THINQon : Vampires

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Imogen Adler

Vampires

Latest Post: March 8, 2011 at 1:07 PM

13 followers

It's very funny to notice the sudden fascination with vampires everywhere. I'd always thought of them as a vestige of the late 19th century erotic imagination, the acceptable and slightly thrilling fantasy of the good Victorian nymphet. But all of a sudden they're making a comeback; in Twilight, of course, but also in a number of sitcoms and, if the fashion press is to be believed, as part of the modern aesthetic. Two pointers: vampires and the idea of the overwhelming sensual experience -- "circuit failure," in post, and in "the traumatic seeing of what cannot be reflected" in post.

Why has this idea suddenly so captured the romantic imagination? What about our modern moment conjures up this particular kind of erotic thrill? Is it a kind of return to the nineteenth century, or do vampires now represent something essentially different? I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has a theory.

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Emily Andrews	in "Beauty and the beast: What's erotic about the monstrous?"	(Bedroom)
Imogen Adler	in "Names"	(Library)
Solveig Wright	in "Proprietary fantasy"	(Bedroom)
Mia Vialti	in "The vortex"	(The Living Room)
Michel de Graph	in "Twilight, Lady Gaga, and women’s structure of desire"	(The Living Room)
Hugh Dupin	in "What is Love?"	(Bedroom)

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Robin Layter, I qualify as a youth. I have long hair and it...

July 3, 2009 at 7:03 PM

21 followers

There's a great South Park episode about this recent vamp-fad.

I can't find a version to embed but you can watch it all here: http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/210813/?autoplay=false

I wrote a paper once about Dracula. If I remember the thesis correctly, it was about the idea of foreign influence and otherness. The big fear in Victorian England was the invasion of something they didn't understand. A big part of this is, as you say, repressed sexuality. And Dracula most certainly did represent the repressed fantasies of all the other characters.

Let's look at the vampires of today. The ones that come to mind first are Twilight and True Blood. Both are fueled by their sexuality. But surely today's world isn't so sexually repressed? Or maybe it is in a different way.

Dracula was a terrifying figure. The whole novel you as the reader were on the team of the hunters and wanted him dead, staked, dust. But today's vampires are a different sort. Now some of them are good. We as the audience have to ask "wait, is that a good vampire or a bad one?" The main plots revolve around love relationships between humans and vampires. We ask ourselves is it alright for that type of relationship to exist? As the western world becomes more sexually free, perhaps the vampires of today are Gothic justifications for free love.

But what questions does this raise? I remember back in Buffy the Vampire Slayer the love between Buffy and Angel, and when the two had sex Angel's curse was undone and he turned evil again as if to say the love between a vampire and his slayer has to remain unrequited. I like to think that sex with vampires symbolizes both life and death, and perhaps that is a great symbol for love. To bond two souls in love you must give life and open yourself for death maybe?

The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstacy and waited - waited with beating heart.

-Dracula

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Una Spenser

In response to Robin Layter

June 22, 2010 at 5:37 PM

3 followers

That's always been a quintessential quote from "Dracula" for me. This idea that as a vampire, she had become "voluptuous" and that it was "both thrilling and repulsive". This is not only about sex. Its broader: passions in general. Including those who are passionate about tradition versus those who are passionate about innovation. The obvious topic is sexuality and the repression of any personal desires in English society. Being night creatures, vampires represent the things we do in the dark, in secret. But my sense is that he made the story titillating so that it would be palatable to a mass audience, while the more important theme was something different. It should be noted that his was not the first very popular vampire story published in England. In 1819, Polidori authored "The Vampyre, the first "sophisticated" vampire story, and a template for Stoker to work from. Then there was the lesbian vampire novel "Carmilla" in 1871. Hence, he had a model that people were familiar with and he could use to camouflage his real message.

"Dracula" was Stoker's diatribe on some big tensions in Victorian England, at the time. Namely the replacement of religion with science in the determination of social mores. Dracula represents the Old World steeped in faith and mystery and superstitions. The doctor and his modern friends represented the New Age of science. In the end, it took embracing both for them to defeat Dracula, if indeed they did. The fact that there is no absolute confirmation that Dracula is destroyed is part of the exploration. There will always be change. There will always be tensions in society around change.

I'm new here, so I don't want to take up too much space, as I get to know people and see where I fit in, but the use of the vampire metaphor and how it has shifted in Anglo-Saxon culture has long fascinated me and I have written quite a bit about. The concept of vampires have existed around the world since the dawn of time, but only we have created these complex characters. In most cultures, they are just zombie-like and everything about what they become is thoroughly undesirable. One would do anything to avoid becoming one. We've turned them into a tool for self-reflection. A constant weighing of what we consider acceptable and unacceptable about ourselves. A challenge, since we are by nature predators and social animals, which requires tempering our predatorial qualities and finding a way not to self-loathe or over repress as we do.

I could go on and on and on....

I think the most interesting vampire mythology right now, in terms of what it suggests about our culture and the things we are grappling with is the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood universe. Twilight is an aberration and makes no sense in the use of vampire as metaphor, at all. It took me a while to understand why, but I have a theory.

Anyway, if anyone wants to talk more, I'd enjoy that.

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Emily Andrews

July 4, 2009 at 9:55 AM

31 followers

Robin, thanks for the examples -- this was all quite illuminating, and something about it made me think: OK, for our own time,
here's a theory. Let's first look at the situation:

Society as we know it is at a kind of crossroads, the real versus the virtual. The cultural subconscious already conjures up all sorts of Matrix-like fantasies in which they are inextricably interconnected. But we're also attracted to this power (Indiana Jones and the crystal skull, anyone?).
We feel very ambiguous about the relation between humans and machines.
All around us are people who have been bitten by the virtual bug -- they stumble around us pale and anemic -- looking for power outlets so they can get another energy fix.
We know that people who spend all their time in, say, video-game worlds are, in a certain way, dead to the world -- they become less and less connected to their physicality, to physical relations with others -- the living dead. At the same time, it's not exactly that we feel we're being taken over by an alien force. We recognize the power but also the great potential for good of tapping into some kind of universal mind (the internet part of it all), of extending ourselves etc.

Thus the potency of the vampire myth for our time. The vampires this time are machines.

We feel something of this flirtation with danger, the possibility of being taken over completely, but at the same time we recognize that we are already not so separate; they are much closer to us. It's impossible to avoid them entirely; nor is it really that we want to. The story says we have to learn to be close enough and clever enough to distinguish between the good and the bad, to learn how to assimilate a bit of this power and use it wisely, while remaining aware of what's at stake.

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Emily Andrews	in "Beauty and the beast: What's erotic about the monstrous?"	(Bedroom)
Molly Bloom	in "How to do good science? / On creativity (Post on Godel)"	(The Living Room)
Solveig Wright	in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Is it all that bad?"	(The Living Room)
Solveig Wright	in "Technology: What are you most excited for?"	(Gadget Room)
Mia Vialti	in "What is the place of High Art today?"	(Study)