The Inverted Age - New English Review

by Matthew Wardour (February 2020)

The Vampires, István Csók, 1907

Modern society can be defined by its inversions: inverted snobbery, the elevation of low culture, the inversion of sexual morality, the way we champion notoriety instead of virtue, the way the educated elite now prioritise work over leisure, or wealth over improvement. It does not matter whether you think these are good or bad or neither, but they are an inversion of a previous order, a genuine revolution. The new is better than the old, the inverted better than the original.

Chesterton, in the opening paragraph of Heretics, wrote that it was becoming more fashionable to be heretical, even in 1905:

La Traviata. I have seen a “feminist” production of Lucia di Lammermoor which added to the opera a sex scene followed by a violent blood-drenched miscarriage. Memorably, I once sat through a rather embarrassing production (though the rest of the audience seemed not to mind it) of Henry Purcell’s King Arthur which was re-imagined as a twenty-first century opera about Brexit. The patriotic drinking song— “And heigh for the honour of Old England!” —became an unsubtle parody of Leave voters. The “Cold Genius”, the spirit of winter in the original opera, became a homeless man distressed by Brexit.

A Confederacy of Dunces, I kept coming back to the mini-series out of a rather shameful love of being appalled. Like Ignatius, I had been “pulled by the attractions of some technicolored horrors, filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency, reels and reels of perversion and blasphemy that stunned my disbelieving eyes, that shocked my virginal mind, and sealed my valve.”

The recent television adaptation of Dracula, however, was replete with concessions to the twenty-first century. Though I cannot entirely recall the long plot of Bram Stoker’s novel (and I must confess I am in no rush to re-read it), I am quite sure, for instance, that Dracula did not have sex with his lawyer Jonathan Harker and that Professor Van Helsing was not an atheist nun. And I certainly would have remembered Dracula prancing about naked, having emerged from the carcass of a wolf, in front of a group of nuns. Indeed, so many crucial moments were extravagantly gruesome—they never had anywhere near the understatement and restraint necessary to be genuinely frightening.

The series, or at least the first two episodes (we will come on to the bizarre final episode shortly), made no effort to represent the culture and mores of the late nineteenth century. Whereas societies once looked to the past to influence the present and future—Rome looked to Greece, Medievals to Classical civilisation generally—we moderns look to the present and the imagined future to somehow influence the past. We place ourselves in the rather strange and indeed mad position of lecturing the past, which of course cannot hear us, while seemingly ignoring the possibility that the past might have something positive to teach us.

Yet even when watching Dracula’s superficial recreation of late nineteenth century life, one can still see how strong the differences are between 1897 and 2020. How much more beautiful is a neglected old castle than a modern mansion! How much more preferable is the glamour of the ballroom to the grubbiness of the nightclub! These apparently cosmetic changes in fact reveal an entirely different worldview and even morality. This difference is even more obvious in the third episode when Dracula arrives in the twenty-first century (I did say it was ridiculous, didn’t I?). Now everyone walks through the streets as if they really were the undead, heads down in their phones, wallowing in self-importance, stumbling drunkenly through urban squalor. Police wear ridiculous tool-belts and look rather like a mock army, cars roam the streets like demons, skyscrapers and high-rises pierce the heavens. What misery, I thought. But the writers, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, clearly think these are the best of times. Dracula, taunting a victim in a plain detached house in Whitby, comments on how even ordinary people now live like kings. It is a cliche one hears frequently, and it can quickly be disproved by those real time-travellers in our society, the very elderly, who, often lonely and nursing a sense of cultural loss, are not as convinced that they lived through a time of great social progress. Our kind of pleasure-seeking progress is of little consolation to the old, for whom material concerns are fading, and who need the communal, familial and spiritual obligations from which we have supposedly been liberated.

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I was reminded of the Royal Opera House’s recent production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni is not unlike the cinematic depictions of Dracula: a sinisterly charming sexual predator who eventually is defeated. The opera is supposed to end with Don Giovanni being dragged into hell while the strings bow feverishly, the brass and percussion pound against the air, and a chorus of demons taunt the doomed libertine. But instead of that fearsome moment, director Kasper Holten chose to have Don Giovanni standing alone on stage, dragged into a psychological hell of his own making.

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Matthew Wardour is an English musician and occasional writer. He blogs on culture, politics and other things which catch his fancy at smelfungus.blogspot.com

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