What the Cock is with all this Vampire Shit?

When I got back to Detroit from Vegas, it really marked the first time I’d pulled my head out of the insular morass that is the academy and breathed deep the candy-scented wind of pop culture. No longer could I count on those around me to discuss the particulars of Proust or the details of Derrida – instead, I had to take the pulse of the day-to-day Joe Punchclock world and see what we had to talk about, and evidently the only thing to talk about is vampires.

At first I thought that was pretty awesome, since I know a fair amount about Vampires. I wrote a paper on Dracula back in my undergrad days, and of course I know that those dreaded nightwalkers have two slam attacks, +6 to armor class, and replace their normal hit dice with D12’s. Of course it turns out that I like the gay ass crap lame stupid vampires from lame crap stupid books and stupid mythology crap gay lame stupid. What everyone likes now are vampires TO THE EXTREME!

Man, watch True Blood and you’ll see that Vampires don’t care about your pussy-ass cross or your stupid garlic – only sunlight can kill a vampire, but who cares? Vampires are made to PAR-TAY! Sleep all day and party all night bitches! WOOOOOO!

And that old guy sleeping in a coffin crap? Please, get real – it’s the new millenium! Vampires are young and sexy. They have all the same problems as teenagers have, only they handle them in sexy and deep ways that adults just don’t understand. Just watch The Vampire Diaries to see how sexy it is to be a vampire.

Of course, who cares if the vampires are sexy and awesome if they can’t connect with us mortals, right? If we’ve learned anything from the Twilight series, it’s that nobody will ever understand you like a vampire. Also, they shimmer! Also, you smell good!

There’s pros and cons to all this vampophillia which, of course, is hardly new – This is a trend we’ve been on since at least the early 1990’s, and there are precursors of this phenomena as far back as the 1970’s. There’s no good reason for anything to stop now except that we’re at a point of over-saturation. When the media-buying public turns on vampires, and turn they will, it’s going to relegate the entire genre to some sort of hammer-pants, Power Rangers, NKOTB-class throwback which none but its most die-hard adherents will deny.

So what are the pros of this latest phase of vampire re-invention? Vampires have for all intents and purposes been a stand-in for “other,” like most movie monsters. Usually we discuss this otherness in Freudian terms – Vampirism as symbolic of perverse sexual desire, Werewolves as rejection of social more, and Mummies as a deep-seated fear of exploring and seeking out the sexual and social lives of our forebears, but it’s more useful in the post-modern, post-colonial, and to an extent post-Freudian paradigm to consider the earliest source material (for brevity’s sake, we’ll just stick with Vampires).

Okay, super-lit-fag part is over: Dracula represented unchecked sexuality, sure, but that was (to paraphrase) just the symptom, and not the cause. Dracula, as a Transylvanian, was a Romanian, which made him a weird liminal figure for the British. On the one hand, he spoke Romanian, a romance language, and held many customs of the European aristocracy. On the other hand, he was a Balkan with one foot in the “mysterious orient” – his crossing over the channel is very much symbolic of the intrusion of foreign cultures into jolly old England, an incursion of unwelcome socio-cultural heterogeneity.

So this is what’s kind of good about this vampire glut – if you read the bloodsuckers as symbols of “other,” it seems to indicate that the empowered culture is more open to miscegenation, more willing to cohabitate, learn from, and live with other cultures, and maybe even to cede power and identity peacefully as the traditional protestant anglo-saxon patriarchy fades into twilight. Maybe, just maybe, these foreigners aren’t so bad since it turns out they’ve lived next to us all along.

The downside of all this is that these heavy-handed tales are becoming less and less subtle, more pedantic, and less original with every passing day. Okay, we get it, they’re just like us. Or are they? Despite the nodding of the old guard in these shows and movies, there’s still that element of difference, of danger, of weirdness, that makes the mention of vampirism exotic. In short, it smacks of the traditional perception of the white girl running off with the black guy in order to piss off daddy. It smacks of everybody having a black friend, or a gay friend, or what have you, and saying that they’re just so cool, basically like everyone else, and not at all like you thought.

And so often it is the “strange” or “perverse” vampire who crosses over to be with the “daywalkers,” the other kind, be it to attempt to form an actual meaningful relationship (True Blood), to include the other in a separate-but-equal binary (Vampire Academy), to re-establish the identity of other into a mainstream context (Vampire Diaries), or to plea for understanding, even pity (Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles). More often than not, it’s a weirdo sell-out vampire (Bill Compton, Lissa Dragomir, Stefan Salvatore, Louis Du Point Du Lac, respectively) who crosses over.

Thus the more the vampire gets “reinvented,” the more he is un-invented. His backstory differs from series to series, and even his proclivity or necessity for blood is heightened or lessened depending on just how exotic he needs to be. The more he is integrated as a trope of the mainstream, the more we notice his differences. If the vampire were black, we’d talk about how articulate he was. If the vampire were Asian, we’d praise him for not being so uptight, and so on.

In any case, this entry got way more blah blah and less ha ha than usual, but I consider it a public service for all vampire fans: stop reading and stop watching now. It’s not going to get better, only much, much worse. Like any art cycle, the current vampire thing is going to go into a parodic mode (or in this case, back in), but first it has to become completely bloated and derivative. Don’t follow fat Elvis to the toilet – go re-read Dracula, and stop watching these insipid fanged melodramas, because if you stop buying, they will go away.