The Vampire Thing

Of all the mythic creatures that have been around for centuries, if not eons, vampires seem to reappear in our consciousness a great deal. The ancient myth, it's been argued, was created to explain the existence of human killers. It does seem reasonable to assume that the psychological type inclined to kill for fun has been around longer than we've been able to solve their crimes. In fact, there are some documented cases of people in history who killed repeatedly, for no particular reason. So, in the days before police procedures, when townspeople went missing or bodies turned up bloodied and mangled, monsters were invented to explain these events.

The Victorians really took to the vampire story. Bram Stoker's Dracula was written in 1897, and draws on the true horror for its time: sex. Vampires, particularly in the early industrial period, are sexual creatures. They stalk and seduce their victims. Their attack is a sensuous experience. And those who are attacked are often turned to vampires themselves, a metaphor for being corrupted by sexual license. Anne Rice's vampires play up this aspect, as anyone who's read her other works would find unsurprising.

Vampires can also be pretty gay, and represent that other threatening form of sexual license - homosexuality. The Victorians were pretty terrified of that, too. The vampire in Dark Shadows gave off some gay vibes, and indeed, the show was campy as all hell. The secretive nature of the vampire comes in to play here, as gays can be among us and yet not known. The coffin in which the vampire sleeps comes to symbolize the closet in which the horror of the unknown other is hidden.

But, with the 20th century came a shift in priorities. Mass production brought consumerism, and as a result, the straight-laced mores of the Victorians gave way to permissiveness. Now we are presumed to want sex all the time, and practically shunned if we fail to live up to that image. Vampires and sex both came out of the closet, and latter-day monsters tend to be a lot more like regular people. The "vampires as people, too" motif came front and center with Buffy, in which the appetites of the vampire are not all that different from the appetites of the humans with which they co-exist. They are still evil, though - unless they have souls.

So I'm not entirely sure what to make of the Twilight thing. I find it interesting that the vampire has now been so normalized that the vampire who romances the human starts to look more like West Side Story than Dracula. These vampires seem to actually have souls, and choose abstinence - a parallel I find somewhat disturbing. It does seem to echo the cultural backlash against permissiveness in which abstaining from pleasure is seen as a virtue in its own right.

Still, these chaste, shiny vampires seem custom-made to appeal to very young women, and feeds their beliefs in non-threatening-yet-dangerous men who have no life outside of obsessing over their girlfriends. I don't find this a healthy dynamic at all, and the assertion that Bella "chooses" to be with Edward as a manifestation of her liberated self is kind of ludicrous. It's exactly the easiest and most dangerous road for a teenage woman to take, and hence not really that much of a choice. Choosing to live her own life, now that would take some guts.

On the other hand, one can cast it in more of the West Side Story mold, in which loving Edward is tantamount to interracial love. In that case, I guess it does take courage to choose the relationship. But I still don't agree with the abstinence part. If being with Bella means constantly fighting his most fundamental longings, then Edward is basically a kinky guy trying to be with a vanilla girl, and promotes the lie that people can actually repress their desires and still be happy.

If any twilight fans are actually reading this, let me know what you think. I'm going to stick with the vampires that actually have sex for the time being. Besides, that guy who plays Edward in the movie is not my type. He has the Frankenstein forehead, which always turns me off.