Zombies, Torture, Bloodsuckers
True Blood is not on right now, to the disappointment, not to say withdrawal symptoms, of the millions addicted to its veinous entertainment . HBO's vampire series is over for the season, not to return the Louisiana backwater where it's set until next June. Bill Compton, the "good" vampire who is in love with and tries to protect Sookie Stackhouse, the waitress who can extremely sporadically read people's minds, will have to wait six months to imbibe from her veins again. Meanwhile, the Stephanie Meyer vampire book and movie phenomenon, which is saving one publishing company and doing amazing box office with the movie "Twilight," is slaking popular culture's hemoglobin thirst very nicely.
I saw "Twilight" last weekend, in an audience on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a theater filled with teens and tweens, a few of whom looked with suspicion at the mature gentleman in their midst. But mainly they laughed at the movie. They weren't scared or filled with ardor for the boy vampire--they just thought the whole thing was hilarious. Made me proud to be a New Yorker--I really do wonder if the film met with the same bemusement in Indianapolis.
But what is with the vampire craze right now? The vogue for them has ebbed and flowed over the last century, but at the moment the ventricles seem all the way open. A friend of mine suggested that this fad may represent our culture's unconscious efforts to depict in metaphorical terms the financial greed that has sucked blood money from the body politic--especially the subprime mortgage fiasco that started it. "Mortgage" is derived from the Latin word for "death," after all.
I'm sure Film Studies courses everywhere and serious books about sociology and cinema and television have examined this theory in greater detail and with more erudition than I ever could. But all on my own over the last four or five decades I've noticed what seems to me a fascinating co-incidence between popular screen themes and deeper social concerns and crises. Zombies and triffids during the Cold War, with its fear of the Red menace. Westerns a little later in which automobiles and machine guns and cameras began to conflict with the American frontier's rough justice and primal way of life. In the nineties, a great number of movies came out that expressed anxiety about the growing influence of technology--"The Matrix," "Pleasantville, "The Truman Show," almost all the Schwarzenegger futuristic features, to name a few. Then came the "Saw" series--which is still going on--and "Hostel" and other brutal torture movies, which seemed to mirror uncannily the awful news about Abu Ghraib. And now we have vampires preying on the innocent and ignorant, at the same time that corporate bloodsuckers are doing their best to avoid the light of day and scrutiny.
Seems to me that movies are, however unknowingly, projections in more ways than one. If I were to guess what might be the next such cinematic manifestation of social anxiety, it would be--in light of neuroscientific discoveries--movies that call into question what most of us believe to be free will.
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What fulfills a teenage girls Idea of boyfriend, or girlfriend, better than an emotionally wounded boy only she can understand? One who will never grow up but unlike Peter Pan is mature enough to be an equal, not an eternal child. One she can emotionally nurse and succor(in an emotive way and in a literal way) who desires her and yet is willing to wait for that "special" time and, at the same time, is her protecotor and if need be avenger.
This is a lover who never ages, never tires of her and will never be any less "perfect" than he is right now.
Of, course he also will never improve. never grow , never expand his horizons or be able to go to the beach on a sunny day. Or anty day.
It is a stagnant and static 'perfection' not unlike Dorian Gray except Dorian didn't project his narscissism on another fantasy being.
It is a the end result of over a half century of the idea of the vampire being watered down from the moment Bela Legosi first uttered the words "I am Dracula". The vampire is not a lover nor a kindred spirit nor even a sedeucer. The vampire is a Rapist. A Stalker of women and children .
"Seems to me that movies are, however unknowingly, projections in more ways than one. If I were to guess what might be the next such cinematic manifestation of social anxiety, it would be--in light of neuroscientific discoveries--movies that call into question what most of us believe to be free will."
Look at the indie-propaganda films that are circling the internet. The Zeitgeist movies or Freedom to Fascism fit that bill nicely.
That's not what I see though. Apocalypse movies and westerns are becoming more prevalent. Our fear is the the fall of lawful society. My prediction (for what its worth) is anti-messianic message will proliferate.
"Apocalypse movies and westerns are becoming more prevalent?" I dunno: with no statistics or hard evidence whatsoever to back me up, I think it's movies based on video games. All the recent non-game apocalypse movies I can think of are fundie Christian absurdities. Anti-messianic as in anti-fundie? Cynically, will Hollywood bear the wingnut heat that will generate? Realistically, it's about freakin' time! Anti-messianic apocalyptic? Well, we do need a new Mel Gibson. The one we got went kinda rusty.
Interesting idea, Daniel, but it's hard for me to get past the idea of some "Invisible Hand" directing Hollywood et. al. to produce what is socially relevant as well as what sells, though maybe in the long run people are smarter than I give them credit for.
But I still don't buy the vampire thing as economic metaphor. I really think, like other reviewers & critics, that it's something deeper to perhaps the unconscious human psyche or to whatever term du jour or just to some retained primitive tribal memory. For every zombie and triffid threatening teens during the Cold War you had a black & white vampire doing the same thing. For every color Western with automobiles and sixties anachronisms you had a Hammer vampire bloodying up the place. For the greatest part of the now-Governator's movie career you had a world gone tipsy on Anne Rice's hemoglobin fantasies. We've had vampires in the Stone Age and vampires in space.
Twilight and True Blood are just the latest installments in a literary and entertainment genre that will be with us always, probably because it does speak to something deeper than the latest recession.
The bloodsucker / investment banker analogy is pretty obvious really. it even extends to waiters in restaurants around London's financial district being warned never to ask a banker how he'd like his stake.
http://greenteeth.blog.co.uk/2008/12/01/the-cost-of-the-recession-5146788
I am intrigued by the notion that the vampire craze reflects our current neuroses, but I don't think you'll find a consistent correlation with economic woes if you look back on other periods of vampire mania. Or put another way, 1930 should have witnessed a tidal wave of vampiricism if there were a connection to economic bloodsucking. But Menaker has a point that something is going on. I'm hoping that once we get settled into an Obama presidency--once liberal supporters are content that their hopes won't be dashed and conservatives discover that the end of the world is, if anything, more distant--then maybe we can put the vampires to bed again.
The vampire craze is not symbolic of anything economic. It is simply an escape fantasy, and people wish to escape even more in hard times. What could be better than the idea of a sexy vampire suddenly entering your life and turning you into a vampire, a creature that has no need to be caught up in the problems of normal lives?
In addition to the Sookie Stackhouse books (I assume they're meant to be humorous, but I read one and it fell completely flat to me) and Twilight, there's a whole glut of "vampire romances" out there. Personally, I think they've been done to death for now, particularly the "vampire-as-great-lover" trope, which has always creeped me out.
I've heard a lot of theories about why they've been popular, including one during the 80s/90s that there was an analogy to HIV/AIDS. These were not the kind I'm referring to above, obviously, but more the traditional horror-genre vampires. I haven't read any of the "Twilight" series, though it sounds from what I've heard as if the sheer awfulness of them is something that simply must be experienced for oneself, but it sounds as if, at least in the first one, as if vampirism is at least to some extent a stand-in for sex.
So, what's next for Hollywood? Post-apocalyptic wastelands, driven by anxiety over the ongoing collapse of our economy and our environment?
Wall-E.
Hypothesis? Economic discontent, discontent with leadership and institutions. The Vampire is a useful metaphor for companies and Government because parasites, generally, don't make good antagonists.
Ummm, Hello? There was a lot of unintentional laughter here in Indianapolis. Mostly due to bad acting.
Apologies, Indianapolis. I knew I'd get in trouble for that bit of Coastal snobbery, and I completely deserve it. Some years ago, a friend of mine here in New York visited his girlfriend's family in Indianapolis and came back feeling as though they regarded him as "a monster of irony"--his words. I think that tiny anecdote is what led to this moment of self-indicting parochialism.
No worries. I read a similar comment in the New York Times when the movie "Pulp Fiction" came out. The writer wondered if they'd understand it in Indiana. It seems to be my duty to push back against coastal snobbery whenever it rears its tony head. Thanks for writing back!
Hollywood has meetings about which direction to take popular cinema during major cultural transitions. Much of this seems coincidental but it is manipulated in order to somehow sync the public sentiment with what's on the big screen and coming to the shelves on DVD. Vampirism as popular culture to me represents the emptiness that the youth are feeling in terms of community. Vampires sit outside standards of morals and ethics by default with no possibility of ever joining 'normal' society; this presents a role-model that is both free of certain social restraints but still structured in important ways. That all vampires throughout the world are connected through their shared needs implies an immutable sense of family that many are starving for. Oddly though, while the impetus to become a vampire seems to be based in a fiercely independent decision, vampire culture seems to be strongly rule-based. If intentional, this syncing of cultural sentiment is brilliant; if unintentional it is as you say a fascinating coincidence.
Kids love it cuz it bothers their parents and seperates them from the others who aren't cool. Of course our modern obsession over hygien, blood, and recreational (non-productive and non-penetrating) sex is the language being used.
I'm eager to find out how it all turns out for them as they reach maturity...real maturity and not simply the technical age of consent. I have a feeling it will have all the impact as getting one's first beatle haircut, but then some of it will linger and add to the general zeitgeist. In the mean time it helps to defuse some of the other hysterias that are the hallmarks of our modern times.
As the father of an avid fan of the Anne Rice vampire series, and also an aspiring film major, my daughter didn't even give "Twilight" a second thought. If she ever does, it will be in the form of a second-hand DVD, and laugh, she will, in Atlanta, GA. Personally, I can't draw a parallel between film vampires and Wall Street. Maybe that's because I'm more of "A Christmas Story" sort of guy. Little Ralphie reminds us that avarice, left unchecked, can be a gut wrenching ride. However, to acknowledge the avarice of one side of this story, and not the other, doesn't paint the whole picture. 94% of mortgages in this country are in good shape, and paid on time. This entire mess was created by the combined burning desires of the bankers who would profit from the loans, and uninformed home buyers, who took a far larger chunk of the pie than they could ever eat. The resulting 6% of bad home loans, along with a flat/sagging economy, and a media more than willing to crank the panic siren has finally yielded a storyline that I hope we won't live to regret. -Geoff- the little kid from the other side of the hedge, Nyack, NY, aol.comage@aol.com
I still miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
..yep, I found myself glammed at watching the "True Blood" series because it was good television, it's a far cry from the teeny-bopper "Twilight", which I didn't watch because of the Entertainment Tonight/ Hollywood Insider/MTV treatment it received along with the screaming idol fans, that just wasn't for me. HBO can crank out good dramas like Sopranos, my favorite, so I gave the vampire drama a look because of that, and I was "bitten". Now I can't wait to see the series return next summer...
How true!!! The saying, "It's not tv, it's HBO" is proved beyond doubt by shows like The Sopranos, Trueblood, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Real Time and on and on. If I could only get cable sans HBO I would probably give up watching altogether. Hurry the hell back, Bill and Sookie!
What would I do without the internet? I wouldn't be able to watch Bill and Sookie either!
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