The vampires who populate contemporary novels, films and TV series are strange
creatures. With their 19th century ancestors Bram Stoker's Dracula or
Sheridan LeFernu's Carmilla, they have only very little in common. Vampires in
their most recent incarnations are the opposite of vicious, lusting creatures.
They are tormented about their own natures as predators. They hardly suck
any blood. And what they want more than anything else is to be part of human
society. In her monograph Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach suggests that
each age gets the vampires it deserves. Representations of vampires, according to
this argument, are tropes employed to negotiate social and political
problems. As vampires are now once again ubiquitous in popular culture, they
provoke the question, what are the issues that are currently being
negotiated? In my following reading of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Saga, as well
as the TV series True Blood created by Alan Ball, I want to explore some of the
issues at stake. Despite the apparent globality of the vampire hype, I am
especially interested in how the trope of the vampire is currently used within
US American culture to negotiate issues of social power and ideological
ruptures. How does the trope of the vampire fit into the contemporary
American sociopolitical landscape? The thesis I want to advocate here is that
Twilight and True Blood, both tremendously successful with audiences,
position themselves at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Both deal with
questions of morality, ideology, and otherness using the trope of what I call
the domesticated vampire, yet they do so in very different ways. A central feature
of the iconography of vampires in Western European and North American
culture since the late 18th century has been the way vampires link racism, sexism,
homophobia, and anti-semitism. Vampires are transgressive. They cross boundaries.
They pollute. Shannon Winups explains. The vampire sucks blood, transferring an
illegitimate and disavowed substance, transforming his victims from the living
to the undead, giving birth without sex, trafficking in the strange and unruly
logics of fluids, mixing and spilling and infecting blood. The vampire pollutes
all systems of kinship, pollutes all systems of blood, pollutes all systems of
race and sex and desire that must be straight. Vampire representations, however,
began to change in the 1970s as social perceptions of otherness changed. As women,
African Americans, and queers started to become recognized subjectivities, the
vampire iconography adapted. As Ingrid Talon notes, the revival of the vampire in
Anglophone popular culture and subcultures since the 1970s was, quote,
primarily characterized by a shift in perspective from an external
representation of the vampire as a threat to and intrusion into the Western
fictional world to the vampire and his or her perspective on the human world.
Vampires have become sympathetic characters who are attractive to the
reader. With a dramatic change in cultural attitudes towards marginalized
groups, the vampire has been claimed as a trope by the political left as a figure
of subversion. Donna Haraway, for instance, uses the vampire in this fashion to call
into question patriarchal family structures and to envision alternative
family bonds. If we now look at one of the latest vampire incarnations,
Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, we can see that Meyer also works in the mode
of the sympathetic vampire and even in a way radicalizes it. In contrast to
African-American author, Joel Gomez, for instance, or Donna Haraway, however, the
way the novels position themselves towards issues of race, sexuality, and
gender is, in effect, reactionary. Stephanie Meyer's Vampire Best Cutters,
which comprise a series of four novels entitled Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and
Breaking Dawn, hardly need any introduction. Targeted specifically at
teenage girls, they focus on the romance between 17-year-old Bella Swan and Edward
Cullen, who lives in the vampire family with adopted parents and siblings. The
texts narrate the voyage of Bella to watch conjugal bliss and immortality
with Edward, an old-fashioned guy who refuses to have sex with Bella before
their wedding. The wedding finally takes place at the beginning of book four,
though the sexual act itself remains blanked out in the space between two
paragraphs. Subsequently, Bella gives birth to their daughter, Renesmee, a child
half-human, half-vampire, and is turned into a vampire by Edward upon her own
request. The series ends after a dangerous attack on the Cullen family by
the feudal vampire rulers from Italy, the Volturi, has been averted, with a prospect
that Bella and Edward will exist together happily ever after. Meyer takes
the trope of the vampire and thoroughly reconfigures it. If, in the era of
Dracula, the vampire represented the devil, the Antichrist, Meyer's texts
associate the vampires of the Cullen family with angels. They're stunningly
beautiful and have achieved a state of eternal perfection. Bella is drawn to the
pure beauty and longs to become one of them. This desire for immortality, which
the text conveys in the figure of Bella, is deeply rooted in Christian rhetoric.
Significantly, Twilight starts out with an epigraph taken from the Bible.
Meyer quotes Genesis. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt
not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
The quote, of course, alludes to man's fall from grace, brought on by Eve's seduction
and her eating from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Twilight, then,
attempts to undo or overcome the fall, as Bella, the text's new Eve, sacrifices her
human life in order to return to a state of innocence. The text, however, also makes
clear that vampires are not good per se, but only those vampires who are able to
control their desires. The Cullen family, who have taken to a diet of animal blood
in order to spare human lives, are ethical vampires who refuse to be monsters.
They are presented as new world vampires, in stark contrast to the feudal rulers
in the vampire world, the Volturi, in old Europe, who think of humans as food.
Carlisle Cullen, the head of the family, specifically came to the United States in
order to live without being a demon. The troubling aspect of all this goodness,
however, is the way the vampires' ethics are directly related to a white heteronormative
family ideal. The Cullens are not only good, but also economically powerful, driving expensive
sports cars and having more cash at their disposal than they could possibly ever spend.
The text sets the white, beautiful Cullens, in contrast to their antagonists, the werewolf
from the Killute tribe. The members of this Native American tribe are consistently described
in darker tones. They appear as savages in comparison to the Cullens, who cultivate their
refined tastes by listening to classical music and reading philosophical books.
This way, Twilight incorporates a racial subtext, which perpetuates stereotypes that associate
whites with the life of the mind, and blacks or Native Americans with physicality and primitivism.
Twilight has foremost been criticized for its regulation of female sexuality, and we talked about
that in other panels today as well. In fact, the texts often read like 18th-century sentimental
novels. In the first volume, Twilight, main protagonist and first person narrator Bella,
frequently immerses herself into Jane Austen novels, which are directly linked to her budding
romance with Edward Cullen. Bella herself often appears like the heroine of a sentimental
novel who needs to be protected. She frequently faints or has accidents, during which Edward
dutifully appears as her guardian angel with fangs. It is telling that Twilight does not
refer to the tradition of other vampire texts, but rather alludes to the sentimental fictions
of Jane Austen. The last volume in the series, Breaking Dawn, stylizes Bella as the central
figure of reconciliation, who brings together antagonistic forces of vampires and werewolves,
and who protects her family against the Volturi. The ending, in which the Volturi come and threaten
the American family idol, once more emphasizes the Cullen's allegedly more advanced civilization.
The Volturi are the last enemy to the life of love and beauty the Cullens have created. With
their defeat, the novel projects ultimate closure. Twilight thus appropriates the trope of the
vampire, which during the last decades has become a trope of resistance for essentially conservative
ends. The series takes the figure which pollutes and destabilizes and turns it into a signifier
of eternal perfection and closure. The threatening other, here represented by the werewolves and the
Volturi, in this scheme is subsumed or negated. In True Blood, the alleged purity of vampires,
which Twilight proposes, is more contested. The vampires in True Blood share some of the
features of domestication, but actually the series negotiates the very question of whether
the other can be fully domesticated. The show is set in Bonton, Louisiana and revolves around
telepathic waitress Suki Stackhouse, who falls in love with vampire Bill Compton.
The vampires have recently come out of the coffin. They have revealed themselves to humans
after Japanese scientists had been successful in creating synthetic blood,
which can serve as a substitute nutrition for vampires. In a sense then, in True Blood,
the vampires of Twilight have evolved to the next level, as they mainstream to be accepted by
society. As Suki and Bill first meet, the vampires struggle for equal rights as going on. The vampire
rights league is fighting for an amendment to the Constitution, which would grant vampires equality
while conservative Christians are fighting against it. The series thereby stages social
conflicts familiar in contemporary American society. True Blood presents vampires as a literal
category of an other which exists besides differences like race and sexuality. In contrast
to Twilight, the politics of True Blood are more complicated. True Blood attempts to blur boundaries,
as the opening scene of the series illustrates. As you will see in a moment, the show establishes
a complex scenario in which it is already difficult to distinguish who is a vampire
and who is human. And the scene I'm going to show is really the opening of the very first episode.
I mean, come on, doesn't your race have a rather sordid history of
exploiting and feeding off innocent people for centuries?
Three points. Number one, show me argumentation. Doesn't exist. Number two, doesn't your race have a history
of exploitation? Are we ever old slaves, Bill, or detonated nuclear weapons? And most of
the point, number three, now that the Japanese have perfected synthetic blood, which satisfies
all of our nutritional needs, there is no reason for anyone to fear us. I can assure you that every
member of our community is now drinking synthetic blood. That's why we decided to make our existence
known. We just want to be part of mainstream society.
You didn't know that New Orleans is a mecca for the vampire? Seriously, I mean, New Orleans,
even after training, didn't they all drown? Vampires cannot drown because we do not breathe.
Dude, no harm intended.
We're just a little drunk. Nice. I could use a cocktail.
Score. I totally had you there. That wasn't funny.
No, Kelly, that was pretty funny. I didn't think it was funny.
Oh, we don't care what you think.
Dude, do you know where it's going to be, Jesus?
No. I knew this girl who knew this guy who knew that blood during Greek week. She like clawed
her own face off. Seriously, I can make good money. Okay, you take me to leave.
Fuck you, Billy Bob. Fuck me. I'll fuck you, boy. I'll fuck you. And then I'll eat you.
Oh.
You will pretend to be one of us again.
And I'll kill you. Got it? Yeah.
Have a nice day now.
Okay. Okay. So the scene establishes the central premise of the series that is the vampires coming
out. The rural southern setting in the truck stop is contrasted with a TV talk show in the background
in which the representative of the vampire rights league advocates vampires complete
mainstreaming. The sleek blonde professional who throws back accusations about centuries of racial
crimes at her interlocutor stands in opposition to the creepy sales assistant behind the counter.
Yet, as it turns out, while he seems to be enamored with the symbols of the undead,
the real vampire comes disguised as a redneck. Thus, this very first scene is both funny and
unsettling. In the logic of the series, southern rednecks would be the kind of radicals to pursue
and lynch vampires. The vampire in this scene thus has taken on the identity of one of his
oppressors. Simultaneously, the shop assistant, of course, also toys with the danger of vampirism.
The stone couple coming into the store and asking for V, that is for vampire blood which humans
consume as a drug in the series, adds another dimension to the picture, that of the reverse
consumption of vampire blood by humans. In true blood, the relations between humans and vampires
are not hierarchical in any clean-cut way. Vampires frequently become the victims of human
violence and abuse, while on the other hand, some vampires resisting mainstreaming keep human sex
slaves. And I was going to show a second scene, but somehow the video got messed up, so it doesn't
work anymore, which I'm not blaming on supernatural forces, but on Microsoft, but anyway. So, I will
just talk a little bit at the end. And the only thing that I could still squeeze out of my video
is this screenshot, which, well, might give a little bit of an illustration. So, the second
scene is from episode five of the first season, in which Bill, vampire Bill, agrees to give an
address to the descendants of the glorious dead, which is a club engaged in remembering and learning
about the Civil War. And he, when he was still human, he served as a soldier in the Civil War,
so he's like the last remaining contemporary witness of that war. So, in this scene, what we
get, that Southern history, and particularly the racial history of the South, is called up again.
As a soldier in that war, Bill, of course, was complicit to the Southern oppressors and
slave owners, and now, as a vampire, he is part of a minority that is socially oppressed.
The scene here, and I think that you can see that, also nicely in the screenshot, establishes the
vampire as a voice of morality, basically. Significantly, the event takes place in a church,
and Bill speaks to his audience much like a minister to his congregation. And his morality is,
first of all, established by the fact that he is immune to the harm of Christian symbols,
like crosses or the Bible, that he's immune to this harm that these symbols supposedly exert on
vampires. So, if vampires were traditionally associated with the devil, Bill here offers words
of reconciliation and the utopian hope of a possible community and life together between
vampires and humans. And in this scene, this moral message is also reinforced by the crosscuts
between images of Bill and some of the members of his audience. And there's this one instance where
one woman says, well, her son says, oh, this vampire, he's so white. And she says, oh, no, he's
dead. We are white. He's dead. So, in that way, she firmly tries to keep up a racial boundary
between herself and the vampire. And thus, the racism against which the series takes a stand is
highlighted. And in Bill's speech, there is contained a lot of pathos, but it is simultaneously
also ironically undermined. As Bill recounts his involvement in the Civil War, he stresses his
honesty and integrity, claiming that he and his comrades entered the war with little awareness of
the ideological conflict at stake. As he outlines how he and his friends believed in a higher
calling, we, in fact, get to see a close-up of Suki Stackhouse's brother, Jason, who has actually
appeared high on V at the gathering. So, in this scene, the pathos tips and is ironically broken.
And so, I would argue that the images we get with the very pathetic speech also suggest some kind
of ambivalence. So, coming to my conclusion, Twilight and True Blood used the same trope,
the domesticated vampire, and both representations are deeply involved in questions of morality and
ideology. However, they pursue different politics. Twilight presents an aesthetics which perpetuates
a conservative morality in which the other has been entirely domesticated. True Blood, in contrast,
resists the fixation of meaning Twilight engages in, staging the very social conflicts that Twilight
suppresses. True Blood presents a meta-discourse on the politics of integration in U.S. society.
It plays ironically with categories of difference, advocating a liberal political position.
Ultimately, however, I would also claim that the series possesses little subversive edge.
Naturalizing vampires as a literal category of the other, the series may divert attention from
the racism and sexism which still do exist very much in American society by projecting it on an
other that's fantastic and that does not exist in society. So, one may thus raise the question,
what function do the fantastic elements in the series actually have? And there, I would
suspect that their prime function may be to help the show, to give its audiences what they want
without disturbing too many fast-held beliefs. Thank you.