2 - “Making” Americans from Foreigners

Summary

Universal Studio's 1931 release of multiple-language versions of Dracula consolidated and popularized Hollywood vampires as aristocratic, cosmo¬politan, and humanized. Hungarian-born actor Béla Lugosi's accented per¬formance of Count Dracula in the English-language Dracula embodied Hollywood's idea of the vampire for decades. Even Spanish-born actor Carlos Villarías was allegedly directed to model his portrayal of Conde Drácula in the concurrently shot Spanish-language Drácula after Lugosi's performance. The iconic image of Lugosi's black cape and tuxedo, pale face, dark hair, and pierc¬ing gaze spread globally despite Universal's efforts to control unauthorized use of the costume, makeup, and even the name “Dracula” through international copyright. Hollywood rejected the model of Prana-Films’ earlier adaptation of Stoker's novel in Nosferatu. Max Schreck was rendered almost unrecognizable as a human actor under prosthetics and makeup that rendered the vampire's features like those of insects, birds, and rats, thus offering little space for pro¬jections of desires.

Universal's vampire drew more readily upon conventions from stage and screen melodramas, modeling the vampire looks and acts upon human villains, typically foreigners. The immigrant-vampire's arrival on Hollywood screens actually comes relatively late; other immigrants had already adorned it for decades. Conventions for vampires thus drew upon ones for representing immi¬grants in other earlier films, including actualities (precursors to newsreels) that belittled immigrants as amusing entertainment and industrial training and state propaganda films that recruited and assimilated select groups of immigrants. This chapter traces cinematic conventions of narrative, performance, set and costume design in pre- and early Hollywood films that offered models for suc¬cessful assimilation into the Melting Pot and so-called new race, popularized in Israel Zangwell's 1908 play. The unnatural whiteness of America was key to this social mobility. State and industrial films in particular were employed to americanize immigrants—to whiten them by teaching them what common sense allegedly told (male) citizens to do. Whiteness assimilated certain groups to create a common national identity from selected national identities. Whiteness shifts shape like the figure of the vampire. Vampires contest the racial system that privileged northeastern Europeans over eastern and southern Europeans during the early twentieth century.