Three recent films/series use the plight of fantastical beings (vampires, mutants, aliens) trying to gain acceptance into society as metaphors for the real life struggles of embattled, minority groups. Is the metaphor successful, or does it also work against its apparent progressivism by indulging in the very stereotypes it claims to resist? But first, a brief summary:
* True Blood uses the fictional acceptance of vampires into society as a metaphor for how the United States regards the gay community and the gay rights struggle. (A stream of amusing markers draws clear parallels between the two: in the opening credits a lit up sign displays the message “God Hates Fangs”; vampires are said to “come out of the coffin”; and it’s mentioned in passing that Vermont was the first state to legalize marriage between humans and vampires.) Michelle Goldberg nonetheless finds True Blood conservative through and through: though the vampire-homosexual analogy is “cheeky and clever”, “it has troubling implications, because the vampires, political rhetoric aside, aren’t really interested in joining human society. Unlike the misunderstood X-Men heroes, most of the vampires we meet are arrogant, perverse, and cruel—everything the far right believes gays to be.” So is True Blood a sophisticated, sympathetic tale of the plight of an excluded, embattled group, or does it simply make use of that plight to imbue its story, at strategic moments, with a serious, charged, and culturally relevant aura?
* X-Men also borrows heavily from the culture wars landscape to cast the mutants as a misunderstood, vilified group that’s gradually gaining acceptance. And just like in True Blood, a more militant faction, here lead by Magneto, threatens to sabotage the advances made by the mainstreaming, well-behaved majority. But the more heavily the mutant struggle for acceptance draws on gay rights themes, the more problematic its relation to it becomes. Mutants are, after all, by definition more dangerous and threatening to humans proper. They have a power in excess of the norm, which at once differentiates their clearly demarked kind from that of the ‘normal’ and pitches it against them. Though this lack of self-control is just as often likened to adolescence and sexual development, the fact that it’s unique in posing a real danger to their world limits the comparison and ultimately distinguishes it from safe, nonthreatening sexuality ‘proper’.
* District 9, still out in the theaters, presents a similar problem. The aliens stand in for all sorts of subaltern or excluded groups, and through that substitution the film is able to elaborate a powerful, progressive critique of certain states’ treatment of different groups; but at the same time, a delicate dance is required to keep the metaphor from circling back and affirming the common, derogatory representation of particular ethnic groups as nonhumans, subhumans, animals, etc.
Each of these films (or series) also makes consistent use of ‘fake’ news footage that invokes past and ongoing civil rights struggles, and borrows heavily from the politically-charged atmosphere most associated with culture wars social issues. In all three we are sporadically treated to clips of warring pundits, for instance, one conservative, the other ‘tolerant’; or heated split-screen debates between vampire and church, or mutant and human, spokespeople. The specter of a high-stakes national debate, sensitive to the slightest misstep, is everywhere present, hanging precipitously over the heroes’ heads – mutant, vampire, and alien.
The progressive, or empathetic, representation of subaltern groups as fantastically, often physiologically different is of course not a recent phenomenon; nor is the prominent inclusion of a media or public relations sphere in the development of narrative events and the creation of a ‘national’ atmosphere (as in King Kong, for instance). But what is perhaps historically novel in this gaining trend is the media’s dramatic promotion in importance: it is a premise of all three – District 9, especially – that the media world holds a powerful, if not determinate, position over the fate of the groups in question. In the latter film, news footage of alien riots, with shaky, live, street footage and commentary from ’specialists’, approximates the familiar instant-retrospective gaze of a culture comfortable with having an underclass and the violence required to maintain it. Whether we see in this footage the LA riots or the razing of Cape Town’s District Six under the Group Areas Act of 1966, the image of history we are given is purposefully generic and prepared.
Freud said of the dream that it’s not just what reality the dream is representing that matters, but why that reality had to take the dream-form it did. We know that the vampires represent homosexuals, but what is it of our time that encourages the representation of homosexuals as vampires? Or of Zimbabwean, Mozambican, and Malawian migrants as aliens? The ease with which matters of race, in particular, have been reimagined, historically, as matters of species needs no introduction; nor for that matter does the habitual representation of ’sexual deviants’ as predatory beings.
True Blood in particular runs up against this problem repeatedly: namely, how to draw upon the thematically-rich struggle of gay rights, as a readymade template for any mythical excluded identity, while at the same time stopping short of affirming, through the thriller/horror genre, the very prejudices it otherwise claims to regard as oppressive. Because the vampires really are dangerous, and do actually prey on humans, the comparison with homosexuality must be handled delicately, if not avoided altogether at the appropriate moments. When Godric blasphemes that humans are justified in fearing vampires, his wisdom assumes an almost extra-diegetic, directorial position. Does this blasphemy, then, amount to a tacit endorsement of the conservative view that finds the alleged promiscuity of the gay community to be the true roadblock to their social acceptance – hence the prominent vampire ‘mainstreaming’ theme of the show – or is it the opposite, an instance of the vampire rights theme diverting from its occasional analogy, gay rights?
In this light, to be sure, the show’s invocation of the plight of the gay community can seem disingenuous, a plundering for story parts.
All of this is driven home by the recent episodes with Godric (Allan Hyde), Eric’s (Alexander Skarsgård) ‘maker’. Where it was assumed that Godric had been captured by the Fellowship of the Sun, the extremist conservative Christian church, he had in fact turned himself over in an attempt to create peace and understanding because, as he says at one point, ‘let’s be honest – vampires have not exactly acted peacefully to humans’ (paraphrase). This admission raises the issue of the vampires’ true dangerousness to a thematic level: it’s the first time the vampires’ culpability is acknowledged and treated explicitly by the show. Until Godric made this perspective his own, and introduced it to the storyline, it existed solely as a contradiction or ideological problem in the makeup of the True Blood universe, rather than a problem the characters themselves are dealing with, diegetically. Accordingly, the clip above, in two parts, shows Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck), the vampires’ lead PR agent, chewing out Godric for creating a national PR disaster for the vampire cause. It’s the first time we see the characters interact with the national campaign, and it’s the first time that we get a real sense for ‘the politics of vampirism’ and the concessions that must be made, if only to prevent a battle that cannot be won. It’s also the moment when the blame shifts, however gently, from the humans to the vampires. As a result, it would seem, the homosexuality-vampirism comparison is here put on hold, as if the writers did not want this shifting of blame to be ‘misread’ as an analogy for the gay community’s culpability, but even so the implication is somewhat unavoidable if unintentional.
In this respect, we may see some of the philosophical and political commentary on the show move into its inner workings. So maybe the Godric theme will crystallize into a more nuanced social commentary, or it could simply feed into the ‘mainstreaming’ theme, where the ‘vamps’ need to come to terms with their scary, violent nature and learn to domesticate themselves. I’m betting on the latter – Bill, after all, is supposed to be the model vampire of sorts – but either way the writing seems to have grown more sophisticated over the last season and its politics should be expected to do the same in the season ahead.
Recent Comments