[Marxism] Another depression = More vampires

[Jim Ferguson <jim.ferguson1917@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/19/blood-types

Column: Helen Scott [1]

Blood types
>From the abstinence coached by Twilight to the irreverence of True
Blood, vampire stories are more popular than ever--and more varied in
their message.

March 19, 2009

VAMPIRES ARE everywhere: House of Night, Twilight, Southern Vampire
Mysteries, Night Huntress, Savannah Vampire Chronicles, Guardians of
the Night, Blood Ties, Being Human, Demons, Let the Right One In...

Ever since Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, vampire stories have
exerted a consistent fascination, but the seemingly limitless list of
contemporary versions is remarkable. The legend of the bloodsucking
"undead" provides a potent and flexible metaphor within the rapidly
changing political currents of our time.

Stoker's Dracula is rich in contradictions. It is a "St. George versus
the Dragon" Christian allegory ("dracula" derives from words meaning
"dragon" and "devil"). It is steeped in British imperialism's
orientalist fascination with the mythical East, which represents both
the evil antithesis of the West, but also the irresistible lure of
forbidden desire.

The figure of the centuries-old count, inhabiting a gothic castle in
Transylvania, feeding on the local peasantry, expresses bourgeois
distaste for aristocratic decadence and parasitism. But the vampire
offers an equally apt allegory for capitalism: the soulless boss who
bleeds workers dry. (Think of Thievery Corporation's song "Vampires,"
dedicated "to the world banking system.")

Paradoxically the vampire also represents the outcast--the
unfathomable other, who is beyond the pale and a threat to civil
society--but at the same time the mysterious bohemian non-conformist,
perennially appealing to the repressed middle classes.

The primary source of anxiety in Stoker's novel is female sexuality.
Dracula contaminates pure virgins--through exchange of bodily
fluids--to make them monstrous. The three "voluptuous, wanton" female
vampires in Dracula's castle provoke "a wicked, burning desire" in the
upstanding citizen Jonathan Harker. Such women must obviously be
staked through the heart and beheaded.

>From the beginning, then, vampires have been fluid figures, associated
with sex, illicit desire and gothic romance. Dracula is a seductive
count, but he is described variously as rodent, reptile and insect,
and even in his human manifestation, he is repulsive, with white skin,
red eyes and engorged bloated flesh.

Francis Ford Coppola's gorgeous 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula captures
both sides: Dracula is one moment a soulful Gary Oldman, the next a
grotesque cadaver or a river or rats.

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TODAY'S VAMPIRE has been tamed and is more romantic heartthrob than
scary monster. In a culture where youth is revered and death feared,
such an embodiment of immortality is enthralling. But beyond this
common factor, the 21st century vampire assumes diverse ideological
guises.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series books are overtly conservative. The
teenage heroine Bella Swan is painfully self-critical (she sees
herself as ordinary, uninteresting, clumsy and plain), and worships
the superhuman vampire Edward Cullen, who is richer, older (by almost
a hundred years), more experienced, physically stronger and uncannily
beautiful. She thus feels undeserving and insecure, convinced first
that he despises her, and later that he will abandon her.

The central theme is abstinence: No drugs, no alcohol and no biting
before marriage. The "good" vampires are "vegetarian," feeding only on
animals. The plot turns on the question of whether vampires possess
souls.

Judging by the books' immense fan base among teenage girls (which
certainly can't be accounted for by their literary merit--as Stephen
King puts it, Meyer "can't write worth a darn")--the series taps into
something in that demographic, even though the author came of age in
the 1980s, and Bella's strangely insipid world lacks many markers of
modernity.

They do offer a compelling story of true love that conquers all, and
imaginatively eroticize chaste displays of affection. But their
popularity seems symptomatic of an era where women's rights have
suffered such setbacks that a generation of teenage girls sees sex as
danger, and identifies with a relentlessly self-abasing heroine
willing to sacrifice everything for her boyfriend.

It is telling that Bella's worst nightmare isn't death by vampire or
werewolf, but that she will get old and ugly while Edward stays
eternally youthful and beautiful. The bite of the vampire trumps
retinol or botox.

"Post-feminists" argue that the Twilight series is popular because
young women crave "traditional romance." But this can't account for
the matching popularity of other series like the House of Night novels
by mother and daughter team P.C. and Kristin Cast.

In this parallel universe, the House of Night--part Wicca coven and
part Hogwarts--is a matriarchal finishing school for "vampyres"
(evoking the radical feminist "womyn"). In a departure from the usual
plot, the teen heroine Zoey becomes a vampyre, rather than falling in
love with one.

Zoey loathes her bigoted Christian fundamentalist stepfather, and
welcomes the escape from claustrophobic family life. Her new friends
are gay, straight, Black and white; they use cell phones and are
sexually aware without losing their autonomy. This is a feminist
revision of Dracula: As one high priestess notes, "Stoker vilified
vampyres."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BUT OF all the current vampire tales, the one that best captures the
political sea change of the post-Bush era is the HBO series True Blood
by Alan Ball (doing for the undead what he did for the dead in Six
Feet Under) based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris.
Unlike the self-righteous Twilight and earnest House of Night, True
Blood is also very funny and irreverent.

Since Japanese scientists have invented synthetic blood (Tru Blood
comes in O Neg or A Neg and is best microwaved), vampires are in the
process of "coming out of the coffin" to take their place in civil
society.

The opening credits are exhilarating: a rapid series of disturbing,
inspiring and bizarre juxtaposed images from the deep South--civil
rights marches, Ku Klux Klan gatherings, sexually objectified female
bodies, a decomposing fox carcass--to the accompaniment of Jace
Everett's haunting song "Bad Things."

Anna Paquin plays the (telepathic) waitress Sookie Stackhouse, who,
impatient with the narrow horizons of the backwoods town of Bon Temps,
Louisiana, and frustrated with the petty-minded prejudices of her
workplace, welcomes the first "out" vampire in town.

After a series of brutal murders, suspicion inevitably falls on the
vampires, who face constant discrimination (in one of the many witty
details, a church sign reads, "God hates fangs"). In a reversal of the
standard crime formula, here the police are one-dimensional,
incompetent and bigoted, while the quirky and complex protagonists are
the regular working-class townspeople.

While the series flirts with stereotypes, this is in tension with the
superb script, and in season one, the two main Black characters,
Sookie's friend Tara and the gay short-order cook, Lafayette, have the
best lines. In the first episode, Tara, who is reading Naomi Klein's
Shock Doctrine, quits her job at a store called Super Save-a-Bunch.
She explains, "I can't work for assholes," to which Sookie replies,
"When did you get to be so picky?"

Confronted in a television interview with vampires' proclivity for
violence, a member of the American Vampire League replies, "Doesn't
your race have a rather violent history of exploitation? At least
vampires never owned slaves or exploded nuclear weapons."

Vampires have come full circle: once representing the threat posed to
bourgeois society by the oppressed (the colonized, women), in True
Blood they represent a refuge for the oppressed from the monsters
lurking within capitalist society itself.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Columnist: Helen Scott
 Helen Scott teaches postcolonial studies at the University of
Vermont. She is editor of The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, [2] newly
published by Haymarket Books [3], and is a frequent contributor to the
International Socialist Review [4].

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Review: TV
The DVD of True Blood Series One [5] is scheduled for release May 19;
Series Two is scheduled for June 2009 on HBO.

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[1] http://socialistworker.org/department/Books-and-Entertainment/Helen-Scott
[2] 
http://www.haymarketbooks.org/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=Haymarket&Product_Code=MSERL
[3] http://www.haymarketbooks.org
[4] isreview.org
[5] http://www.hbo.com/trueblood/
[6] http://creativecommons

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