Post by hibernicus on May 15, 2014 23:19:13 GMT
In the IRISH TIMES of May 10 Fintan O'Toole has a column lamenting that while vampires and zombies are more widespread in popular culture than ever before, they have been stripped of their political charge; where vampires were once recognised as symbolising oppressive aristocrats (he correctly notes the vampire metaphor was extensively used by nineteenth-century nationalists and land campaigners to denounce landlordism. O'Toole attributes this to the Famine but in fact I know of pre-Famine usage of the metaphor) and zombies were recognised as a symbol of exploitation and forced labour, they have now become depoliticised.
www.irishtimes.com/culture/culture-shock-how-the-undead-have-moved-from-macabre-to-mainstream-1.1789658
EXTRACTS (REPRODUCED FOR PURPOSE OF FAIR COMMENT)
At some point when I was asleep, pretty-boy vampires came in the night and stole the hearts (and the brains) of teenage girls. The undead are arguably more alive now in western culture than at any time since the spread of Christianity.
But they’re also more harmless. Vampires and zombies used to be images of exploitation, inventions that told a truth about the nature of the capitalist and imperial economies. But the vampires have been defanged and the zombies have become creatures of consumerist desire.
There is now a strange gulf between the way vampires and zombies live in economics and the role they play in culture. In the first arena they retain some critical power. When the western banking systems went into crisis in 2007 the metaphor of choice was “zombie bank”. Protesters outside the old Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin had themselves made up as zombies. The message was clear: this is a dead bank, still moving only through transfusions of public money. Even the Economist ran headlines on bank stories such as “Blight of the living dead”....
But these images of zombies as the exploited and vampires as the exploiters have been largely stripped away in contemporary culture. McNally writes that “the idea of the zombie as a living-dead labourer was displaced in American cultural production in the late 1960s by that of the ghoulish consumer”. Today’s commercial zombies are defined by their hunger to consume human flesh, not by the forced labour that turns them into automatons. The link with slavery has been broken.
Vampires, meanwhile, have become harmless, even cuddly. At the most extreme end of the process they have been neutered as well as defanged: in the Twilight saga, vampires open a safe zone for adolescent fantasy. The gorgeous vampire Edward and his family have voluntarily given up sucking human blood and get their sustenance from animals instead. (Garth Ennis prefigures this with much more humour in his Preacher comics, where the Irish vampire, Prionsias Cassidy, gets his blood from lamb chops.)
Contemporary pop culture has reconfigured the vampire as, at worst, a romantic outsider, a version of the 19th-century poète maudit. Not a landlord, colonial overlord or capitalist exploiter in sight. It’s enough to make Michael Davitt rise from his grave.
END
Now there is indeed some truth in this analysis, but O'Toole has simplified matters to fit his particular analysis, and in one important respect has glossed over how political/cultural developments he favours have contributed to the reimagining of the image of the vampire.
This point is that present-day depictions of vampires and zombies often have a subtext of sexual radicalism; vampirism and being a zombie are implicitly equated with alternative sexual orientations (sometimes also with racial or ethnic minorities), and vampire-hunters and zombie-killers are equated with racist vigilantes and queer-bashers.
In relation to the zombies, what O'Toole leaves out in his discussion of the origins of the metaphor is that the older 1930s and on- zombie films expect you to fear the zombies and identify unequivocally with those stalked by them, even if those stalked have to some extent brought it on themselves. It is actually the post-1960s zombie movies of George A Romero and Co who directly present the zombies as oppressed proletarians and imply that the living have brought it on themselves and are as bad as, if not worse than the walking dead. O'Toole also fails to note that the equation of zombieism with consumerism contains an implicit criticism of consumerism as dehumanising, seen for example in Romero's second film THE DAY OF THE DEAD which features zombies roaming round a shopping mall because it was the place of greatest spiritual significance in their lives, or Max Brooks' novel WORLD WAR Z [not the film based on it] in which the zombie invasion symbolises the fear that the present-day consumerist economy is unsustainable and founded on exploitation and delusion; in order to defeat the zombies the US has to recreate the producerist New Deal economy in which people actually make things instead of supplying inane consumerist spectacles, and to go back to the mass-mobilised armies of World War II.
Similarly, O'Toole's view of the contemporary vampire image seems to be drawn almost exclusively from the TWILIGHT books and movies, which are relatively anodyne/restrained as they are influenced by Mormon theology. There is quite a lot of mass-circulation vampire material which is much more consciously sexually transgressive.
This of course draws on something which was present from the beginning in the image of the vampire. The original vogue of the vampire presented them as glamorous and destructive demon lovers (modelled on Lord Byron), or rapists (Bram Stoker's original Dracula - as distinct from his later reimaginings in other media - is physically repulsive yet has power over women, the sort of creep who hangs around nightclub bars waiting for the chance to slip Rohypnol into a woman's drink and then offer to "help her find a taxi"). This is part of the image of vampire as aristocrat - the image of aristocrats as rapists who get away with their crimes because they are above the law, or seducers who use their power and wealth to dazzle their victims and encompass their destruction, is a major part of C19 literary culture and indeed of real life (that's why THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, with Count Almaviva's defeated attempt to seduce Figaro's wife, had such a revolutionary charge; and de Sade was very selfconsciously an aristocrat who assumed he was above the law, and fans of his work have tended to see themselves as a superior and secret few). The idea of irresponsible and destructive promiscuity, of unequal and exploitative relationships based on seduction, as opposed to an ideal of marriage based on total mutual commitment, is deeply involved in the original image of the vampire - and Michael Davitt saw involvement in social purity campaigns and denunciation of aristocratic vice as part and parcel of his attack on aristocracy.
A significant source of the glamourisation and consumerisation of the vampire has been precisely the sexual revolution, the idea that permanence and restraint in sexuality are undesirable and seduction and transgression in fact constitute indispensable liberation. Fintan O'Toole doesn't get this because he is all in favour of the sexual revolution as liberation from constraint, and is not willing to acknowledge its inherently destructive elements.
Similarly, another source of the banalisation of vampire and zombie is their employment as a nihilist myth of atheism. Stoker's book and older film versions quite clearly place the vampire within a Christian framework by which he is contained and defeated, but newer ones imply that if God is involved at all He is an inscrutable and unjust Authority and the vampire His victim (oddly enough, this is precisely in line with O'Toole's selective use of the romantic-satanist myth of revolt to underpin his own political agenda, without acknowledging that it undermines any political agenda at all other than transgression for its own sake). Likewise, the zombie myth always had as a subliminal element the fear that God is an illusion and we are nothing but walking corpses, whose sheer materiality and eventual decomposition into rotting meat shows up the ideas of afterlife and redemption as pathetic wishful thinking. This is completely explicit in a lot of recent zombie representations.
In other words, Fintan O'Toole does not recognise that the banalisation of the horror genre, its denial of the existence of real evil (which O'Toole equates with capitalist and aristocratic domination) derives from other parts of his agenda (atheism, sexual revolution). Perhaps, you might say, O'Toole's big problem is that he can't acknowledge that he is a vampire himself - metaphorically speaking.
[ADDENDUM - I wish to emphasise that my comparison of Fintan O'Toole to a vampire refers only to his principles and their logical implications for society as a whole, not to his personal life which I hear is blameless.]
www.irishtimes.com/culture/culture-shock-how-the-undead-have-moved-from-macabre-to-mainstream-1.1789658
EXTRACTS (REPRODUCED FOR PURPOSE OF FAIR COMMENT)
At some point when I was asleep, pretty-boy vampires came in the night and stole the hearts (and the brains) of teenage girls. The undead are arguably more alive now in western culture than at any time since the spread of Christianity.
But they’re also more harmless. Vampires and zombies used to be images of exploitation, inventions that told a truth about the nature of the capitalist and imperial economies. But the vampires have been defanged and the zombies have become creatures of consumerist desire.
There is now a strange gulf between the way vampires and zombies live in economics and the role they play in culture. In the first arena they retain some critical power. When the western banking systems went into crisis in 2007 the metaphor of choice was “zombie bank”. Protesters outside the old Anglo Irish Bank headquarters on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin had themselves made up as zombies. The message was clear: this is a dead bank, still moving only through transfusions of public money. Even the Economist ran headlines on bank stories such as “Blight of the living dead”....
But these images of zombies as the exploited and vampires as the exploiters have been largely stripped away in contemporary culture. McNally writes that “the idea of the zombie as a living-dead labourer was displaced in American cultural production in the late 1960s by that of the ghoulish consumer”. Today’s commercial zombies are defined by their hunger to consume human flesh, not by the forced labour that turns them into automatons. The link with slavery has been broken.
Vampires, meanwhile, have become harmless, even cuddly. At the most extreme end of the process they have been neutered as well as defanged: in the Twilight saga, vampires open a safe zone for adolescent fantasy. The gorgeous vampire Edward and his family have voluntarily given up sucking human blood and get their sustenance from animals instead. (Garth Ennis prefigures this with much more humour in his Preacher comics, where the Irish vampire, Prionsias Cassidy, gets his blood from lamb chops.)
Contemporary pop culture has reconfigured the vampire as, at worst, a romantic outsider, a version of the 19th-century poète maudit. Not a landlord, colonial overlord or capitalist exploiter in sight. It’s enough to make Michael Davitt rise from his grave.
END
Now there is indeed some truth in this analysis, but O'Toole has simplified matters to fit his particular analysis, and in one important respect has glossed over how political/cultural developments he favours have contributed to the reimagining of the image of the vampire.
This point is that present-day depictions of vampires and zombies often have a subtext of sexual radicalism; vampirism and being a zombie are implicitly equated with alternative sexual orientations (sometimes also with racial or ethnic minorities), and vampire-hunters and zombie-killers are equated with racist vigilantes and queer-bashers.
In relation to the zombies, what O'Toole leaves out in his discussion of the origins of the metaphor is that the older 1930s and on- zombie films expect you to fear the zombies and identify unequivocally with those stalked by them, even if those stalked have to some extent brought it on themselves. It is actually the post-1960s zombie movies of George A Romero and Co who directly present the zombies as oppressed proletarians and imply that the living have brought it on themselves and are as bad as, if not worse than the walking dead. O'Toole also fails to note that the equation of zombieism with consumerism contains an implicit criticism of consumerism as dehumanising, seen for example in Romero's second film THE DAY OF THE DEAD which features zombies roaming round a shopping mall because it was the place of greatest spiritual significance in their lives, or Max Brooks' novel WORLD WAR Z [not the film based on it] in which the zombie invasion symbolises the fear that the present-day consumerist economy is unsustainable and founded on exploitation and delusion; in order to defeat the zombies the US has to recreate the producerist New Deal economy in which people actually make things instead of supplying inane consumerist spectacles, and to go back to the mass-mobilised armies of World War II.
Similarly, O'Toole's view of the contemporary vampire image seems to be drawn almost exclusively from the TWILIGHT books and movies, which are relatively anodyne/restrained as they are influenced by Mormon theology. There is quite a lot of mass-circulation vampire material which is much more consciously sexually transgressive.
This of course draws on something which was present from the beginning in the image of the vampire. The original vogue of the vampire presented them as glamorous and destructive demon lovers (modelled on Lord Byron), or rapists (Bram Stoker's original Dracula - as distinct from his later reimaginings in other media - is physically repulsive yet has power over women, the sort of creep who hangs around nightclub bars waiting for the chance to slip Rohypnol into a woman's drink and then offer to "help her find a taxi"). This is part of the image of vampire as aristocrat - the image of aristocrats as rapists who get away with their crimes because they are above the law, or seducers who use their power and wealth to dazzle their victims and encompass their destruction, is a major part of C19 literary culture and indeed of real life (that's why THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, with Count Almaviva's defeated attempt to seduce Figaro's wife, had such a revolutionary charge; and de Sade was very selfconsciously an aristocrat who assumed he was above the law, and fans of his work have tended to see themselves as a superior and secret few). The idea of irresponsible and destructive promiscuity, of unequal and exploitative relationships based on seduction, as opposed to an ideal of marriage based on total mutual commitment, is deeply involved in the original image of the vampire - and Michael Davitt saw involvement in social purity campaigns and denunciation of aristocratic vice as part and parcel of his attack on aristocracy.
A significant source of the glamourisation and consumerisation of the vampire has been precisely the sexual revolution, the idea that permanence and restraint in sexuality are undesirable and seduction and transgression in fact constitute indispensable liberation. Fintan O'Toole doesn't get this because he is all in favour of the sexual revolution as liberation from constraint, and is not willing to acknowledge its inherently destructive elements.
Similarly, another source of the banalisation of vampire and zombie is their employment as a nihilist myth of atheism. Stoker's book and older film versions quite clearly place the vampire within a Christian framework by which he is contained and defeated, but newer ones imply that if God is involved at all He is an inscrutable and unjust Authority and the vampire His victim (oddly enough, this is precisely in line with O'Toole's selective use of the romantic-satanist myth of revolt to underpin his own political agenda, without acknowledging that it undermines any political agenda at all other than transgression for its own sake). Likewise, the zombie myth always had as a subliminal element the fear that God is an illusion and we are nothing but walking corpses, whose sheer materiality and eventual decomposition into rotting meat shows up the ideas of afterlife and redemption as pathetic wishful thinking. This is completely explicit in a lot of recent zombie representations.
In other words, Fintan O'Toole does not recognise that the banalisation of the horror genre, its denial of the existence of real evil (which O'Toole equates with capitalist and aristocratic domination) derives from other parts of his agenda (atheism, sexual revolution). Perhaps, you might say, O'Toole's big problem is that he can't acknowledge that he is a vampire himself - metaphorically speaking.
[ADDENDUM - I wish to emphasise that my comparison of Fintan O'Toole to a vampire refers only to his principles and their logical implications for society as a whole, not to his personal life which I hear is blameless.]