Current mood:	working
Current music:	P.I.L.: "This Is Not A Love Song"

"Alone in a Darkened Room..."
I saw Twilight today (and my guess was correct: it was me and a bunch of high school girls in the audience...). What follows, by and large, is not a review; I'm rather interested in thinking about the role of the vampire in pop consciousness. By way of review, I will say two things. First, the movie is fun, and not campy/cheesy in the way so many vampire movies are. Second, I find it interesting that the central relationship in an incredibly popular romance story should be so obsessional, even co-dependent. Perhaps an issue for another time.

What is most striking is the very fact of the movie: not a vampire story with a romance in it, but a romance story with a vampire in it. Further, look at the "monsters" themselves: No Buffy-style wumply foreheads here. No, and in fact, Stephenie Meyer's 'creatures of the night' not only get along just fine during the day, they only avoid sunlight because it makes them sparkle like diamonds. Yes: that classic foe of vampires, the sun, simply makes the vampires of Twilight more beautiful. We've come a long way since Bram Stoker's first description of the Count:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

Stoker's Dracula is strange and nauseating--a tone which carries through all early popular depictions of vampires. Meyer's vampires may be a little more "sparkly" than their contemporaries, but their beauty is by this point nothing out of the ordinary: be it Angel or Spike, Louis or Lestat, Bill or Blade, Dracula or...well...Dracula, today the "sexy vampire" has become the standard. So what happened?

I've had a paper on this very issue kind of kicking around in my head for a couple of years now--and a paper it'll have to eventually be, if I'm to properly substantiate and defend a lot of what I'm going to say here. But, in fairly broad, rough strokes, I think the story can at least be laid out as follows:

1. Fin de Siècle Monsters

The vampire first enters pop media consciousness at the turn of the 20th century, as the monstrous return of the repressed, a fear projected outward in the form of an external threat to the community. Stoker himself calls attention to Dracula's role as the threat from the East ("The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East"), though certainly many critics have redirected our attention inward, identifying Dracula with Stoker's own homosexuality (and, more generally, the persecution of homosexuals in Victorian society). Burton Hatlan seems to summarize Dracula's various roles pretty well:

In the figure of Dracula, Stoker created an image of "otherness". ... Dracula is physically "other": the dark, unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England denied. ... He is also culturally "other": a revenant from the ages of superstition ... But more significantly he is socially "other": the embodiment of all the social forces that lurked just beneath the frontiers of Victorian middle-class consciousness, everything that was socially "other" to the Victorian bourgeoisie. He represents all dark, foreign (i.e. non-English) races; all 'dark', foreign (i.e. non-bourgeois) classes; and (paradoxically) the 'dark', exotic aristocracy, which, though moribund, might suddenly revive. ... It is 'otherness' itself, all that bourgeois society has repudiated, that Dracula represents - the psychically repressed and the socially oppressed.

The first role of the vampire, then, is that of horrifying otherness which terrorizes bourgeois society. This is society in the age of "rationalization," to use Weber's term--but a rationalization, as Habermas and Marcuse have both argued, which also functions in Freud's sense: the rational ordering of life through science and technology covers over, or acts as a veil for, systematic domination. However, we have to realize that this systematic domination is at the same time the very conditions of possibility for bourgeois society: without it, Victorian (and, more generally, bourgeois) society crumbles. The oppressed Other is the threat to society insofar as the Other's suppression is what unifies society as a given whole. This repressed (yet internal) Other will return in various forms over the following decades, leading up to that most obvious of returns in the antisemitism of the Third Reich. But insofar as those creating vampire media (novels, and then movies) are a part of the bourgeois society, this first arc is marked by the bourgeois viewpoint: Vampire as vile monster, threatening society.

2. The Turn

I've written about this before, but the turning point in vampire pop culture comes in 1954 with the publication of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Here the vampires are undergoing a shift: both hideous and alluring, Robert Neville often has a hard time keeping his mind on killing them and away from sleeping with them. But of course, the biggest watershed moment of all is in that last great scene, where Matheson drops his hammer on us: We are the monsters, We are the Other. That this happens in America during the 50s only makes sense. The postwar boom is the apotheosis of the middle classes: the barrier between bourgeois society and its Other is now the protagonist of culture. Furthermore, the emergence during this same period of so-called "genre fiction" as both a branch separate from "mainstream literature" and as a mass-market commodity means that the people who are creating the vampire media are no longer at the center of bourgeois cultural life. Instead, science fiction authors and their like occupy niches, often at the fringes of middle class culture. From this vantage point, the alienating effects of the bourgeois lifestyle can begin to take center stage, and we can begin to see that society for what it is. At the same time, there is a tension here: the push/pull of a lifestyle both alienating and intensely desired. These same themes have always been at the heart of pop culture vampires, but as the vantage point shifts from the center of bourgeois culture to the very fringes of its fringes, the old themes take on new faces...and the lines between hero and villain/monster get a little blurred.

3. Fallout

In the aftermath of Matheson's novel, something remarkable happens: For the first time in history, the vampire becomes both unambiguous sex object and protagonist. 1960's Blood and Roses was the first in a string of movies based on (a sexy interpretation of) le Fanu's Carmilla--"lesbian vampire" movies are now something of a genre of their own!--but which celebrate and/or sexually objectify the homoerotic themes in their source material instead of recoiling from it in any form. Fourteen years later, Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula cast the Count himself in the protagonist role for what can only be described as a sex comedy. From here, it is but a very short step to the likes of Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and--yes--Stephenie Meyer. The vampire remains a "romantic" character, but has now become the protagonist, the one with whom we identify ourselves. The vampire is now our own attraction to the status of Other, of outsider. Having realized that we are the monsters, and that alienation is the very fabric of our lives, we want out. Alas, that way lies only death.

More surely remains to be said--most particularly about this most recent stage. But for now, I'm trying to get the broad strokes down, so that later passes can begin to fill in some detail. As Aristotle says, "it would seem that any one is capable of carrying on and articulating what has once been well outlined, and ... time is a good discoverer or partner in such a work."