The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

As you know, if you’ve read a review of or seen the trailer for Renfield, the movie’s amusing and basically satisfying twist on the Dracula lore is to put the focus on the co-dependent relationship between the vampire and his servant, Renfield.

And though we’ve had our share of co-dependent relationships down the years, the one – and really only – scene in the film that struck us as both nailing something true and nailing it truthfully, if you know what we mean, was one that had nothing to do with co-dependency. Or at least not purely or directly.

If you haven’t read the introductory blog you might wonder about our use, now and again, of the 1st person plural pronoun. Though there is only one Michael at the keyboard, there are, as you can gather from the content of some of the posts, multiple active occupants in our psyche, so the plural pronoun is often preferred. There are many occasions, though, on which, for any number of reasons, the singular seems more apt, so it appears regularly as well.

Oh before we continue: spoiler alert! Though very minor: just a tad more than what you saw in the trailer.

And oh, again: trigger warning! Some references to child sexual abuse. Nothing graphic, but still…

The truthful scene

The one scene that really grabbed us and made us say, “oh, yeah,” was the one used by the trailer-makers to wrap up the trailer: when Dracula shows up at the co-dependent support group meeting that has helped Renfield start changing the direction of his life. That’s where things got real for us, and for a moment we even thought that it was where the filmmakers had finally hit their stride or found their conviction, but we don’t think that was really it. We think it was just us hearing our name called.

This is the moment when Renfield realizes that he’s Dracula – at least for all intents and purposes. As long as he stuck to being Dracula’s servant, that’s all he was; once he goes rogue, then it’s his responsibility when everyone gets bit. Or, at least, he can’t help but believe that. And guess what? So do the police.

Presumably, this scene doesn’t read quite this way to everyone, but most anyone who experienced some form of abuse as a child, especially extended abuse in the home, spends their life waiting for some version of this moment when the proof comes that they are, in fact, the monster. As a child, you can’t help but believe that you are complicit in the abuse, even if you aren’t being told that you are, and at least until you’ve gained a great deal of recovery you believe, at least at some level, that you and the abuser are the same.

Of course, there’s more to the scene than that. We’d have to see the film again to try to gauge how much of the density of it the filmmakers are actually capturing on their own and how much of it is just carried along as “inheritance.”

The scene is a cliché of multiple genres: the villain hurting everyone you care for. It’s also a cliché of many abusive situations: do what I want and/or keep quiet about what I do or I’ll hurt someone/everyone you care about. That’s mostly what kept me quiet during the years that my father abused me, the threat that he’d harm my mother or sister.

A nice touch in Renfield arises from the fact that this particular trope is often a feature of hero narratives, and especially superhero narratives; that’s why the latter have secret identities: to protect their loved ones. Officially, Dracula attacks Renfield’s support group only because it helped Renfield temporarily stop being Dracula’s victim; but what triggered that attempt was Renfield playing the role of (super)hero in an earlier scene, and being acknowledged as such. So we get some additional mileage here, which maybe also factors into actual abuse narratives: we just finished reading Catherine Gildiner’s Good Morning, Monster, and in a couple of the true stories there, rebellion by an abused child led to harm to a loved one, which stopped the heroics cold. Likewise, sort of, the fact that my father did end up abusing my sister didn’t suddenly free me to rat on him.

At any rate, what screws this scene up is the classic plot contrivance that wraps it up: the cops show up just a moment too late and mistake Renfield for the killer, rather like Farmer Hoggett finding Babe over the corpse of Maa.

You’d almost think that that untimely arrival seals the deal on what we’ve been talking about: yes, everyone else believes that you’re the monster, too. But the reverse is the case: even though Renfield isn’t the first character in this position to not protest their innocence irrespective of the literal facts, we know that the authorities are mistaken, and that the hero will be exonerated in good time.

Which is not how the truth plays out: those of who believe ourselves to be monsters don’t have a scriptwriter to save us.