The Postmillennial Vampire : Power, Sacrifice and Simulation in True Blood, Twilight and Other Contemporary Narratives

117 Pages·2017·4.336 MB·English

by  Susan Chaplin (auth.)

The Postmillennial Vampire
SusanChaplin
The Postmillennial
Vampire
fi
Power, Sacri ce and Simulation in True Blood,
Twilight and Other Contemporary Narratives
SusanChaplin
LeedsBeckettUniversity
Leeds,UnitedKingdom
ISBN978-3-319-48371-9 ISBN978-3-319-48372-6(eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48372-6
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Inloving memoryof myfather, FrankChaplin
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Iwouldliketothankthefollowingfriends,familyandcolleaguesfortheir
generosity and support: Richard Clemens, my husband; David Chaplin,
Catherine Burns, Lisa Samson, Bill Hughes, Jerome de Groot, Sharon
Ruston, Joanne Watkiss, Kaley Kramer, Nasser Hussain, Jim McGrath,
Dale Townshend, Angela Wright, Linnie Blake, Avril Horner, Sue
Zlosnik, my colleagues in the School of Cultural Studies, and all the
students, past and present, that I’ve been lucky enough to teach and
learn from,and whoseenthusiasm forthe Gothichelped fire myown.
vii
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 TheVampire, the Scapegoatand the SacredKing 17
3 FromBloodBondstoBrandLoyalties:PoppyZ.Brite’sLost
SoulsandAlan Ball’sTrue Blood 37
4 ‘NothingisReal, Everythingis Permitted’: The Vampire
andthe Politicsof Jouissance 59
5 Contagion,Simulation, Capital:From Tru Blood
toNewBlood 87
6 Conclusion 103
Bibliography 107
Index 111
ix
CHAPTER1
Introduction
Abstract TheIntroductiongivesanoverviewofthework’smethodology
and its application to the primary material. In particular, it examines the
relation between law, sacrifice and what René Girard (whose work forms
thetheoreticalspineofthisvolume)terms‘violenceasthesacred’.Thelaw
is posited as a ‘sacrificial’ mechanism that appropriates and redefines the
function of the sacred. The discussion then opens into a brief account of
Girardian theory (especially mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechan-
ism) and its relevance to key developments in vampire narrative since the
1970s.
Keywords Law (cid:1) Sacred(cid:1) Violence(cid:1) Vampire
At the end of one of the most influential late twentieth-century critical
studies of the vampire, Nina Auerbach (1995) makes the bold claim
that ‘at the end of the twentieth century, vampirism is wearing down’
(p. 192). In the 1980s and 1990s, argues Auerbach, the vampire came
to suffer a profound ‘loss of will’ and needed ‘a long restorative sleep’
(p. 192). The first decade of the new millennium has not borne this
out. The early 2000s saw the phenomenal success of Joss Whedon’s
TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Charlaine Harris began to publish
the best-selling Southern Vampire Mysteries, adapted for TV by Alan
Ball as HBO’s top-rating True Blood; and, of course, 2005 saw the
©TheAuthor(s)2017 1
S.Chaplin,ThePostmillennialVampire,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48372-6_1
2 THEPOSTMILLENNIALVAMPIRE
publication of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, closely followed by the
other three novels in The Twilight Saga – New Moon, Eclipse and
Breaking Dawn. At the same time, postmillennial vampire films such
as Blade, Underworld, Daybreakers and 30 Days of Night have taken
vampire narrative into darker, more apocalyptic territory. Far from
‘wearing down’, the vampire has come to dominate postmillennial
popular culture to an extraordinary extent, generating fluid narratives
across diverse media and guaranteeing huge profits for publishers, TV
companies, film studios and the manufacturers of computer games.
This phenomenon has attracted the scrutiny of scholars within film,
literary and cultural studies over the last decade and this work aims to
contribute to an expanding field of criticism that includes notable
recent studies by, for instance, Stephanou (2014), Crawford (2014),
Gelder (2012), Mutch (2013) and Kane (2006).
Thisstudytakesasitsstartingpointtherelationshipbetweenvampir-
ism and postmodern, global, neoliberal regimes of power. Central to its
methodology is René Girard’s theory of sacrifice, and especially his
notion of sacred violence as something which, he contends (in a strik-
inglyevocativephrase),alwaysrequires‘somethingtosinkitsteethinto’
(Girard 2005, p. 4). There has been some engagement already with
Girard in this critical context, but this volume in many ways argues
against the grain of this scholarship. Girard’s work is important to a
critical understanding of the contemporary vampire and its relationship
to power, but not necessarily for the reasons thus far proposed.
Specifically, the postmillennial vampire, which is the main focus of this
study, cannot be understood solely as a ‘scapegoat’ in the Girardian
sense, though this has been the main contention of recent critics who
have examined vampire narrative through Girard. Corn and Dunn, for
instance, contend that the vampire continues to ‘offer the ideal scape-
goat’ (2011, p. 151). I intend to argue otherwise, at least to some
degree, and crucial here is the transformation in the representation of
the vampire that begins in the 1970s with texts that strive to represent
the vampire as a more sympathetic, or even tragic protagonist: Fred
Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975), for instance, and Anne Rice’s
morewidelyknownInterviewwiththeVampire(1976).Thisshiftinten-
sifiesanddiversifiesinthepostmillennialperiodandGirard’sworkoffers
a powerful insight into just what it is that the vampire signifies, and
signifies with such urgency, within popular Western culture at the start
of the twenty-first century.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
LAW AND SACRIFICE
For over two hundred years the Gothic has constituted one of the
most sustained, if highly ambivalent, popular cultural engagements
with and interrogations of the modern Western rule of law. Several
critics in recent years have argued that late eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century Anglo-American Gothic fictions served to interrogate
thevulnerable,unstablepositionofincreasinglyderacinatedsubjectsin
the face of modern forms of juridical authority (see, for instance,
Marshall 2011; Chaplin 2007; Punter 1998). David Punter com-
ments that eighteenth-century fiction ‘is obsessed with the law, with
its operations, justifications, limits’ (p. 19). He goes on to argue that
it is the Gothic specifically that articulates not only the ‘limits’ of law
but the disintegration of the law’s symbolic authority in contempor-
ary Western culture. The law emerges in Gothic fictions (and, more
recently, across a range of media) as not only limited but as con-
taminated: the space of law is impure, perpetually unstable and
monstrous.
Central to this work is the complex nexus between contemporary
Gothic and the ‘operations, justifications and limits’ of law in the
postmodern, and especially the postmillennial period (Punter 1998,
p. 19). I argue that what is key to the relationship between modern
Gothic and the rule of law is the persistent depiction within Gothic
narrative, across a range of media, of the radical failure of the sym-
bolic authority of law. This is most vividly apparent, moreover, in the
mode of Gothic that has exerted perhaps the greatest fascination over
the popular and literary imagination during the last two decades: the
vampire narrative.
The mid-1970s’ shift in the representation of the vampire has been
widely discussed (see Fhlainn 2011; Botting 2008; Mutch 2013; Zanger
1997).Itiscommonlyacceptedthatthevampirehasbecomeincreasingly
‘human’ over the course of the last few decades, moving from the mon-
strous predators of Bram Stoker (1897), Richard Matheson (1954) and
Stephen King ([1975] 2007) to the tortured, sympathetic and often
highly romanticised hero-vampires of contemporary culture. As Sorcha
Ní Fhlainn observes, ‘Vampire subjectivity is the ultimate postmodern
achievement [...] the vampire, in using the term “I”, is immediately
empowered and provides a distinct point of view on the modern from
withinourownculturalwalls’(2011,p.260).Whilsttheemergenceofthe