Using Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as a bridge text, ―Consuming Appetites and the Modern Vampire‖ compares the British tradition, which advocates disciplined appetites as defense against Dracula's demonic invasion, with modern American texts, which celebrate the vampire as a reflection of its own culture of excess consumption. We instead want to shift the discussion to food and eating rituals. Most critics have read vampire as embodying Victorian fears surrounding fin-de-siècle desire and sexual decadence. This article looks at food and the role of appetitive consumption in modern representations of the vampire. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Coppola attempts to connect as many people in the audience as possible beyond their various divides-sexual, social, economic, cultural, artistic, religious, or whatever.

For sure, great filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola go along with the spirit of their time, trying to satisfy their own artistic needs in addition to the commercial needs of their audiences. We might even say that this market economy can be seen as part of this historical adventure in what some identify as a dialectical though not antagonistic relation. Does postmodernity emerge from the market economy in the field of ideas, ideologies, and cultural constructions, or does it come from the slow and steady evolution of the human species in its historical adventure? We cannot know for sure. Maybe this spirit has been created by the commercial intentions of the medium (where the medium is the message), or the spirit of the day has emerged from history itself and has invested the medium with its essence (where the message is the medium). It is a commercial necessity, of course, one which corresponds to the spirit of our day. Coppola, though, seems to use the cinematographic medium as a way to convey meaning through images, always keeping the various sides balanced so that the film remains understandable, in one way or another, by all members of the audience.

Eiko by Eiko by Eiko Ishioka