The Death of Vampires

      

Subversive or Swallowed? What Vegan Vampirism Means for Ideology Today

If Count Dracula took a stroll through Forks, Washington and Bon Temps, Louisiana, he would be sorely disappointed. He would have tried to find the Cullens at home but only to realize that most of the clan are enrolled in Forks High School repeatedly to fit in with humans despite being over a hundred years old. He would have laughed as they tried to control their natural urges to drink human blood, compromising instead for a type of ‘vampire vegetarianism’ in which only animal blood can be consumed due to a strict moral code of not feeding on humans. 

Down in Louisiana, a visit to Merlotte’s Bar and Grill would have left our dear Count even more speechless; amidst the unmannered and definitely un-aristocratic Southern U.S. working class culture, vampires and humans are interacting in a bar like it’s normal! A vampire girl is now a waitress and wait---what’s this? True Blood? A bottle of liquid that looks like blood, but is actually…synthetic tasteless sustenance designed for the modern, conscientious (read: vegan) vampire who’s more interested in dating and falling in love with human beings than eating them.

The millennium saw a new breed of vampires in popular culture. Gone are the shows of the 90s in which there was more a less a clear line of the bad (vampires) and the good (Buffy the vampire slayer & company). And definitely gone are the days of Victorian vampirism, the sexual, the violent, the sexually-violent, and the violently-sexual, from which our beloved Count hails. Vampires today are vegan, vegetarian, bourgeois, consumerist, and yearn for true love and nuclear families. In short, they want to be like humans, so much so that they have decided to curb their ‘amoral’ natures to fit in to our contemporary societal mores.

The history of vampires is fascinatingly ubiquitous and similar around the world. A form of vampirism (bloodsucking, the undead, violence against the living) existed in African, Asian, and European cultures long before Count Dracula came into existence. These myths were explanations and explorations of death, decomposition, and disease along with spirit superstitions. However, it is with Victorianism that our sustained contemporary image of the Vampire came into being. 18^th-19^th century Europe saw the emergence of vampires in literature (John Polidori’s The Vampyre. James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire) culminating in the most culturally influential vampire novel of all time: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It is Stoker that culturally cemented the Vampire as aristocratic, handsome, sexual, powerful. 20^th century literary and film explorations of the vampire have all been heavily influenced by Stoker’s Dracula (see: Nosferatu). The Vampire as predator, as seducer, as villain. But come the 21^st century, hero replaces anti-hero, prey replaces predator, morality replaces debauchery, and monogamous love replaces polygamous sexcapades. Has the Vampire been tamed?

Vampirism can be seen as a type of the “uncanny” in the Lacanian sense. 'Extimite,' or the French version of the uncanny, “is simultaneously the intimate kernel and the foreign body; in a word, it is unheimlich. Freud writes, ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.'" (Dolar 6). In terms of vampires, their predatory, parasitic, violent, and sexual natures can be interpreted as human things “of old and long familiar,” elements that have been repressed and suppressed by culture. Freud’s explanation of the “uncanny” seem to “use the entire panoply of psychoanatlytic concepts: castration complex, Oedipus, (primary) narcissism, compulsion to repeat, death drive, repression, anxiety, psychosis, etc” (Dolar 6). The uncanny, monsters, ghosts, the undead all represent and can be indicative of things morally unacceptable or culturally feared. 

For example, In Frankenstein, the monster was “excluded from nature and culture alike. Through his tragedy, culture only gets back its own message: his monstrosity is the monstrosity of culture…By not accepting him society shows its corruption, its inability to integrate him, to include its own missing link” (Dolar, 18). But we cannot apply this analysis of Frankenstein to our contemporary T.V show/movie vampire monsters. The Cullens in Twilight and Vampire Bill & Company in True Blood are not shunned and isolated by human society and then left to die in their sad isolated monstrosity; on the other hand, they actively seek to incorporate themselves into the human world, and some even succeed at finding human acceptance and love. If Frankenstein shows what 19^th European society cannot accept, does the Twilight Series and True Blood show just how open and accepting our contemporary society is?

Not necessarily. It’s true that the True Blood vampires enjoy plenty of sex and kill without a flinch of the fangs, but the ultimate storyline is about these vampires yearning for Love with a capital L and peaceful integration/tolerance from the Southern “racist/vampirist” town folks. The Twilight series and movies are even more removed from Count Dracula’s version of vampirism. In fact, the Cullens barely resemble vampires. They drink only animal blood, go to high school and believe in abstinence til marriage. All things debauched and morally questionable are gone and are replaced with a beautiful moral family that just wants to live in peace and find love. 

However, this evolution of the definition and traits of vampirism isn’t a surprise. Roland Barthes can shine light on the idea of mythical evolutions. There is “no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely. And it is precisely because they are historical that history can very easily suppress them” (6). The characteristics of vampirism has continued to culturally evolve (first came blood-sucking, then came the aristocrat, then can the fangs, the cape, and the fear of sunlight). For us, vampires have again evolved with the times (and then came veganism...) and the important question to ask is why?

Now, connotations of vampirism, in the Barthesian sense, will carry on a whole new slew of meaning: integration, more humane, more human….this is what pop culture phenomenons Twilight and True Blood have done. After all, connotations reflect culture and history of the times. They are an “active perpetration of society, production, and core belief system” (Farmer 18). What’s puzzling is that vampirism throughout history has been the symbol and discourse for the taboo, the repressed, where vampires have always fallen on the evil side of the good/evil divide. Now, these shows portray them as more good than evil, drawing sympathy from the viewers, because they are now more human-like (aka abiding by societal norms of morality). They have compromised some of their alternative lifestyles and adopted cultural norms. In other words, is the Vampire, with its long history of subversive connotations, dead? And if so, who killed it?

The perverse is normalized, the peripheral is brought closer to the center, the subversive is subdued, in other words, vampires have been swallowed up by cultural hegemony.

"Hegemony: defined by Antonio Gramsci as a 'moving equiibrium' that binds a society together without the use of physical force. It works by generating the consent of subordinate classes to the ideas, values, and beliefs -the ideologies- of dominant classes. The result is that the social distribution of power appears legitimate and 'natural'. Hegemony is never completely stable: it must constantly be won, reproduced and sustained."       

      From the Glossary of Fran Martin's Interpreting Everyday Culture.

Our 21^st century vampires have designer furniture, listen to classical music, go shopping, drink at bars, drive trucks, and desire monogamous marriage. Their lifestyle is pretty much indistinguishable (except having to sleep during the day, of course) from the middle class. Contemporary Vampirism via True Blood and Twilight can be read as a type of cultural ISA (ideological state apparatus). Louis Althusser’s term is useful here because ISAs further ideology (in this case, contemporary middle class American values) through private domains (in this case, the cultural entertainment industry). The cultural values adopted by vampires in these shows are the values of the viewers and the dominant set of values today. Monogamous, consumerist, and even the trend of going ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan,’ vampires have been swallowed up by dominant ideology instead of historically being the subversive counter-force. This shows just how entrenched and insidious dominant culture is, growing ever-more-powerful to even swallow up and re-appropriate vampirism. What’s even more fitting is that HBO has spawned a True Blood brand, where they sell everything from a real TruBlood drink (made of blood oranges) to Halloween costumes. Vampirism now caters to Consumerism (but that’s a whole other topic for a whole other paper).

          What has happened to the once symbol of subversion and perversion is very telling of the power of contemporary dominant culture and ideology (middle class, consumerist). It also may forebode danger in the sense that if hegemony can swallow something as powerful as Vampirism, are other acts of subversion, perversion, and revolution to be swallowed up and chewed out too?

                                                 Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy. New york: Motnthly Review Press, 1971.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Dolar, Mladen. “I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night: Lacan and the Uncanny.”

Rendering the Real. Vol. 58 (Autumn, 1991): pg. 5-23.

Farmer, Brett. “The Ideologies of Everyday life.” Interpreting Everyday Culture. USA: 
           Bloomsbury, 2003.