We stopped clicking for a few minutes and found a show that looked interesting, and watched it for a few minutes. Then we discovered it was about vampires.
Click.
What is it with modern culture (or even popular culture going back decades, or centuries) that is so fascinated by immortal blood suckers? I know there are lots of pseudopsychological explanations for it, but they just leave me cold. I have zero interest.
Kind of like Barack Obama, now that I think about it. And I wouldn’t deny a relationship.
I mean, parasites are parasites…
I don’t get it either. Even squickier is the idea of the vampire-as-perfect-romantic-prince thing that many of my fellow females have. Dracula, the novel by Bram Stoker, is a decent adventure story if you like Victorian epistolary novels (I do, but I realize that style isn’t for everyone), but his vampire is hardly the broodingly handsome and/or sparkly high school god modern sensibilities have invented; in fact, Stoker’s vampire was a bestial monster.
I don’t get what is so dreamy about creatures that exist on raw blood. That’s just gross.
Is it the only-alive-at-night thing? I know a lot of teens are into that.
And many never grow out…
And how does the garlic thing (which is good for you) fit in? Not to mention the mirrors.
None of it makes sense.
I dont get it either. My GF likes the books because they have dead simple language usage, simplistic plot and basically nothing to stimulate the gray matter.
However, she has english as the second language and found that reading this stuff is a good way to improve it .. im not sure that this helps explaining the general trend ?
Is it really more complex than “it’s a trend”? A few years back, before the bloodsuckers, it was wizards. Before that everything had a grey Roswell alien in it.
MacKay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions” is great reading regarding this sort of thing. He has a whole chapter on the similar phenomenon of slang catchphrases (trust me, they are similar).
There seems to be this disturbing ideal among a portion of the female population of the “romantic anti-hero” and it goes back a ways, Heathcliff in ‘wuthering heights’ (ok I haven’t been able to sit through it myself but I’ve read a number of reviews and analysis of it) was supposed to be a scathing deconstruction and still many think he’s wonderful, Stephanie Meyer among then.
It seems to be the complex form of the bad boy thing “sure he might beat you(or feed on you in this case), but he’s not right now so your love must be working! How exciting!”
But at least with a real vampire you have the prospect of immortality (if he/she/it likes you). With the Obambi socialist kind all you get is an entire economy with the lifeblood sucked out of it. Then it’s truly dead-at least until 2012.
The “Twilight” type vampire is a romantic daydream for the average lonely teen and adult in a state of arrested development. The day dream lover who is dangerous, exotic, even shows good character and is far superior to the matches Ms average could get in real life. Yet he sees something so special in a very average story protagonist that he falls in love with her.
For guys, think of “I Dream of Jeannie” but without the parasitic angle.
It’s not about parasitism, it is about immortality and beauty. Now that average life expectancy is getting longer every year, people want the fountain of youth too.
What is it with modern culture (or even popular culture going back decades, or centuries) that is so fascinated by immortal blood suckers?
I don’t know either, but it may explain how people like Senator Byrd keep getting reelected.
I enjoyed the humor of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” That’s the only vampire show I ever watched regularly.
Larry, Angel was pretty good too.. but only cause Whedon treats the genre like sci-fi: define the rules, if you bend them only do so temporarily, and set up the dilemmas that require the characters to push the limits on those rules.
I think the parallel is that some people are just stupid.
You can’t get rid of them and you can’t get away from them.
Being poor myself, I can’t even insulate myself from them.
If I weren’t basically gentle and kind I would definitely go postal.
It must be this AZ heat… it makes ya crazy.
What do vampires do at the poles? Sleep for six months?
It’s fantasy, a way to escape from the mundane world and your (relatively) little problems. It’s why I tend to dislike modern literature. If I wanted to read about someone dealing with their problems, I’d write a diary. And then read it.
Eh, they’re less tedious and revolting on average than zombie movies.
Eh, they’re less tedious and revolting on average than zombie movies.
Another genre in which I have zero, or negative interest.
Zombieland was pretty good. Bill Murray getting himself killed pretending to be a zombie… how can you not like that?
I want to see the people who made “Scary Movie” make one called “Vampire Movie”. And at the end, I want Bella to bite Edward and turn him into a human.
I highly recommend Thomas Foster’s book, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor”. It explains and enumerates in plain terms what your English teachers were trying to get you to accept — that literature is never about the obvious subject matter, it’s always about the broader and deeper meanings of the story. Chapter 3 is about vampires. Foster writes, “ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires”. For example, he explains the real meaning of the Henry James story “Daisy Miller” — about the courtship of an attractive American ingenue by an older European sophisticate, and her subsequent death. You see, Daisy Miller is a vampire story. It’s about the exploitation of youth and innocence by tired and ancient — yet ravenous — dark forces.
And you can dislike it, but it’s a universal theme with obviously wide appeal. The theme appears in every genre, from Shakespeare to George Lucas. The cute twist offered by Stephanie Meyer is that her vampires reject exploitation. You can see why young women, especially, who in today’s society feel enormous predatory pressure to fulfill their sexuality, would find this theme irresistable.
I think the vamp trend is just a modern expression of teenage angst. “Oh if people only knew my dark secrets and my special gifts and talents. I’m just so not like everybody else because I’m so special and yet people keep ignoring me. I know I’ll dress all in black, make my face pasty white, and wear 10 lbs of eye liner. That’ll show them all how different I am.” South Park did a episode where they make fun of the Vamp movement and how it really is just a new form of Goth that was trendy among the youth a few years back. In my time in High school it was called “Alternative”. Further back before that it would be called “Punk”. If you sat each generation side by side one would be hard pressed to find many differences between them. What I always find so ironic is that in their constant quest to be and look oh so different that they end up looking exactly the same. It gets to the point where it becomes more alternative to dress normal than it is to wear makeup and provocative accessories. In fact there is a chain of stores at most any neighborhood mall that caters specifically to the teenage angst trends; ‘Hot Topic’ being one of the most successful.
Oh and BTW, Zombies are way cooler than Vampires, MMmmmkay. Just don’t come crawling to me when the zombie horde strikes and your left without your proper supply of 12 gauge ammo and molotov cocktails. Not My Problem!
What everyone else here said. It’s a way of being an individual — just like everybody else.
As for zombies, they’re just gross. At least a vampire has the possibility of being a snappy dresser and can hold a conversation. Also rotting chunks of flesh don’t tend to fall off the average vampire.
“For guys, think of “I Dream of Jeannie” but without the parasitic angle.”
Yeah, and there is also “Bewitched”
The deal with “Jeannie” and also “Samantha” is not that the guy half of the relationship thought, “Wow, cool, I have a witch with magical powers as my wife, my girlfriend is a Djin with magical powers.” I guess Jeannie and Samantha were desirable love interests in their own way, but the deal was that the magical powers were a distraction.
It was kind a roundabout expression of the Betty Friedan “Feminine Mystique.” These women were supposed to be proper wife/girlfriend by just being kind of pretty and cute and standing by their schlumpy men who were trying to climb the corporate/NASA ladder. But no, they had magical powers, and they kept doing the darndest things with those powers, “embarassing” their consorts at the most awkward moments.
The deal with the “vampires” is that they are dangerous and “forbidden fruit” and exotic and all of that kind of appeal. The deal with Jeannie and Samantha is that their powers were a kind of annoying distraction — they were supposed to “give up their careers of having magical powers” so they could just be proper companions to their men, but they were infuriating but cute in their refusal to do so, and so on. In other words, and entirely different model than the vampires.
But, where is Feminism in all of this? Back in the day, the woman had the magical powers (or in real life a career, or her own money) and she had to put all of that on the back burner to be a proper middle-class suburban housewife to some dull guy. Now, the guy has the magical powers, but the woman has to rearrange all of her life priorities to deal with the maintenance requirements of this weird guy? Has anything changed in 50 years/
I remember hearing an explanation for the fascination vampire stories have for some women, that holds together well. It is about passion!
Not the passion of the heroine, at first, but that of someone who *wants* her, and will and can do anything to have her. This was reflected in tales of vampires that wrapped their cloaks around their victim, and magically (of course) turned that into a whirlwind that lifted her high in the air above the mundane things of life, where he consumated any and all lusts he might have in regards to her. The whirlwnd can be the answering passion about the other that these women wish to feel themselves. Many hope it would lift them out of a mundane existence. The fascination that many women have with men who they feel express their passion towards a woman by rape is quite similar, IMHO.
The vision of the passion of this other (in the minds of some female readers) along with demonstration of irresistable power over them, is extremely stimulating to many women. It may have a lot to do with satisfaction in the “slave” of a male “master” in a BDSM relationship alongside the reported increased rates of sexual activity in such relationships.
The search for this passion, in another, and in themselves in response to another, when taken to extremes can be called “being in love, with being in love.” The vampire in the minds of many, represents power, irresistable power, and that has stimulated some women looking at men for all the history we have knowledge of.
Well lemmesee…they’re already dead so that whole STD thing is right out, including pregnancy. Hedonism w/o consequences! Woohoo! Don’t have to work for a living, set your own hours, so long as they’re dark. And only the kewl kidz get turned into vamps, the losers are just a food source. You’ve also already been all you’re going to be so you can just do the self-inflicted grounghog day thing, over and over and over… I suppose that means that vamps are incapable of boredom, likely means they suffer from goldfish memory.
I’m all vampired and zombied and werewolfed out. We need a new monster fad. How about going back to giant monsters?
In Vampire Movie, there’s gotta be a confrontation between Renfield and PETA.
Very simple. Vampires control the flow of blood. And for them, that flow is inward.
Another strange literary obsession seems to be with organized crime. Why all the mafia and druglord glorification?
Maybe it’s power worship. Some people are obsessed with any sub-group of people who get to define what they want to do and somehow enforce it on everybody else. And those obsessed people would really like to be the ones doing the defining and enforcing.