← Previous post Next post →

[originally published on July 20, 2009]

 Newsweek recently came out with this inhuman interest piece (badoom-ching). Notice that the ladies love the vampires almost exclusively, leaving the men to more scrupulous fantasy partners, like, I guess, Megan Fox straddling that motorcycle.

There are exceptions (surprise!). In Interview with the Vampire, at least, Anne Rice’s vampires avoid the lure of the bland human woman pretty successfully. I man, OK, Lestat munches down on prostitutes and old women, the de rigueur throwaway characters; and some naked chick gets devoured on stage. That’s about it. Typically, Rice sort of presents a boy’s club of vampires, ranging the gamut from annoying friends to full-out lovers. In her later books Rice introduces a broader range of female characters, but by “broad” I mostly mean “not eternally six years old.” The women in Rice’s book are often supernatural creatures themselves, leaving the Anne-Rice-wish-fulfillment human doppelgangers to a minimum.

(On a side-note, in True Blood, only one vampire is represented as openly homosexual, and he is plump, sweet, and unattractive, impotent enought to be held captive by a very Manson-girl Lizzy Caplan. This is interesting because inTrue Blood the vampires are basically symbols of homosexuality: it’s no coincidence the show takes place in the swampy good-old-boy heart of the South. The vampires have a whole Christian cult after them [“God Hates Fangs,” kids!]. And yet the single homosexual human, Lafayette, is left without a glimmer of a sex-scene, while everyone around him is engaged in a feverish MadLibs of sweaty double-entendres and full-frontal nudity. I would theorize that this is to avoid being heavy-handed with the symbolism, but, um, remember that I’m talking about True Blood. Its hand already weighs enough to smush your brain into submission with a single strike. If it’s a matter of alienating the audience, then remember that this is a show written by Alan Ball, aired on HBO, and populated by people smearing cake on their faces and munching down fistfuls of dirt in a sexual hysteria. In Ball’s Merriam-Webster dictionary, “offensive” has been scratched out and replaced with a question mark written in blood. So there’s not much explanation for the peculiarly neutered version of homosexuality that appears in True Blood. Except, possibly, to give gay people a good name by distancing them from the tacky antics of the heterosexual Maenads, shapeshifters, and eternal teenagers?)

Then there’s the maybe-inevitable all-girls-boarding-school vampire novel, The Moth Diaries, by Rachel Klein, which is being made into a definitely-inevitable movie. This novel tackles the whole girlish-obsession trope, which never really gets old because, come on, who can become creepily romantically obsessed quite like an adolescent girl, and when the object of the obsession is a figure just as potent with hormones and diet soda and Salon Selectives, it’s guaranteed family fun. This story sidesteps the male-vampire lover by creating a female-vampire lover. My hope was that with the vampire dude removed from the scene, the characters would become a little less fan-fictional, but I was wrong. At least good on Klein for a new twist: but, really, who knows what will happen in the film version. Scott Speedman will become a vampire and gallantly seduce them all, no doubt.

Speaking of Scott Speedman, that creates a helpful transition toUnderworld, the 2003 feature film which showed the world what it would be like if vampires were intensely boring. “Scott Speedman” sounds like a name a 12-year-old girl made up for her imaginary abusive boyfriend, but that’s beside the point. The point is this: in Underworld, Speedman has the distinction of being the boyfriend to one of the world’s only discernible vampire girlfriends. In this relationship, she wears the fangs! What a thoroughly modern gal!

Pretty obviously, though, Underworld doesn’t deliver. The romance is rushed and half-developed, a plot mechanism at best, about as sexy as opening up the back of a wristwatch. Compared to the long, steamy, complicated seductions surrounding Edward and Bella Swan or Bill and Sookie Stackhouse, in which every motivation is handled in tortured, loving close-up and every kiss is accompanied by swelling violins; in which Sookie (literally) runs to Bill in her (literally) tiny white nightgown and he deflowers her on the rug in front of a fireplace, or Edward is driven wild by the very smell of Bella’s blood; up against bloody ripped bodices of this caliber, theUnderworld romance can’t even BEGIN to compete. The very point of vampiric romance is that it makes up for the lifelessness of its leading man: it doesn’t reflect it. Kate Beckinsale is a brittle, cold little killing-machine, rejecting women’s attempts to imprint their fantasy selves onto her leather-bound figure. 

The other and more striking difference is that Scott Speedman’s character, Michael (thrilling name), is hardly even human at all, which negates the whole human/vampire aspect of the trope entirely. By the time he meets the vampy Selene, he’s been half-turned into a werewolf (don’t ask … don’t), and Selene’s relationship with him develops as he’s transforming. His humanity is negligible at best. This romance is less vampire/human and more vampire/vampire-werewolf-hybrid. Plus, they’re both dazed action-figures in Hot Topic contacts, so it barely matters what they’re supposed to be in the script, does it? Does it?!

But even as I’m writing this it occurs to me that I’m completely overlooking the most promising and groundbreaking romance to come out of HBO in at least a few months, or something: Hoyt and Jessica, the rebellious teenage vampire-girl and the bumbling virginal good-old-boy who reads her his comic book over the telephone and OH MY GOD MY HEART IS MELTING. I definitely need to explore this further, since Hoyt, with his country-fresh charm, is maybe the very first male Mary Sue to ever fall prey to a bloodsucker.