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rackhamrose.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ship_manifesto2004-09-28 09:19 pm
rackhamrose.livejournal.com) wrote in ship_manifesto2004-09-28 09:19 pm
Entry tags:
Gabriel Van Helsing/Vladislaus, Count Dracula (Van Helsing)
Title: All Men Are Mad In Some Way, or, Love Really Bites
Author: Rackham Rose
Spoilers: for the movie, video game, second-to-last draft of the screenplay, and a very few for Dracula itself. The animated short The London Assignment has been more or less disregarded, because its inconsistencies with the rest of canon stick out like a sore thumb.
Email: rackhamrose at pressed-feathers dot net
Note: Thanks are due to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shoiryu, finnigans_wake, and asprosdrakos, who all slapped me around until this was in workable shape.
Also, ironically enough, today is the day Van Helsing would have been released on DVD, had Universal not pushed back the release date.
*`-,--
When I took my mother to see Van Helsing for Mother's Day--after all, nothing says "I love you" like Hugh Jackman almost getting naked on screen--there was a particular scene between Van Helsing and his undead foe during which she leaned over and whispered in my ear, "They're ex-boyfriends." Later, when my father was driving us to dinner, she emphatically pointed out to him that the two characters in question were "No, really, incredibly gay."
And after the gigglefits wore off, I realised that something strange had happened: I still enjoyed the pairing.
There is, across many fandoms, a broad trend to slash rivals--as one eloquent shipper put it, rivals bring out the worst in one another, but also the best--and, even in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (where these characters first make their appearances, albeit under startlingly different circumstances), there is more than ample setup for just such a potential relationship.
Stoker's Van Helsing and Dracula were perfect enemies: Van Helsing, metaphysician, philosopher, scientist and occultist, had in Dracula the adversary of a lifetime, and the centuries-old Dracula had a human opponent who was very nearly his equal. Director Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing and Dracula, however, are a perfect rivalry for far different reasons.
The first time we see Van Helsing (played in this incarnation by Hugh Jackman), he's tracking down the hideous monstrosity Mr. Hyde--a creature who is easily twice if not three times his size. While he's confident enough not to flinch when Hyde is literally inches from his face, sneering, stealing his hat, and physically threatening him, the fight between them isn't an easy one: Van Helsing is trapped under a bell, thrown through a wall, and tossed off the cathedral before he gets the upper hand. We're shown that he has impressive weapons and is in fact fighting the good fight (Hyde is, it's implied, considered a dangerous criminal throughout Europe)--and yet the hunter himself is on wanted posters and accused of murder by the Paris gendarmerie.
As it turns out, he's working for a highly secretive inter-faith organization called the Knights of the Holy Order, who have a base beneath the Vatican and whose mission is to protect humanity from any kind of supernatural evil. It's in the Order's laboratory, when Van Helsing returns to find a new assignment, that we discover he has no memory of his past. His supervisor, Cardinal Jinette (Alun Armstrong), takes pains to remind him that he was found seven years earlier "crawling up the steps of this church half-dead": he is, more or less, the Order's foundling. The only possible clue he has to his past identity is the ring he wears, an enormous silver signet with a dragon crest on it.
And then he's shown a picture of his next assignment, the vampire he's being sent to kill, and for some reason it gives him pause.
The Order dispatches him to Transylvania, where he is supposed to provide assistance to the long-suffering Valerious family: Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) was one of their own during his human life, and once he became a vampire the entire family took it upon themselves to try and defeat him. Nine generations later, the family is on its last legs, and Dracula still has the upper hand; it's implied that this is their last chance to try and get rid of him.
The first confrontation between vampire and vampire hunter, roughly halfway through the movie, provides the first and most intriguing hints that there was once something between them. Van Helsing manages to draw Dracula out, within arm's length, and drives a silver stake through his chest; for a moment it almost seems he's won--and then Dracula straightens, completely unaffected by the stake, and smiles at him.
"Hello, Gabriel."
It's the first time anyone has spoken Van Helsing's given name during the film; this is clearly enough to throw him. (Interestingly enough, in the video game it's implied that he had no idea "Gabriel" was his given name at all.) The blocking in this scene is particularly interesting: after Dracula pulls the stake out of his chest, he begins to move towards Van Helsing, as if he's expecting Van Helsing's reaction to him to be one of familiarity. Van Helsing immediately backs off, until Dracula begins to list details about him that no one else could possibly know, like the fact that he has terrible nightmares. (One particular line, cut from the final version of the screenplay but present in a second draft and in the novelisation, makes it even more interesting: Dracula asks if he knows "how you received those triangular scars on your back". These are, incidentally, scars we never see in the movie.)
And then, at last, when it's clear there is some connection--to the past he can't remember, and to a life outside the Order--Van Helsing finally takes a few steps forward.
"How do you know me?"
It's a question that's never fully answered. We are told that Van Helsing killed Dracula in 1462, but we aren't told why--though the game provides this interesting piece of dialogue in one particular cutscene.
Dracula: We were friends once, Gabriel. Brothers. In the Order. Until you murdered me.
Van Helsing: If what you say is true... why would I kill my own best friend?
Dracula: Why would any man kill his best friend? Jealousy? Ambition? [pause] Love?
Van Helsing: ...love?
During the final scenes in the film it's also revealed to us that the ring Van Helsing wears belonged to Dracula first. A ring is a particularly intimate gift--even if your brain doesn't tend to kick into fangirl overdrive at the mention of one man giving another a ring, it's still something intensely personal, whether it was a family crest or a personal seal, a token of appreciation or a bitter trophy. How did it change hands, so to speak? Is Van Helsing the type of man to keep any reminder of his past, no matter how terrible, and even if it came from an evil source?
It's an interesting question for a fic writer or reader to ask, but doubly so because it's one Van Helsing has to ask himself.
"We have such history, you and I."
One of the most tantalising things about this pairing is the fact that the characters have some sort of past together that the audience knows nearly nothing about. We're given three solid facts in canon: first, they knew each other, second, Van Helsing was the one who killed Dracula before he sold his soul and became a vampire, and third, Van Helsing somehow ended up with Dracula's ring.
The spaces between those facts are enormous, and brimming over with potential.
There are endless different ways to see or write these two as they once were. Maybe they were lovers; maybe they were only friends. Maybe they were out to kill one another, or had no one to trust but each other; maybe they were amiable enemies. We don't know, and we may never see any solid canon that establishes anything concrete about what they were to one another.
What does drive a man to kill his best friend? Were they even best friends at all? Were they something more, or was there less between them? Was there an attraction that was never acknowledged? Did principles, or ambitions, or some mutually coveted person or thing come between them?
Had they faced each other after Dracula became a vampire and before Van Helsing lost his memory?
How much of what Dracula tells Van Helsing is a lie, and what if he's not lying at all?
There are absolutely no flashbacks in canon. None in the game, or the novelisation, or the movie itself. Dracula isn't sharing what he knows, and if Van Helsing remembers anything solid, we never see it. Because the biggest revelations about their past in canon are so sketchy, they may not in fact be the biggest revelations at all. There's a huge potential to explore who they were, and how that affects who they are by the time we meet them in the movie.
"You have no heartbeat..."
"Perhaps it just needs to be rekindled."
Like Van Helsing's elusive memories, the most interesting aspects of this pairing lurk just beyond the borders of what is stated. What did happen between these two, and how could it have ended the way it did? What exactly happened in their past... and what exists in their future?
After all, anyone who's seen one or two vampire movies knows that you can't kill Dracula (and after over a hundred and twenty movies' worth of trying, maybe it's better to toss the guy a virgin or two and let him be). It's more than possible that their story is far from over. With Van Helsing still desperately unsettled by what he can't remember, what little he can piece together about who they might have been in relation to each other once upon a time, it might be painfully easy for Dracula to glide back into his life and offer him a way of remembering, little by little, what really happened... because no matter how unreliable Dracula may be, no matter how evil, he has the upper hand in that he knows the truth.
Whether the director's vision calls for a friendship that soured or a relationship gone wrong, there is undeniably some sort of connection between them in canon. Despite the fact that he's an experienced hunter and otherwise able to cope with his lack of memory, Van Helsing is out of his depth around Dracula, is even unsettled by the idea of him--and despite the fact that Dracula is hundreds of years old and immensely powerful, Van Helsing is a constant stumbling block for him, something he can neither kill nor permit to live.
To me, their dynamic is a perfect combination of rivalslash at its finest and the classic idea of second-chance pairings, in an oddly delicate way. As a writer and reader, I'd be the first person to admit that I'm deeply, irrationally attracted to situations that involve an underdog fighting against a force or person far more powerful than they may ever be--but, strangely enough, Van Helsing is suddenly more human, more vulnerable and sympathetic, when someone recognises him. For all his knowledge, he falters when he realises that someone knows the given name he may not even have realised was his own. And Dracula may only have "a shadow, a sense memory of love" (as Roxburgh himself describes it), but it's still something very real, his last connection to humanity made manifest in a former friend--or lover--who's still alive, and probably one of the only familiar things he'd be likely to run into after four hundred years.
The fact that they have this tenuous link, that they both know--however vaguely--used to be somehow stronger and that even four hundred years after the fact it's still important, makes them both vulnerable. It adds a dimension to them that none of their interactions with the rest of the cast do. Dracula gets to be more than the looming, soulless evil or the obsessively lovesick immortal he's often portrayed as, and Van Helsing is someone who can conquer ridiculously insurmountable odds but has no idea if he even has a family.
It's not a happy pairing, by any means. No matter how you look at it, Dracula is still a soulless, manipulative blood-sucker, and Van Helsing is still bound to keep humanity safe from any supernatural force that might threaten it. They might use one another for anything-but-noble purposes; they might hurt one another badly. They would most likely fight, and often. There is no plausible happy ending. But ultimately the happy ending isn't the point with these two: it's the connection between them, which is both very simple and not simple at all. Knowing that someone in the world remembers you, or knows things about you that you may have forgotten, is pretty powerful knowledge, but it comes with many pricey questions.
And the answers would have to be equally pricey: they could throw either man off what he thinks is his purpose, raise doubts about what things are better unremembered and undiscovered.
But, best and worst of all, everything that happened between them to either uncover or further bury the past would be very real, and far more solid than any memory.
Unfortunately, since the fandom is still small, I can't offer many recommendations--your best place to start is by combing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
vanhelsingslash and the Van Helsing/Dracula sub-archive at Eternal Twilight. If I run across anything highly noteworthy, though, I'll post it here post-haste.
Author: Rackham Rose
Spoilers: for the movie, video game, second-to-last draft of the screenplay, and a very few for Dracula itself. The animated short The London Assignment has been more or less disregarded, because its inconsistencies with the rest of canon stick out like a sore thumb.
Email: rackhamrose at pressed-feathers dot net
Note: Thanks are due to
shoiryu, finnigans_wake, and asprosdrakos, who all slapped me around until this was in workable shape.Also, ironically enough, today is the day Van Helsing would have been released on DVD, had Universal not pushed back the release date.
*`-,--
When I took my mother to see Van Helsing for Mother's Day--after all, nothing says "I love you" like Hugh Jackman almost getting naked on screen--there was a particular scene between Van Helsing and his undead foe during which she leaned over and whispered in my ear, "They're ex-boyfriends." Later, when my father was driving us to dinner, she emphatically pointed out to him that the two characters in question were "No, really, incredibly gay."
And after the gigglefits wore off, I realised that something strange had happened: I still enjoyed the pairing.
There is, across many fandoms, a broad trend to slash rivals--as one eloquent shipper put it, rivals bring out the worst in one another, but also the best--and, even in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (where these characters first make their appearances, albeit under startlingly different circumstances), there is more than ample setup for just such a potential relationship.
Stoker's Van Helsing and Dracula were perfect enemies: Van Helsing, metaphysician, philosopher, scientist and occultist, had in Dracula the adversary of a lifetime, and the centuries-old Dracula had a human opponent who was very nearly his equal. Director Stephen Sommers' Van Helsing and Dracula, however, are a perfect rivalry for far different reasons.
The first time we see Van Helsing (played in this incarnation by Hugh Jackman), he's tracking down the hideous monstrosity Mr. Hyde--a creature who is easily twice if not three times his size. While he's confident enough not to flinch when Hyde is literally inches from his face, sneering, stealing his hat, and physically threatening him, the fight between them isn't an easy one: Van Helsing is trapped under a bell, thrown through a wall, and tossed off the cathedral before he gets the upper hand. We're shown that he has impressive weapons and is in fact fighting the good fight (Hyde is, it's implied, considered a dangerous criminal throughout Europe)--and yet the hunter himself is on wanted posters and accused of murder by the Paris gendarmerie.
As it turns out, he's working for a highly secretive inter-faith organization called the Knights of the Holy Order, who have a base beneath the Vatican and whose mission is to protect humanity from any kind of supernatural evil. It's in the Order's laboratory, when Van Helsing returns to find a new assignment, that we discover he has no memory of his past. His supervisor, Cardinal Jinette (Alun Armstrong), takes pains to remind him that he was found seven years earlier "crawling up the steps of this church half-dead": he is, more or less, the Order's foundling. The only possible clue he has to his past identity is the ring he wears, an enormous silver signet with a dragon crest on it.
And then he's shown a picture of his next assignment, the vampire he's being sent to kill, and for some reason it gives him pause.
The Order dispatches him to Transylvania, where he is supposed to provide assistance to the long-suffering Valerious family: Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) was one of their own during his human life, and once he became a vampire the entire family took it upon themselves to try and defeat him. Nine generations later, the family is on its last legs, and Dracula still has the upper hand; it's implied that this is their last chance to try and get rid of him.
The first confrontation between vampire and vampire hunter, roughly halfway through the movie, provides the first and most intriguing hints that there was once something between them. Van Helsing manages to draw Dracula out, within arm's length, and drives a silver stake through his chest; for a moment it almost seems he's won--and then Dracula straightens, completely unaffected by the stake, and smiles at him.
"Hello, Gabriel."
It's the first time anyone has spoken Van Helsing's given name during the film; this is clearly enough to throw him. (Interestingly enough, in the video game it's implied that he had no idea "Gabriel" was his given name at all.) The blocking in this scene is particularly interesting: after Dracula pulls the stake out of his chest, he begins to move towards Van Helsing, as if he's expecting Van Helsing's reaction to him to be one of familiarity. Van Helsing immediately backs off, until Dracula begins to list details about him that no one else could possibly know, like the fact that he has terrible nightmares. (One particular line, cut from the final version of the screenplay but present in a second draft and in the novelisation, makes it even more interesting: Dracula asks if he knows "how you received those triangular scars on your back". These are, incidentally, scars we never see in the movie.)
And then, at last, when it's clear there is some connection--to the past he can't remember, and to a life outside the Order--Van Helsing finally takes a few steps forward.
"How do you know me?"
It's a question that's never fully answered. We are told that Van Helsing killed Dracula in 1462, but we aren't told why--though the game provides this interesting piece of dialogue in one particular cutscene.
Dracula: We were friends once, Gabriel. Brothers. In the Order. Until you murdered me.
Van Helsing: If what you say is true... why would I kill my own best friend?
Dracula: Why would any man kill his best friend? Jealousy? Ambition? [pause] Love?
Van Helsing: ...love?
During the final scenes in the film it's also revealed to us that the ring Van Helsing wears belonged to Dracula first. A ring is a particularly intimate gift--even if your brain doesn't tend to kick into fangirl overdrive at the mention of one man giving another a ring, it's still something intensely personal, whether it was a family crest or a personal seal, a token of appreciation or a bitter trophy. How did it change hands, so to speak? Is Van Helsing the type of man to keep any reminder of his past, no matter how terrible, and even if it came from an evil source?
It's an interesting question for a fic writer or reader to ask, but doubly so because it's one Van Helsing has to ask himself.
"We have such history, you and I."
One of the most tantalising things about this pairing is the fact that the characters have some sort of past together that the audience knows nearly nothing about. We're given three solid facts in canon: first, they knew each other, second, Van Helsing was the one who killed Dracula before he sold his soul and became a vampire, and third, Van Helsing somehow ended up with Dracula's ring.
The spaces between those facts are enormous, and brimming over with potential.
There are endless different ways to see or write these two as they once were. Maybe they were lovers; maybe they were only friends. Maybe they were out to kill one another, or had no one to trust but each other; maybe they were amiable enemies. We don't know, and we may never see any solid canon that establishes anything concrete about what they were to one another.
What does drive a man to kill his best friend? Were they even best friends at all? Were they something more, or was there less between them? Was there an attraction that was never acknowledged? Did principles, or ambitions, or some mutually coveted person or thing come between them?
Had they faced each other after Dracula became a vampire and before Van Helsing lost his memory?
How much of what Dracula tells Van Helsing is a lie, and what if he's not lying at all?
There are absolutely no flashbacks in canon. None in the game, or the novelisation, or the movie itself. Dracula isn't sharing what he knows, and if Van Helsing remembers anything solid, we never see it. Because the biggest revelations about their past in canon are so sketchy, they may not in fact be the biggest revelations at all. There's a huge potential to explore who they were, and how that affects who they are by the time we meet them in the movie.
"You have no heartbeat..."
"Perhaps it just needs to be rekindled."
Like Van Helsing's elusive memories, the most interesting aspects of this pairing lurk just beyond the borders of what is stated. What did happen between these two, and how could it have ended the way it did? What exactly happened in their past... and what exists in their future?
After all, anyone who's seen one or two vampire movies knows that you can't kill Dracula (and after over a hundred and twenty movies' worth of trying, maybe it's better to toss the guy a virgin or two and let him be). It's more than possible that their story is far from over. With Van Helsing still desperately unsettled by what he can't remember, what little he can piece together about who they might have been in relation to each other once upon a time, it might be painfully easy for Dracula to glide back into his life and offer him a way of remembering, little by little, what really happened... because no matter how unreliable Dracula may be, no matter how evil, he has the upper hand in that he knows the truth.
Whether the director's vision calls for a friendship that soured or a relationship gone wrong, there is undeniably some sort of connection between them in canon. Despite the fact that he's an experienced hunter and otherwise able to cope with his lack of memory, Van Helsing is out of his depth around Dracula, is even unsettled by the idea of him--and despite the fact that Dracula is hundreds of years old and immensely powerful, Van Helsing is a constant stumbling block for him, something he can neither kill nor permit to live.
To me, their dynamic is a perfect combination of rivalslash at its finest and the classic idea of second-chance pairings, in an oddly delicate way. As a writer and reader, I'd be the first person to admit that I'm deeply, irrationally attracted to situations that involve an underdog fighting against a force or person far more powerful than they may ever be--but, strangely enough, Van Helsing is suddenly more human, more vulnerable and sympathetic, when someone recognises him. For all his knowledge, he falters when he realises that someone knows the given name he may not even have realised was his own. And Dracula may only have "a shadow, a sense memory of love" (as Roxburgh himself describes it), but it's still something very real, his last connection to humanity made manifest in a former friend--or lover--who's still alive, and probably one of the only familiar things he'd be likely to run into after four hundred years.
The fact that they have this tenuous link, that they both know--however vaguely--used to be somehow stronger and that even four hundred years after the fact it's still important, makes them both vulnerable. It adds a dimension to them that none of their interactions with the rest of the cast do. Dracula gets to be more than the looming, soulless evil or the obsessively lovesick immortal he's often portrayed as, and Van Helsing is someone who can conquer ridiculously insurmountable odds but has no idea if he even has a family.
It's not a happy pairing, by any means. No matter how you look at it, Dracula is still a soulless, manipulative blood-sucker, and Van Helsing is still bound to keep humanity safe from any supernatural force that might threaten it. They might use one another for anything-but-noble purposes; they might hurt one another badly. They would most likely fight, and often. There is no plausible happy ending. But ultimately the happy ending isn't the point with these two: it's the connection between them, which is both very simple and not simple at all. Knowing that someone in the world remembers you, or knows things about you that you may have forgotten, is pretty powerful knowledge, but it comes with many pricey questions.
And the answers would have to be equally pricey: they could throw either man off what he thinks is his purpose, raise doubts about what things are better unremembered and undiscovered.
But, best and worst of all, everything that happened between them to either uncover or further bury the past would be very real, and far more solid than any memory.
Unfortunately, since the fandom is still small, I can't offer many recommendations--your best place to start is by combing
vanhelsingslash and the Van Helsing/Dracula sub-archive at Eternal Twilight. If I run across anything highly noteworthy, though, I'll post it here post-haste.