortured on the regular. instead, it has the audacity to blame dracula’s abuse on him having npd— a literal trauma-based personality disorder— thus shifting the stigma of diagnosis off of renfield and onto his abuser.
you see why that’s a problem, right??? you see why taking the character who is victimized because of his disability, un-disabling him, and transferring the disability narrative onto his abuser is a problem, right???????
I’m not saying dracula can’t have mental health problems or be complex. because the movie wasn’t saying that, either. its dracula was still a caricature of cruelty, only now with a diagnosis plastered on. the actual pathos of lugosi’s dracula— the passive suicideality when he murmurs “to die, to be really dead…that must be glorious,” his motive in turning mina being to have her by his side “age after age” suffering in immortality as he has suffered, “there are far worse things awaiting man than death”— all that is gone. 2023 dracula has no self-destructive craving for the true grave, only a catty egotism and need for power that I will again compare with the book’s dracula.
I think that ‘petty bastard’ dracula and ‘thought he knew what he was signing up for, but it got worse’ renfield could work, but not in this context. not in a movie that wants to be a sequel to 1931 dracula. petty bastard dracula is more book-like. renfield who signed on willingly and then switches sides is more book-like (though, again, book renfield had the context of institutionalization). but universal had to draw on 1931 to retain copyright.
in conclusion. the 2023 renfield movie was full of lost potential. to top it all off, there was copaganda. I don’t want a copaganda action comedy about renfield. I want the legit actual horror of having someone who knows how to trigger your episodes doing so to play you like a fiddle. I want the ripping off the bandage of coming to grips with the fact that you’ve been used, and used to hurt people you care about. I want the dread of realizing that if you don’t put a stop to it right now someone else is going to fall into the trap and your abuser is going to have another victim. I want to feel shrimp emotions about what it’s like when the only guy who you think understands you is eating you alive and you have to kill him before he kills you.
