Purple State of John

2009-07-29 18:29:29

Filed under: 30 Days of Night, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, From Dusk To Dawn, I Am Legend, Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark, Sex, Television, True Blood, Twilight, Vampires
Posted by: John

shadows

Back in 1994, long before anyone had forged a connection between Mormons and vampires, Visible Ink Press published The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of information about the children of the night. In that 800-page compendium, we encounter a blood feast of lore.

There are entries on Bram Stoker, The Addams Family, anemia, the comic book character Baron Blood, Mario Bava, Blacula, Chinese, Bulgarian and Malaysian vampires, Tom Cruise, decapitation, Count Duckula, eucharistic wafers, necromancy, Ingrid Pitt, suicide, sunlight, Hammer films and Abraham Van Helsing. There are also a curious number of entries for local chapters of the Dark Shadows Society, including those to be found in Oklahoma and Milwaukee, but we’ll get back to them in a minute.

What you won’t find in my edition of this encyclopedia is any mention of Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer , which premiered on the WB channel in 1997. You’ll look in vain for Elizabeth Kostova, author of the bestseller The Historian, or the comic series 30 Days Of Night, which became a bloody and scary movie of the same name, or Stephenie Meyer, who wrote Twilight, the most influential and popular vampire saga of recent times, or Alan Ball, the creator of the HBO series True Blood, based on the novels by Charlaine Harris, who is also absent from these pages.

What does that tell you? Back in 1994, long before our current fanger boom, there was still enough material and interest in vampires for a small publishing house to put together an 800-page book on the subject. We’ve been in this vampire-besotted state before.

Now, of course, the encyclopedia would have to be twice as big, making room for entries on all of the above, plus the British television miniseries Ultraviolet; the new Ethan Hawke film The Daybreakers; the film director Guillermo Del Toro (author of his own new series of vampire novels); the straight-to-video Subspecies movies, produced by scrappy independent Full Moon pictures and shot entirely in Romania; the actor Willem Dafoe; the Swedish movie Let The Right One In; the leather-thong-ripping Laurel K. Hamilton; and maybe Paris Hilton.

Yet the encyclopedia reminds us these names are but the latest in the long, unlikely dance of the vampire through our popular culture.

Between 1970 and 1972, it tells us, Hammer Films released no fewer than nine vampire movies, each catering to a slightly different taste, from the old school theatrics of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Taste The Blood Of Dracula (1970) and Dracula A.D. 1972 , in which a bunch of London hippies drag the count forward in time only to get munched down like bloody hash brownies; from the softcore sapphic antics of The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust For A Vampire (1971) and Twins Of Evil (1972), based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novella Carmilla; to the graphic suckiness of Scars Of Dracula (1971) and the downright kinky Countess Dracula (1971), starring the spectacular Ingrid Pitt; finally, a weird attempt at revisionism in Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter and a dank late masterpiece of the genre, the utterly bizarre Vampire Circus (1972).

I remember seeing some of these movies as Sunday afternoon re-runs on television, particularly Scars Of Dracula, which seems to have been on permanent rotation at our local Channel 11 affiliate through the 1970’s. Others caressed my imagination in the forms of ads in the movie pages of the newspaper.

Throw in the experience of watching the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows afternoons after school in 1970 and 1971, of reading Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot a few years later, not to mention Bram Stoker’s original Dracula somewhere along the way, and absorbing the puppet Count on Sesame Street and the animated Groovy Ghoulies as kiddie entertainment, is it any wonder that I ended up bewitched by this mythology? Is it any wonder that, three decades later, a host of creative types developed a fascination with retractable fangs?

Before we look for deep sociological or cultural reasons to explain the current dominance of the vampire in the popular culture, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether it’s all happening now because it happened so often back then. On the one hand, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s eruption was itself a recycling of material that had been wildly popular over thirty years before, when Tod Browning’s 1932 Dracula saved Universal Studios from ruin. But did the 1930’s see the total saturation of my youth? I don’t think so.

Some have argued persuasively that it’s in the nature of vampires to come back to us every so often in great numbers, peeking in the window, asking to be let inside

In the introduction to Our Vampires, Ourselves, the great Nina Auerbach writes: “We all know Dracula, or think we do, but as this book will show, there are many Draculas—and still more vampires who refuse to be Dracula or to play him. An alien nocturnal series, sleeping in coffins, living in shadows, drinking our lives in secrecy, vampires are easy to stereotype, but it is their variety that makes them survivors. They may look marginal, feeding on human history from some limbo of their own, but for me, they have always been central: what vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become.”

I’ve never heard it said or written better anywhere else. So who are the vampires of our time and what do they say about us?

The first thing to be said is that, Elizabeth Kostova and my own novel Fangland excepted, we seem to have left behind Bram Stoker and his fiend. In the fang boom of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, the novel of 1897 was very much in the air. Christopher Lee played a bloodier, younger, sexier version of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, which was itself based on a play that originated with the novel.

The name of Count Dracula remained critical to the Hammer franchise even while the movies played endlessly with the iconography, diluting it to the point of parody. When Stephen King wrote Salem’s Lot, he gave us a version of Stoker’s monster, and who does the Lestat of Anne Rice conjure except a much more fey version of the same? At the movies, through the decade of the 1970’s, new cinematic versions of the original continued to appear, with Jack Palance, Frank Langella and Louis Jordan all taking turns at the grand old man-bat.

The last one of that cycle, very late in coming, appears to have been Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the early 1990’s. After that, with some appearances here and there, the next great leap in mythology happened on television, and one could argue it’s stayed there. Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel drastically rewrote the rules of the genre for the popular idiom, trashing the character of Dracula as a glam pretty-boy for good measure. The new vampires were romantic punks who liked high school girls, or old bastards who commanded armies of young punks.

Buffy brought to the fore the themes of female sexual empowerment that had flickered around the edges of the drama since the 19th Century, but it did something else as well. Taking its cue from the soap opera Dark Shadows, the show developed an entire moral and metaphysical universe in which the vampire could be the object of human pity and admiration as well a vehicle for satirical dissection of politics and sex.

Lots of books and lesser known movies, like the novels of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and the poetic glories of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, fed into this approach, but no one was more influential than the television impresario Dan Curtis, who had demonstrated already in 1967 that the vampire could be put in almost any situation, as a monster or a heartthrob, and find resonance with an audience of teenagers. In the early 1970’s, 200-year-old Barnabas Collins, played with a remarkable mixture of outlandish hamminess and real depth by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, made the cover of Tiger Beat magazine along with David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman and Jack Wild.

Dark Shadows, in that sense, is the grandaddy of all that the vampire has now become in our culture: conflicted, sympathetic, horny, almost cuddly. Looking at the latest hit vampire series, True Blood, it’s clear that not much has changed since Dark Shadows, unless it’s for the worse. True Blood, which started out with promise, has turned into a lousy series, poorly acted, ludicrously accented, badly plotted and lazily shot. That’s not the end of the world, though. In its own way, Dark Shadows was also lousy, epically, laughably, juicily, wonderfully lousy, which made it unforgettable as television, particularly for people under the age of ten.

In the first season, True Blood had sort of a literary pedigree. The gifted writer Chris Offutt was on the team, and I like to think he brought a semblance of judgment to the show’s lowbrow vibe. He kept the worst lines, the most egregious performances and the least promising plot lines at bay. Week after week, the show improved, and one could imagine a series that did for the undead what Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under did for undertakers.

But that turned out to be wishful thinking. HBO let Offutt go for reasons unexplained, and you feel the loss. The series is wildly popular, evidently, but that fact that can be explained by the increasing amount of graphic and yet oddly unaffecting sex and the even more in-your-face violence. Success is certainly not the result of quality control.

Last year, in a documentary about the show, Ball said that he’d been influenced by Bigelow’s Near Dark, and I could almost see the connection. The best moments of True Blood did have poetry. Check out the opening credit sequence if you don’t believe me. But I suspect someone handed him a tape of Dark Shadows halfway through last season and explained to him the wild popularity of that show, and he saw the light.

What we haven’t had in a very long time is a truly off-the-wall, off its rocker, naively adventurous and overwrought Gothic soap opera. We still don’t have it, because so far, True Blood doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. It’s not quite bad enough to be Dark Shadows at its jaw-dropping worst, and it’s never good enough to be the same show at its mesmerizing best. With all due respect, Bill Compton, the lead vampire, is not now and never will be Barnabas Collins, and Sam the barkeep can’t hold a candle to Quentin Collins, who became a werewolf.

I wish Anna Paquin were better—or far, far worse—as Sookie Stackhouse, but she seems to have been coached into a plucky, spunky stasis. The character isn’t going anywhere. I wish the scorn for the piety of Christians were funnier and wilder. On Dark Shadows, there was a nasty old pastor named Trask who lusted after his schoolgirl wards and got attacked by a disembodied hand. The sunlight worshippers of True Blood can’t yet hold a candle to that character. The showwears its politics on its sleeve, but I’m not sure they are more interesting or courageous than when they were nothing but subtext on the daytime soap.

Vampires don’t much like to be cordoned off into safe territories. As soon as that happens, they either burn up or go underground, disappearing for a decade or so until the familiarity has washed off, and they can scare us again. In True Blood , we’re seeing that process firsthand. The show makes bloodsuckers–and sex—safe, boring and ultimately tired. The orgy in the most recent episode made Stanley Kubrick’s last movie look like fun. Were we supposed to feel scared of the participants because their eyes had turned black? Or were merely supposed to disapprove?

That’s not the vampire spirit at all. The only way to bring this show–and its dark denizens–back from the death this show represents is to throw the rule book out the window and go for broke. May I suggest three remedies?

1) Hire Broadway actress Elaine Stritch to play a vampire-hunting, foul-mouthed drunk

2)Do more time travel, but make the sets a thousand times crappier.

3)Stop playing so much good music.

Everyone else should pick up The Vampire Book and see what all the fuss was about.

Comments (2)

2009-03-02 15:06:36

THE GERMAN, THE VAMPIRES AND THE MURDERED WOMEN OF CIUDAD JUAREZ (PART II)

Filed under: Berlin, Books, Bruno Schulz, Ciudad Juarez, David Lynch, Europe, Fangland, From Dusk To Dawn, Germany, John Marks, Mexico, Peter Matthiessen, Roberto Bolano, Russia, Sex, The Wall, True Blood, Vampires, Vasily Grossman, War Torn, politics
Posted by: John

savage

Early in the second part of The Savage Detectives, the novel that made Roberto Bolano famous in the English-speaking world, a narrator named Fabio Ernesto Logiacomo, tosses off the following line: “Literature isn’t innocent. I’ve known that since I was fifteen.”

The character, a poet, makes the remark in the context of one of his own poems, which had been censored by the Cuban government, but the line is bigger than that. It’s like an easter egg on a DVD, dropped into the extras to let us know the big secret about the director’s next picture; in this case 2666, Bolano’s hideous and ecstatic epic about the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez. In an imaginary landscape, in which great books are closed countries, guarded by three-headed dogs and vampire kings—and they often are!—the lines of the poet would be hacked with a knife into the colossal adobe and granite arch rising before the gates of Bolano’s final masterpiece.

I’m thinking of innocence here in terms of criminal justice rather than Original Sin or lost virginity. 2666 traffics in all three meanings, but its most vivid sense arises in the tension between the writer’s life and art and the commission of an unspeakable crime. The crime lies at the heart of a culture that has nurtured and elevated the writer, or put another way the writer has been nurtured and elevated in a culture that has been completely compromised by a calamity. Guilt sings on every page.

Bolano doesn’t want us to read his book as a literary critic would. I’m pretty sure he wants us to view the entire work as a crime scene. Otherwise, why make it so damn forensic?

I’ll go one step further. As I read the fourth part of 2666, I had the overwhelming and creepy sensation that Bolano had written the section in the happy knowledge that he would be dead by the time it was published. Why should he be happy about a thing like that? Because in these pages the author ceases to be a writer of literary fiction and becomes an amateur crime scene investigator, telling the reader that the culprits are obvious and hiding in plain sight. In describing a series of unsolved murders in the cold, hard language of a police report, with occasional flourishes to remind us that he is, in fact, a novelist, Bolano takes on a moral responsibility that doesn’t traditionally lie with fiction, and in the process, he probably endangers himself—or would if he were still alive.

If I’m not mistaken, there is a hidden body in the novel, and it’s not one of the dead women. It’s the novelist himself, speaking from beyond the grave to solve the crime. His ghost doesn’t want immortality. It wants arrests. That, he seems to be telling us, is the only possible point of fiction in the age of mass murder.

But let’s go back. If you’re reading this now, you may get the idea that 2666 is a Mexican version of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, a non-fiction account of the Charles Manson murders. That’s far from the truth. 2666 is 800 pages long, and only one section of about 200 pages directly addresses the murders. Nevertheless, one has the distinct feeling that everything else in the novel is meant to form a kind of chalk circle around the hundreds of women who have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez, er, Santa Teresa, since 1993.

A description of the book may help to explain what I mean. The novel is broken into five sections, and the introduction tells us an intriguing story worthy of a Bolano fiction. The author knew he was dying at the time of writing and felt that he wouldn’t have time to form the separate sections into a unified whole. He therefore had the idea that each section should be a free-standing work, published on its own. After his death, his literary executors believed that the novel worked as a unified whole and overruled the notion of separate publications, but published two versions just the same, a hardback containing each of the five sections in one volume and a paperback in three volumes. In the paperback version, parts one, two and three crowd into one volume; parts four and five each get their own volume.

I read the paperback, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a taste of the dramatic and radical openness of the book. Bolano has written a tale that can start at the beginning at any one of his five sections. In that sense, the novel resembles Hopscotch, the Julio Cortazar masterpiece that instructs the reader to jump to another part of the book at the end of each chapter. Hopscotch, for all its virtuosity, feels like the world’s greatest literary game. 2666 does not. On the contrary, on every page Bolano seems to want to utter a line from every action movie ever made: This is not a game.

Each section has its own tone, and if you wanted to be stuffy about it, you might say that each tone is meant to correspond to a particular style or philosophy of fiction-making in the post-modern universe. Plot-wise, the first part depicts a complicated relationship between European literary critics who specialize in the works of an obscure German author named Benno Von Arcimboldi. In tone, the section lies somewhere between parody and homage. The first fifty pages are the worst in the novel, but if a reader were to start with the last section first and close with this section, the experience would be completely different; riveting, I suspect.

The second section tells a short story about a Catalan philosopher languishing in cultural exile in Mexico, and it’s high modernist in tone, sort of stream-of-consciousness. Stylistically, section three is a cross between Raymond Chandler, James Baldwin and David Lynch, and I think of it as the gringo section. It’s the only part with a Yankee protagonist at its center, and half of it is set in the United States. The writing has the terse, tense, pulpy feel of a neo-noir movie or a crime novel by Dennis Lehane. It tells the story of Oscar Fate, a black journalist who goes to Mexico to cover a boxing match for a dead colleague.

I’ll skip section four for a moment. Section five tells us the life story of the German writer Benno Von Arcimboldi, which we get as a sort of modernist Bildungsroman, soup to nuts, start to finish, the making of a great writer as filtered through the horrors of 20th Century Europe, everything from Hitler and Stalin to Count Dracula.

Section five is the police report, or if you like the tabloid newspaper, repulsive and even leering in its graphic, unblinking account of the discovery of the bodies of dozens of women whom we never meet as characters, though they almost all have names. It’s not slasher saga. We never see the girls hunted down and killed. We are never meant to identify with a killer or watch the final moments of a sexually violated girl. We are meant to be shocked and mortally challenged, however.

If it’s so horrible, Bolano seems to say, why do you keep reading? And if you do, why the hell don’t you do something about it? Think this is just a game?!

Each section stands alone, but each section also overlaps, often in gossamer ways. At one thematic pole are the women, at the other is the German writer, and the novel pulls them together with a million unseen filaments. There are the vampires, for instance, flitting around the edges of the fiction like the faeries decorating the margins of a Victorian childrens book. They aren’t extraneous, because nothing here is, but it’s hard to say exactly what they’re up to. The author is asking the undead for a favor, but what is it?

In The Savage Detectives, Bolano teases us, his future readers of 2666, with a poem by Octavio Paz: “The Vampire”. I’ll leave you with this seductive clue:

Whirling your deep and gloomy tresses pour

Over your candid body like a torrent,

and on the shadowy and curling flood

I strew the fiery roses of my kisses.

As I unlock the tight rings

I feel the light chill chafing of your hand,

and a great shudder courses over me

And penetrates me to the very bone.

Your chaotic and disdainful eyes

glitter like stars when they hear the sigh

that from my vitals issues rendingly,

and you, thirsting, as I agonize,