Last weekend I watched the Twilight movie. I was aware that vampires were in again among kids, and I decided to check it out. I was a teenage Vampire movie buff myself in the day.
Some friends had the idea of checking it out actually, they invited me. I looked up Vampires again after all this while, I even watched an episode of True Blood online.
It was pretty raunchy. I did not register, however, anything particularly new. True Blood was just like my good old Anne Rice, with the New Orleans setting and everything. The main difference seemed to be that True Blood was made-for-TV from conception. The show is a state-of-the-art soap opera, oozing influence of that universe of suave southern vampires created by the aging Lousiana author. They of course heteronormatized for television what was essentially slash fiction in writing. They also got everyone a lot more naked like HBO must do, but it’s still a story told within the general rules of Interview with the Vampire.
There was something new there, but I missed it at the time.
With all the skin on display, I overlooked the fact that in the universe of True Blood, vampires aren’t tormented with their thirst for blood. They just don’t drink blood at all. Eating humans is simply out of the question. The vampires are supposed to feed on artificial blood. They kill people of course, but that’s in that universe a simple crime of murder – the vampire are not inherently bound to kill and most of them don’t.
Watching Twilight, one can’t help but see up front: vampires are now champions of morality.
They call themselves vegetarian(sic), have jobs, go to school, lease cars, pay taxes. They come together not as a coven, but as an American family. Their leader acts as a father, or rather a “dad” with a trophy wife and “children” – teenagers that he turned into vampires in their death beds as a last resource.
They are rich, and they have supernatural powers. Their home resembles a luxury decoration catalog, or one of those archictectural porn mags with photos of high end houses.
Rogue vampires that aren’t much more than petty criminals feed on people and provide action for the heroes. The protagonist bloodsucker is a God-fearing bravo ragazzo incapable of any evil. The Cullens is the name of the family, and they are an eerie role model for the well adjusted family. They’re rich, white and have strong morals.
Of course, they’re also blood-sucking demons, but that is elegantly not discussed. The hit novel on which the movie is based was written by a good Mormon who is not interested in such things. Making the Cullens vegetarian (sic) is her clever plot solution to the feeding problem. These vampires are supposed to be a metaphor for, oddly enough, Christians.
Like most vampires before them, those of Twilight also stay out of the sunlight. They don’t die if that happens: they shine like CGI glitter.
The whole thing shocked me silly.
Vampires have cool powers and are loaded. Naturally, people are tempted to desire their powers. The vamps don’t share their dark gift out of a very adamant principle: they cannot trust that other will have the moral fiber that they have, and hence would not grant to anyone the power they possess. It’s for our own good that they do not turn us all into being like them. We’re assholes and would probably go out sucking blood of the innocent.
It’s a creepy metaphore for the rich in our western society. Their drama is essentially that of holding on to power that they believe the general public cannot exercise without initiating violent chaos.
I mean if there are vampires and they go out in the sun, have sex and live on artificial blood and/or veggies(sic), then why isn’t all of mankind made a vampire yet? Srsly u guys?
The main story line, incidentally, is not concerned so much with class struggle. It’s the story of a teenager couple resisting the urge to carry out an unspeakably sinful act of physical contact, one that would immaculate the pure young lady protagonist for ever if carried out. They really, really want to do it, but it’s wrong so they stay cool and don’t do it. Yawn.
It’s raunchy, too, don’t get me wrong. The abstinent protagonists may not have sex or exchange (much) blood, but they fool around. Those abstinent kids!
How the F did vampires get into this NeoCon mess?
Before Dracula, there were in popular culture no vampires as we know today. Select groups were aware of literary villains that were much like Dracula, but any bloodsucker in pop was as much a vampire as the chupa-cabras is. Vamps were monsters, animated corpses and ghouls.
Dracula was the first story (that I know of) to make the monster human, part of an archetypal pack of core characters. Since then, we have been hearing stories about the same archetypes. Twilight is still a version of that 19th century tale re-geared towards children, and it’s not a first. From Count Chocula to Quackula, it’s been done a thousand times before. The looks of Dr. Cullen in the movie aren’t to distant from that sort of cheeky rendition of the classic boogie man drawn for young audiences.
The hero protagonist of the original by Bram Stoker is not the vampire, but the mortal man who confronts Dracula. The vampire is an overwhelming, captivating villain. Jonathan Harker is a hard working honest man and a loving romantic man of his time. The romanian count is his foe to defeat.
This structure has survived for decades and is a strong theme to this day. The woman who is the object of the hero’s love becomes a target for Dracula. He has supernatural seduction powers too, btw. The foreign count is the dude who’ll score your chick, fuck her up and kick your ass.
Dracula became a widespread meme with the movie released in 1931. Bela Logosi was with that the vampire imprinted in popular imagination. To this day one can pull one’s collar up and cover one’s face with an arm to mimic a vampire and get one’s point accross. It’s an icon so strong that can now be applied to anything targeted at any audience and communicate: vampire. You can find it everywhere, yoghurt is sold with versions this image on the label.
To the audiences of the time, however, Dracula did not appear cartoonish. From the release of the book in 1897, the vampire was hip.
In comparison with that original modern vampire universe, today in 2009 a movie like Twilight shows clearly that the shift has changed to a different protagonist. In Dracula, the man is the hero who bitterly battles the charismatic villain for the status of protagonist. Today, the spotlight is on Mina Harker.
The female object of desire and dispute seems to be the main protagonist of both True Blood and Twilight. Her drama is that of desiring a power that is best for her not to possess. She must cope with that and stick to her morals.
It’s a character that suits the objectives of today’s Christian propaganda. What a change from the vamps of my day!
The previous generation, established with Anne Rice and her chronicles, is centered on another of Bram Stoker’s stock characters: the minion. Vampire minions are newborn vampires barely concerned with human affairs. Their drama is that of being who they are and not being able to be anything else.
Stoker never gave much thought to those undead, but Rice had a whole lot of fun ith them. Glam, gay culture, the renaissance (rather than the medieval vibes of the old count), fabulousness, pride and identity are main themes of her stories. These undead are young, beautiful, restless and rebellious. In Bram Stoker they were mostly female, minions of the devil like the British maiden Lucy Westenra and the murderous trio of Transylvanian vampire mistresses of the castle. They were always the Rock and Roll vampires.
Anne Rice and others have focused on such minions exploiting a variety of contemporary themes. Rice first hit the public in the 70’s. Long before her first novel was made into a movie, Rice-like vampires had creeped into popular culture. Like the literary Dracula roaming the streets of London before being portrayed as a blood sucking proto-Borat in movies of the early 20th century, these vampires were hip.
Anne Rice didn’t come up with that out of nothing. It’s worth noting that Nosferatu, a variation of Dracula, presented the villain an otherwordly fugly creature that could never pass as human. With that visual commentary it placed some more interest in the monster than the original version, putting more stress on the question: what is it like for the vampire? Being supernaturally beautiful, the Anne Rice generation of bloodsuckers revived (no pun intended) that theme of awkward isolation from the living.
Throughout the 1980s, popular movies started showing more of these underground minion vampire punks, albeit in movies that were very much concerned with the mortal male hero.
Eventually in the 1990’s, movies with celebrities like Tom Cruise and Wesley Snipes brought the concept of superstar vampire to mass audiences.
They were no longer monsters, there were superheroes. There was a moral dilemma now: the protagonist (they stole the show and were now protagonists) had all this power and had to try and make good use of it rather than evil. It was also suggested that good use would essentially be having a good time and not doing anything evil on purpose. It wasn’t like they had to go around saving people like Superman. Just feeding on the wicked, as Rice put it, was enough. Quietly, Anne Rice brought a redeeming legal concept into the tale: her vampires could be heroes to admire as they were not murderers, but at worse guilty of a sort of manslaughter of the wicked.
At this point no one wanted to kill the vampire anymore, a vampire was something to become. Mortals could only lament that they didn’t have any more chance of becoming one than we have a chance of becoming celebrities or millionaires.
The current generation took it from there. Moving away from the wild minions imagined in the 1970s, they seek to inspire good by remixing the story of Mina Harker.
The vampires of Twilight flaunt their class and privilege like those of Rice did. But they mingle with the humans around them as part of their community. They not only socialize with mortals, they also endorse a set certain of morals. And they constantly remind the living that the privileged undead can protect as easily as they can kill.
I think they’re the scariest vampires ever.
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