Scene

The scene in Bramstoker’s Dracula, when the Prince appears as vapor and sneaks into Mina’s room. The way Mina’s body rises and her hips roll and she comes to life as she feels him weightlessly glide over her body, she cries out in agony from him merely being vapor, and he completely consumes any space between them, he comes in the cold night air, warming her as nothing but vapor and suddenly the Prince materializes and she opens her eyes and he cradles her so softly and tenderly kisses her. And she proclaims in desperation, “I never thought I would feel your touch again” and puts her hands lovingly in his hair and gently but forcibly guides his face down her writhing body, him obeying without hesitating kissing her everywhere, his kisses delightfully tracing her curved all the way down, their bodies wrapped in the other. That scene is so mesmerizing and so dark and sexy and romantic. 

The entire scene; the dialogue, the want, the electricity suspended in the air, as they finally get to gaze in the other’s eyes and touch tenderly. They can’t keep their hands off each other, they can’t not touch, they can’t not breathe the other. The intimacy of him telling her the truth and confessing all his sins like she’s his religion, and she absolves him of every horrible deed he ever had to do to get back to her. Even though he kills her best friend Lucy, after seducing her and turning her into a vampire, long before he turns Mina even. And she beats upon him with her frailty in anger and she loves him anyway begging him to change her and make her like him, so that they can be together as immortal lovers. It’s so awful and tragic, so achingly beautiful and haunting. Then he just takes her, and destroys her violently biting into her flesh, and drinking from her consuming her soul. 

Wow. Then the story gets really dark and grim. He leaves almost immediately after taking what he wants and she’s left bitten and fevered, and wanton but incomplete and not transformed yet, deathly sick and unable to eat or sleep. She becomes possessed by her desire for her Prince, almost masturbating in front of VanHelsing before trying to suckle the life flowing from his veins. VanHelsing has to save her from her own grief and transformation, and protect her from Dracula’s 3 wives. She is absolutely bereft from Dracula’s mark left upon her, so much so that in the end - even the mortal man she married recognizes that his lovely sweet, innocent dying Mina can only be saved by the love for the man that he claims imprisoned him and sought to steal his fiancé from him. 

That idea that a woman or a man has that depth of passion to cripple a man to the point that he would make a deal with the devil himself, and cross oceans of time for only a small window of time together, and to get one more kiss from his precious MIna.

Then everyone gangs up on the Prince and tries to murder and destroy the love that defies life and the natural law of man itself. She grabs a rifle and defends the monster laying in the snow, bleeding out and professing his love. She stays with him and spends the last moments loving him and granting him one last kindness as he’s dying in her arms, she pushes the blade deep in his heart and releases him from his curse, and proceeds to cut off his head. 

Afterwards she becomes human again and pretends like nothing ever happened and leaves with her husband. Who, by the way, was with every one of Dracula’s three wives in a carnal primal sense while they fed on him and sucked him nearly dry. He suddenly awakens to a fragile moment of weakness remembering that he is in love with Mina and must save her from the lord of the undead, who managed to easily sway him into staying in his castle and later calling him a mknster that had poisoned his mind and tricked him into staying with Dracula’s 3 wives. Only to call Dracula his captor and play the victim. 

And this is why we are all fucked up. This is a story of love, of how love defies sanity. And yet all the minutiae of the details escape us all because in the bigger spectrum of this gift of fiction, we strip it bare, ignore all the red flags riddled with lies, deceit, debauchery and darkness, and take from it that the idea that love has the greatest power over all of us. 

We all yearn for someone to see us, even as the monsters we sometimes are - knowing all of our sins - and loving us infinitely anyway.