Let’s say you have two pale, attractive young men in a room. Bill and Ed, let’s call them. Now, put one of these handsome young men in sunlight and his skin turns smoky and black and flakes off his body. Put the other in the same conditions and his skin sparkles. “Like diamonds.” Night and day, right? Polar opposites, the logical man would declare. But he would be wrong: they are both vampires. Hollywood vampires, anyway, the sort that has pervaded 2008’s offerings. They are Bill Compton and Edward Cullen, respectively, stars of HBO’s True Blood and the shockingly popular movie Twilight. Bill might snarl at the comparison or brandish those switch blade teeth of his but the two are not so different as their sun allergies might suggest…
Vampires have always been sexier than their fellow monsters (Brad Pitt AND David Boreanas have filled the role). No one has ever asked to be turned into a werewolf. It seems generally agreed that being a werewolf sucks. But people run to vampires, fall in love with them. Some run away screaming, sure, but others beg to be turned into one themselves. You want possible salvation after you get old and die, or do you want to go with the sure thing immortal sexiness? Even with the whole murder thing, the attraction is obvious.
Giddyup!
So that’s why it’s so disheartening to see this history-of-film-spanning anti-hero extraordinaire castrated so thoroughly. Edward, for instance, comes from a family of (frightfully attractive and pleasantly incestuous) “vegetarian” vampires, meaning they have sworn off human blood and live off of animals. It’s not very satisfying, they say, but it sustains them. They also do not sleep. As mentioned, the sun does not harm them, merely makes them sparkle. They read minds. They do not require invites to enter a home. They live in an open, airy mansion with huge windows and high ceilings, and Edward even makes light of their lofty existence, asking “What did you expect, coffins and dungeons and moats?” when his little girlfriend (who he refers to, alternately, as his spider monkey, a lamb, and “his own personal brand of heroin”) first visits. Well, Ed, yes, you seem to have cherry-picked all of the best parts of being a vampire–hotness, immortality, strength–and left the sun problem and necessity of murdering people to old fashioned vampires. There is no down side here. Bill Compton, from True Blood, on the other hand, still has to sleep underground at night. The sun will still kill him. His most serious deviation from vamps past is living off of True Blood, a synthetic blood substitute invented by the Japanese, for some reason. Similarly, True Blood provides sustenance but not satisfaction. Plenty of vampires still hunt humans. But a large part, including Bill, are “mainstreaming,” joining American society as nocturnal citizens. Either way, neither Bill nor Ed proves a threat to anyone, especially not their mortal human lovers. Interview with a Vampire pioneered the vampire living off of animals to avoid killing thing, but Brad Pitt lived with other vampires or alone, miserable, sucking on rats. Now Bill can pop open a cold True Blood; Ed can kill a pig more humanely than a butcher does. They may be immortal but they’re hardly vampires.
Generic True Blood shot.
Maybe it’s not their fault, though. Maybe it’s us, needing this new vampire-lite offering to placate us in a time of need. Placing trends in film in the context of its age is always a fun little exercise so let’s see where that gets us with the handsome harmless duo of Bill and Ed.
Could they be a response to the geopolitical issues facing us? None of the vamps in any of these depictions enjoy their blood substitute, but they stick to for moral reasons. Wouldn’t it be nice if our own enemies did that? What if terrorists, instead of jihading all over our perfectly nice cities, took to wrecking their sons’ Lego sets instead? Or maybe Russia could be satisfied by a nice long game of Risk instead of flexing their muscle in eastern Europe. After all, Bill Compton once roved the land, sucking the blood of innocents, but now look at what a nice house and cute little girlfriend he’s got himself. Or maybe it’s the economy! Yeah, Edward Cullen was in a “moral downturn” when he used to kill people but, hey, now he just kills animals instead. If he can pull off a bailout on his soul, maybe Wall Street will be okay after all.
Silliness aside, Edward’s perfect Aryan vampire clan in Twilight puts too much faith in the human race. The poor dad doesn’t delight in killing his enemy, because he hates to harm any creature. What the fuck? So it’s our Western values that will vanquish evil through assimilation, then, is it? Vamps in True Blood, while many still stick to the older, bitier ways, have a PR person defending them on national TV. Immortal hell-spawn or no, that sounds pretty damn American to me.
Angel from Buffy (and Angel), the most obvious precursor to the current sexy vampire with a soul, still had to drink human blood. And Brad Pitt also drank animal blood in Interview with a Vampire, but instead of comparing it to “tofu” like the papa vamp in Twilight does, chokes on rat blood and suffers for his choice. The Cullens, on the other hand, get enough energy from animal blood to play a spirited game of baseball whenever there is a thunderstorm to disguise the boom of their bats hitting the ball. God Twilight sucks so bad please don’t see it.
Another vampire film released in 2008 very different from those starring Bill and Ed is Sweden’s Let the Right One In. It certainly has its own problems, but at least it kept things creepy. The twelve year old girl vampire was eerie enough, and on top of that she has a disturbingly sexual relationship with a 12 year old boy, and a murderous man servant, and her fucking face bleeds if she enters a house uninvited. That she doesn’t attract the same hoards of admirers as Edward Cullen’s real human actor counterpart is upsetting to me. He only drinks animal blood. She decapitates people. It shouldn’t even be a contest.
In conclusion, True Blood and Twilight borrow the vampire only to enliven their own dull stories. Many Southerners are intolerant of gays. Yep. But what do Southerners think about vampires? Whoa! And this handsome teen boy is attracted to this kind of pretty teen girl. Okay. But he’s a vampire! Ahh!
From Nosferatu to Near Dark, vampires have been our fears and anxieties and ambiguous attitude toward self-serving greed and lust. Bill and Eddy, though, borrow from that rich history and dilute it. If their kind comes to dominate the field, all of those victims, all of those many gallons of blood throughout the decades, will have been drained in vain.
