The First 21st Century Vampires

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A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930’s, and in its place offered a vibrantly modern model for the character, reflecting the unique culture, ethos, and mores of the 21st century. True Blood, I’m realizing, is now doing the same for that other undying superhuman trope: the vampire.

Of course, the vampire has been undead for a lot longer. The earliest recorded vampire myth dates back to Babylonia, about 4,000 years ago, and over the millennia it has appeared in almost every culture. But lets cut to the chase: 1922 was year vampires broke ground in film (though, technically, they’d made a few cameos before then). It was the year F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” came out.

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Take a good look. That’s what a movie vampire used to be. A creature no teen girl, or anyone else for that matter, would want to see as a lead in a summer mystical romance franchise. In all the silent films that featured vampires there was always a clear and consistent view: here be monsters.

While this original archetype might have undergone a radical transformation over the past 80+ years of cinema — from grotesque monster to, ironically, heartthrob, a result of the only evolutionary force vampires are actually subject to: sexual selection, naturally — don’t be fooled. Just because Twilight’s Edward Cullen or the whatever-their-names-are characters of The Vampire Diaries happen to be getting panties in a twist at the moment, they are not in any way contemporary. Much has been made about the exceptionally “old-fashioned” gender roles in Twilight, but that analysis is basically missing the forest for one tree. Think about it: is there ANYTHING that happens in Twilight that could not have happened just as easily 50 years ago? You could turn Twilight into a 1950’s period piece and basically NOTHING about the major plot points, dialogue, personalities, relationships, or motivations — of either the vampires OR humans in this saga — would need to change. This does not a 21st century story make. In fact, if you’re curious about exactly why Twilight is so popular, the mechanics of this process are actually quite timeless:

Twilight’s preternatural hotties aren’t so much throwbacks as they are completely out of time. The story could be happening in any age; its characters’ capacity to reflect some kind of cultural context is irrelevant, probably detrimental.

The predominant Millennial quality that grounds Iron Man in the 21st century, I wrote, is transparency. In his total openness about everything from his deepest secret to his fleeting impulses he is as “post-privacy” as Facebook would have us all become. To suggest that True Blood’s vampires are uniquely modern because they too, like Tony Stark, have revealed their secret identity to the world, would be easy — it is, after all the premise that the entire show is based on — but it wouldn’t be accurate. For Stark, radical transparency is a way of life. You never have to wonder what Tony Stark is thinking because it’s usually exactly what’s coming out of his mouth at any given moment. The vampires on true blood are anything but transparent. Their secret truths and ulterior motives are consistently obscure. Tellingly, even Sookie Stackhouse, the show’s mind-reader, can’t penetrate their thoughts. Despite a superficial simulation, transparency is not really a quality that connects True Blood’s vampires to the modern age. But you know what does?

Recycling.

These vampires are environmentally conscious! Hey, it’s the  the 21st century, caring about the environment is hot! In fact, in the wake of the BP Oil Spill disaster which has affected all the Gulf states — chief among them, Louisiana, True Blood’s setting — there is a subtly startling undercurrent of environmentalism running through this season’s sublot. At one point, Russell Edgington, the 3,000-year old vampire King of Mississippi, a new character introduced this season, rhapsodizes, “I mean, do you remember how the air used to smell? How humans used to smell? How they used to taste?” Earlier, the vampire Queen of Louisiana describes a rare delicacy: “A Latvian boy. Has to be tasted to be believed. Not polluted like most humans. Tastes exactly the way they used to taste before the industrial revolution fucked everything to hell.” When Russell asks rhetorically, “What other creature actively destroys its own habitat,” one imagines these vampires didn’t need to see an Inconvenient Truth because they’ve lived it. They may be blood-sucking fiends but destroying the planet is below even their standards.

Nevertheless, consumer culture that they’ve lived to find themselves in, they’re not beyond shopping at the mall. (Looking good is, after all, a vampire priority.)

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No doubt, there’ll be some anecdote about a vampire shopping online eventually. Most likely Eric will get there before Bill, I’m assuming, based on this classic exchange from season 1:

Eric: “I sent you three texts, why didn’t you reply?”
Bill: “I hate using the number keys to type.”

In fact, while Bill might be True Blood’s most conservative vampire (how postmodern!) — his education on how to be a vampire for the 17-year old girl he’s just been forced to turn into one is about as awkward and evasive as the birds and the bees talk from a religious dad — Eric is, arguably, its most progressive. That is, he has no fear of progress. Eric might be 1,000 years old but he’s as naturally at ease with his tech gadgets as any “digital native.” So far, he’s the only vampire I’ve seen use a bluetooth device. Ever.

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As the proprietor of a popular vampire bar called Fangtasia, Eric clearly recognized “The Great Revelation” — as the vampires call their coming out to the world — as a great business opportunity. Entrepreneurship is an unexpected quality for a vampire in general — I mean, why bother with such pedestrian concerns when you’re immortal, right? On the other hand, what else would you do with an eternity of nights? Might as well launch a nightlife startup. According the Wall Street Journal, The Great Recession, which began in full force around the time True Blood first got on the air, is churning out ever more entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur.com reports, 8.7% of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in the second quarter of 2009, and they expect to see even more people starting their own businesses in 2010. So it’s no surprise that 21st century vampires would be business-minded. Upon visiting Fangtasia, Russell, himself a semi-silent owner of a werewolf bar in Mississippi called Lou Pines, even tells Eric, “We must talk of franchising.”

If being an entrepreneur isn’t your thing, there’s always the royal route: seizing assets from your subjects. In the vampire Queen’s case, that asset is vampire blood, which she then has other vampires move as black market narcotic. Since selling their blood is a high crime among vampires, it’s initially unclear why the Queen would be doing this. What inscrutable and ominous vampiric motives could she have? By season 3 it’s revealed that the Queen needs the money to pay off the IRS. For vampires in the 21st century, death might not be certain, but taxes are. Indeed, True Blood’s portrayal of vampire culture is more of a bureaucracy than any other cinematic depiction. After a religious fanatic suicide bomber self-detonates at a party in a vampire lair, killing a number of humans and vampires in attendance, there are, literally, forms that the lair’s owner has to fill out in this situation — a sequence that encapsulates the equally bizarre extremes of both the terrorism and banality of our age.

While just last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 initiative, which denies marriage rights to same-sex couples, was unconstitutional, on True Blood, same-sex couple Russell and Talbot have been married for 700 years. Homoerotica is by no means anything new in vampire lore, but gay marriage?? There’s a concept that barely existed in the public discourse before the 21st century. And Russell and Talbot’s relationship is exactly what you’d expect from a couple that’s been married for 7 centuries — anything but erotic. A particularly noticeable departure for the otherwise seriously agrosexual HBO series. Of course, the new phenomenon of marriage between vampire and human — which, though legal in the word of True Blood, is still highly controversial — has, from the show’s beginnings, served as a running metaphor for “marriage equality.” Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, as well as Six Feet Under, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, is not only someone who clearly understands a thing or two about the modern existential condition, he is also an openly gay man. No surprise, then that True Blood’s very opening credits sequence weekly drives home a starkly unfantastical image that connects vampires to that other minority fighting religious opposition for equal rights in the 21st century.

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“Alternative lifestyle,” an often-used euphemism for homosexuality, is actually a perfect way to describe True Blood’s approach to vampirism. Even the show’s brilliantly integrated marketing campaigns have sought to bring True Blood’s fictional world off the screen and into reality by treating vampires as an increasingly visible minority with their own lifestyle brands and targeted advertising:

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True Blood’s vampires even blog. Well, technically, it’s only Jessica, with her http://babyvamp-jessica.com blog, but as a 17 year-old who just became undead last year she’s the only Gen-Y vampire on the show, so obviously she’d be the one blogging — check out the awesomely pointless first few entries — 1, 2, 3 — this directionless experimentation with a new “toy” is exactly how a teenager would start a blog. (Vampire diaries?? Who the hell keeps a “diary” anymore in the age of social media? Sheesh.)

Overall, there is a deep, underlying theme about progress coursing through True Blood. “It’s vampires like you, who’ve been holding the rest of us back for centuries,” sneers Russell before destroying a Spanish Inquisition-era vampire Magister. It’s the vampires that are most hung up on the past who are some of the show’s craziest messes. The psychotic vampire Queen, who’s stuck in some perpetual 1940’s costume drama, has just been stripped of power; Lorena, whose inability to get over her past with Bill becomes her destruction; Eric’s newly-revealed 1,000 year old revenge obsession for the murder of his father will no doubt promptly lead him into some kind of trouble this season. Godric, Eric’s maker, even destroyed himself in part because after 2,000 years he could no longer bear that vampires had not progressed; that he hadn’t. Unlike the atemporal caricatures of the other franchises, True Blood’s vampires offer a uniquely compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman, relationship to it. We are living in a time when change, whether we like it or not, is coming at us so fast and furious we can barely comprehend it — speaking on a panel at Techonomy last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we now create 5 exabytes of data every two days, an amount equal to all the information created from the dawn of civilization through 2003. Who can really understand whatever the hell that even means?  True Blood’s vampires are at once representations of cultural change within the narrative of the show, and, likewise, must themselves confront a new millennium’s progress. Some adapt better than others. Some have more sinister interpretations of where progress should lead, but they, like the rest of us in the 21st century, either accept change, or deny it at their own peril.

    



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today’s awesome ad award goes to:

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I noticed this last night in a window of a corner store in my neighborhood and thought it was great. I’m not a native Spanish speaker but English wasn’t my first language either, so I understand what the message means beyond simply understanding what the words mean.

If you don’t know Spanish, what “Te extrano” is trying to say is “I miss you.” But it’s spelled incorrectly. It’s spelled in English. In Spanish it would be “Te extraño.” The little mark on top of the N, the tilde, turning the n into a letter that doesn’t exist in English, not an N but an Enye.  With the ñ the word sounds like “extranyo.” To say it otherwise just sounds like a strange, foreign mispronunciation–a mispronunciation you experience often if you’re Hispanic in the US. “Sin la ñ no es español” means: “Without the ñ, it’s not Spanish.

What I seriously dig about this message is that it manages to capture and reflect the experience of a particular population, a particular identity, and says “We understand.” That’s what the best advertising does.

    



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subliminal messages

The latest short film from London Squared Productions. Urban Anthropologists, Andy and Carolyn London interview some of New York City’s more overlooked citizens.

Love it!

    



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non-definition as a defined identity

The goal of all human activity can’t be reduced to the leaving of descendants. Once human culture was firmly in place it acquired new goals.
– Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee

right as i was in the process of rereading the third chimpanzee (i had to read it in college for sociobiology, and recently realized i’d forgotten half of it), a friend of mine forwarded me this NYmagazine article, The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School. “it’s very interesting in terms of trend ideas and stuff,” he told me. “i thought of you.”

the article follows a particular clique of kids (primarily girls) up at NYC’s stuyvesant high school, a magnet public school for some of the city’s créme de la créme teens (similar to my high school alma mater, boston latin). i read this piece in the same week as the NYTimes feature on the girls of newton north high (a suburb right outside of boston). the article was called For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too. it’s funny that i read these two articles in such proximity, because they actually came out within two months of each other and couldn’t be more divergent in what they present as the focus of the elite-educated, east coast, teenage girl experience.

the NYTimes says:

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

….If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.

two months earlier the NYMagazine article presented the findings of its own investigation into the workings of the contemporary teen female search for self:

Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.

while the “amazing girls” of newton north (it’s what their teachers and classmates call them) talk about lives overwhelmed sometimes to the point of nervous breakdown by the amount of work all their accelerated classes and extra curriculars demand, education is put into a completely different context by the girls of stuy’s cuddle puddle: because of their school’s superior education, one of the girls says, the students are more open-minded.

just as the intense academic pressure that is the focus of the NYTimes article is barely assigned an impact in the after-school lives documented by the NYMagazine article (“Sure, they drink and smoke and party, but in a couple of years, they’ll be drinking and smoking and partying at Princeton or MIT. They had to be pretty serious students to even get into Stuyvesant, which accepts only about 3 percent of its applicants.”) sexual identity exploration is completely brushed aside in the lives of the newton north girls.

This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better….. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends. I mean, girlfriends last longer.”

just to be clear, that’s “girlfriends” in a completely platonic sense, but the sentiment is at least the one bit of common ground between these two seemingly wholly divergent worlds. “Relationships are a bitch, dude,” says Alair, the 16-year old “punk-rock queen bee” of the NYMagazine piece. relationships also play a huge role in the process of defining one’s sexual identity, and they seem to be going out of style.

while the gauntlet of college acceptance is now more competitive than ever, i think the process of navigating sexual identity has now likewise become infinitely more complicated. and for the latter there is no standardized test prep-course.

from NYMagazine:

These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

the irony in this, of course, being that the very IDEA that “sexuality doesn’t have to define me” itself comes to define a particular identity. a particularly modern kind of identity that previous generations are ill-equipped to understand what the hell to do with.

“My mom’s like, ‘Alair, I don’t understand you. I want to be a parent to you but I have no control at all . . . As a person you’re awesome. You’re hilarious, you entertain me, you’re so cool. I would totally be your friend. But as your mother, I’m worried.’ ”

“To some it may sound like a sexual Utopia,” says the NYMagazine article. “Where labels have been banned and traditional gender roles surpassed, but it’s a complicated place to be.” it’s one thing to grow up in the suburbs, discover your personal non-status quo sexual identity, and move to some open-minded metropolitan place where you can create a community around this shared lifestyle-identity. it’s quite another to grow up in an environment where the very definition of sexual identity itself is the status quo you’re rebelling against. and though manhattan may be an island it is by no means isolated in this respect.

The Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories.

….It practically takes a diagram to plot all the various hookups and connections within the cuddle puddle. Elle’s kissed Jane and Jane’s kissed Alair and Alair’s kissed Elle. And then from time to time Elle hooks up with Nathan, but really only at parties, and only when Bethany isn’t around, because Nathan really likes Bethany, who doesn’t have a thing for girls but doesn’t have a problem with girls who do, either. Alair’s hooking up with Jason (who “kind of” went out with Jane once), even though she sort of also has a thing for Hector, who Jane likes, too—though Jane thinks it’s totally boring when people date people of the same gender. Ilia has a serious girlfriend, but girls were hooking up at his last party, which was awesome. Molly has kissed Alair, and Jane’s ex-girlfriend first decided she was bi while staying at Molly’s beach house on Fire Island. Sarah sometimes kisses Elle, although she has a boyfriend—he doesn’t care if she hooks up with other girls, since she’s straight anyway. And so on.

the article asks the question, how will this teenage experimentation eventually affect the way they choose to live their adult lives?

and i’m wondering how will it affect the way marketers talk to them?

a couple of months ago there was a bit of talk going on about Levi’s “Innovative Gay Marketing Move,” where levis produced two different versions of the same ad, one for a straight male audience, and one for a gay one. while the gay version premiered exclusively on MTV’s Logo network, whose programming is aimed at the gay community, the actual “innovation” in this dual-ad strategy that everyone latched on to seems to be simply the fact that the gay community was acknowledged at all on their own terms side by side with an approach to the straight demo. (so that only took about 40 years). levis, essentially, letting everyone know that they’re hip to the differing desires of these two identities as defined by sexual orientation. congratulations.

the question now is: how do you approach an identity that is defined not by gay or straight or even bisexual, but by its shared distaste for defining its new hybridity in those binary terms at all?

    



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branding the new impossible beauty ideal is nothing new

following up on the smash success of its award-winning “evolution” ad, dove unleashes “onslaught“:

much like the evolution ad, which shows the intense makeup and photoshop augmentation of an image of an average woman and at the end offers, “no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted,” while directing viewers to take part in dove’s Real Beauty workshop for girls, the new ad–aimed at the same north american audience–warns viewers (ostensibly parents, but perhaps every woman’s inner child) to “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.” the spot likewise ends with a plug for dove’s self esteem fund:

 

The Dove Self-Esteem Fund is a national resource established as a link to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, a program aimed at changing the current, narrow definition of beauty. We believe that to make a real difference, we must take action and contribute in ways that will help women and girls celebrate their individual beauty.”

uh-huh…

of course when dove claims to “change the current narrow definition of beauty” they only aim to do so….narrowly. unilever, which is responsible for dove, also sells the fair and lovely “skin whitening” product to areas of the world where a dark complexion means you’re not getting invited to the “individual beauty” celebration:

and see, what you think you’re seeing here is a contradiction….but the reality is you’re not. although, no doubt, it’s easy to get confused about how that could be.

the same way that light skin is now a beauty ideal in india, being–as the national youth anti-drug media campaign would call it–“above the influence” of the beauty industry is the new beauty ideal in north america. the new unattainable beauty standard is the transcendent personal victory over the distorted beauty ideal itself. as viable an achievement as a victory in the war on drugs or giselle’s body.

unilever is, in fact, selling just as equally an unrealistic standard in both messages. considering that dove is about as much a “beauty” (or is it “nonbeauty” now?) product as fair and lovey–which is essentially just sunscreen, more or less–is a “skin whitener” it makes perfect sense that the messaging likewise would actually be so consistent. and in the case of the north american version, unsettlingly prescient.

as someone who’s worked in fashion PR, i can verily attest that ain’t no one hates the folks in the fashion and beauty industry more than they hate themselves. will all that self-loathing one day be enough to launch a whole “war on beauty?”

if it is, i’m sure dove films will be winning awards for its PSAs.

    



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