Writing Right with Dmitri: New Day, New Theme

1 Conversation

Writing Right with Dmitri: New Day, New Theme

Editor at work.

Sometimes we get a bit yawny about 'old themes and memes': we think that everything's been said about them. But each generation reinterprets the old stories in their own way.

Take vampires.

Vampire stories got started in western Europe and North America back in the 18th Century. Unlike the vampire stories in the Balkans, these tales weren't about an odd curse or problem you could get in a village, and that was handled locally as a form of pest control. Oh, no. The first vampire stories were told by male poets, and mostly involved sexy women biting them and draining their vitality. (Go figure.) Try this one. You get the idea. There's sex and death and fear and loss of agency in there, those are the memes and themes of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'.

In the early-to-mid-19th Century, vampires were aristocratic males, often named Ruthven. Lord Ruthven, to you. It started as some lame joke by Lady Caroline Lamb, who was nutty as a fruitcake and mad at Lord Byron at the time. In her Glenarvon, Ruthven was really Byron: mad, bad, and dangerous to know. The great Irish playwright Dion Boucicault – sort of the Steven Spielberg of his day – made Ruthven the Vampire a character in his suitably titled 1852 hit play, The Vampire. (Sorry, I've read it but I can't find it right now.) Ruthven is an aristocrat who bothers his descendants and argues over property rights, the cad.

Which raises a question: what were these aristocratic vampires about? My money's on class conflict. On the one hand, the vampire nobleman is cool, and all. He charms ladies by being elegant, etc. But he's really a blood-sucking parasite, inimical to the progressive thinking of the Industrial Age. Away with him! In this period, he invariably gets staked – or in Boucicault's version, thrown off a cliff in the Alps – to the relief of all. Good riddance. Need we point out that Marx and Engels were publishing heavily around this time?

By the end of the century, the vampire was still an aristocrat. But this time, he was also a foreigner. Much ink has been spilt over the fact that Bram Stoker's Dracula is about a group of red-blooded Brits (with a gun-totin' Texan in tow) who team up with a comical Dutchman to defeat the menace from Transylvania. The underlying fear is kind of obvious: these alien males from the East are going to come in and sweep our women off their feet with their oily charms. Worse, they make them aware of their own sexual agency. We must fight this! Quick, Quincy, the stake and garlic! (The fact that vampires are supposed to be afraid of garlic is obviously an old Romanian joke nobody got. Spend five minutes in the country, and you will.) So: the 1890s reinterpreted the vampire myth in terms of xenophobia and misogyny. Which is why we all love the Frank Langella version of Dracula. Langella, an Italian American from Bayonne, NJ, makes an elegant dangerous foreigner. Kate Nelligan makes a perfect Modern Woman, laughing at the pretensions of fuddy-duddy Jonathan Harker. Yep, we just deconstructed that mess.

The silent and talkie film versions from 1900 to the 1970s are unedifying. They're mostly about scaring the audience. Eek! Oh, look, blood! By the 1950s at least, it becomes obvious that clueless Hollywood and Hammer think Dracula's about what Stephen King said: the essence of death frightening you. Oh, yawn. That's not a theme, it's a cop-out. But TV and a novelist got it right again.

In the 1960s, Dark Shadows was basically about social and sexual minorities. (Ask the lit-crit crowd, they'll explain at length, and they're right.) And Dark Shadows took the side of the deviants. Which is why all of us kids rushed home from school to watch it. We were getting an education nobody knew about: lessons in tolerance, courtesy of some very fine New York stage actors and a very silly plot about a rather emo vampire. (It helped that the actor playing Barnabas was a polite Canadian.)

In the 1970s, Anne Rice got started on the vampire myth. She knew what it was about: sex, eternal youth, sex, high culture, sex, S&M, sex…you get the idea. Since Rice also published bondage novels under another name, we think we're safe in saying that we know what she was on about. And somehow, that fit the vampire theme.

In the 1990s, Joss Whedon decided that vampires were Bad Guys again. But vampire slayers were symbols of women's liberation. (Especially the one who referred to her favourite stake as 'Mr Pointy'. Seriously.) This was a major – and welcome – reinterpretation of the themes and memes of the vampire genre launched by that liberated, though loopy, Caroline Lamb.

Alas, since Buffy and Angel passed on to DVD heaven, we've been plagued lately with narcissistic teenage vampires. Their message appears to be, 'At eighteen, we're perfect. We have it all: looks, emotional intensity, and the boundless selfishness required to live forever without actually learning anything. So why should we change?' Sigh. It seems as if we've hit a boring patch, like we did in the 1890's, when Stoker wanted to get rid of attractive foreigners. (He lost: women liked Bela Lugosi, and Rudolph Valentino, too.) So what to do?

Transform the theme again. Take up the gauntlet of those pioneers of old – Dan Curtis, producer of Dark Shadows, Joss Whedon, even Anne Rice…do something new with the story. Or pick your own: what do you think of Robin Hood? Ivanhoe and his ilk? Zorro? For each generation of readers, there are new themes to explore, and new ways to use those old memes. What will you choose to do with them?

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

11.04.16 Front Page

Back Issue Page


Bookmark on your Personal Space


Conversations About This Entry

Entry

A87870207

Infinite Improbability Drive

Infinite Improbability Drive

Read a random Edited Entry


Disclaimer

h2g2 is created by h2g2's users, who are members of the public. The views expressed are theirs and unless specifically stated are not those of the Not Panicking Ltd. Unlike Edited Entries, Entries have not been checked by an Editor. If you consider any Entry to be in breach of the site's House Rules, please register a complaint. For any other comments, please visit the Feedback page.

Write an Entry

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."

Write an entry
Read more