Swedes are trying to convince me that vampires still matter. I have asserted that they are irrelevant to the modern world. (Vampires that is, not Swedes.) That might sound coy at a time when Twilight has taken in $370 million at the box office and bloodsucking hotties are probably more popular than ever, but allow me to explain. Going back to Stoker there are four basic themes that run through vamp literature and popular lore. I shall dismiss the first three as outdated, and concede that the fourth is still of potential interest.
Van Helsing's battle against Dracula pits scientific reason against folkloric wisdom. Being that we have long since split the atom, sequenced the genome and dated the age of the universe, I'd say that conflict has been decided. Lovecraft's more esoteric fears about what science will reveal about the nature of reality may still resonate today, but as to whether a Romanian count can cross a body of running water there can no longer be any doubt.
Victorian Englishmen were a xenophobic lot, wary of the sinister and un-Christian things being brought back from the colonies. Now, decades after the civil rights movement and as we try to negotiate accord with the Muslim world, it is not so cool to un-ironically suggest that supernatural darkies are arriving to steal your money, give you plague and make sluts of your daughters.
Okay, the sex thing. Vampires offer erotic wish-fulfillment for the sexually repressed, translating sinful lust into death and damnation. Are you bored yet? Once we stop instilling our children with puritanical terror of their mammalian organs vampire love will be obsolete, sales of certain teen romance serials will plummet, and we'll be better off.
Finally, I will be generous and allow that the miserable condition of being a vampire might yet be of allegorical interest. It is a wretched outsider's existence, governed by strict but wholly arbitrary rules — terms of bondage that are painful yet comforting in a BDSM way. I propose a screenplay titled Vampire about an isolated and despairing professional Dom/sub with OCD and a host of phobias.
Let the Right One In is beautifully photographed but overly praised by international critics. The story of androgynous preteen pseudosexual friendship at first seems poised to churn up a squirming host of issues — child abuse, pedophilia, drug addiction, homosexuality and divorce, the co-dependence of prostitution — with which to decorate the condition of vampirism. But then it doesn't. Just by writing down these intriguing possibilities I have "explored" them as thoroughly as does the movie. I gather that the source novel contains the substance I was missing. Let's hope Hammer's English-language remake (2010 release) digs deeper.
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I respectfully disagree with you about vampires. I think they'll be around forever basically because they are symbols of subversion. Their presence at once challenges and undermines the so-called authority. In Stoker's original, it's about sexual permissiveness (perhaps women's liberation as well), the new vs the old rich, and empire. I would argue that the empire aspect is more a result of new ideas coming back from the colonies, ideas which are alien to merry olde England.
ReplyDeleteIt's not hard to see why they appeal to teens and adolescents. What could be more appealing to a teenager than a being with unique and misunderstood powers who subverts authority by his very nature?
Argh, you're right. The three points I dismiss are all variations on the notion that vampires are subversive, which is always relevant. What puzzles me is that I rather favor subversion, yet feel no affinity for vampires. Except Nosferatu.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I admit it. I only hate vampires because they tend to be pretty boys.
Remember one thing she said in the movie:
ReplyDeleteThat Vampires aren't allowed into people's homes unless they are invited?
I think that's the key: how vampires as a group represent the epitome of misfits of the society. They live in different time zones no matter where they go. They smell bad. They throw up if they eat real food. They don't feel the cold you feel. It's a bunch of "They"s. In this movie, the director made a point of how vampires can only be invited into homes, and won't enter otherwise. Sure. You may say that it is just a matter of "following stupid tradition", but this comes from somewhere. They are the observers of everyone around them who are not "them". They don't have rights to enter anyone's life/home. And the worse thing is: they know this so well they have rules against entering someone's home unless you are invited. They are always the ones who observe life going around them day by day, night by night; the never-ending life that they can't be part of and will never be part of.
I guess that's why I feel so strongly about this movie, it depicts the sadness and malaise being the outsider with the ever-so-still snowy nights of the Northernland.
Argh, you're right too. This is the first time I've heard an interesting and provocative interpretation of the "permission to enter" aspect of vampire folklore. Vampires are subversive precisely because they symbolize the Other. That makes them extremely powerful mythological figures, and they have regained my respect thanks to the enlightened contributors to BC.
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