Pop Cultured A bad romance ...Or how I learned to stop thinking and love a vampire Duncan Day-Myron
Vampires used to be terrifying. Nosferatu, Dracula, heck even Blacula, were deadly predators of the night, either killing their victims or burderning them with a lifetime as the living dead. They struck fear into the hearts of the vigilant out to destroy them and the readers themselves, even generations after they had been mythologized and endlessly reappropriated, especially Bram Stoker's iconic representation.
But now apparently they're heartthrobs.
With the second instalment of the four-part Twilight series currently breaking records at box offices around the world, now is as good a time as any (maybe not as good as three years ago, actually) to ask ourselves, what the hell happened?
Twilight is the VIP of a seemingly unstoppable all-star team of brooding, effete bloodsuckers tearing through almost every conceivable media: along with The Vampire Diaries, True Blood and The Vampire's Assistant, books, television and cinema are all pretty roundly spoken for, to say nothing of the amount of magazine covers the stars get. And in the grandstands, an army of teenage girls, fanfiction in hand, screaming for more.
But they're not drawn to a righteous battle of good over evil as in the vampire books of old; it isn't a desire to deconstruct different ideas of morality; it isn't even to make themselves scared of the dark. It's because they're in love with vampires.
Despite the fact that almost every vampire on Twilight, Vampire Diaries and True Blood is, for lack of a better word, a total babe, there is something inherently flawed in writing something which seeks to romanticize one of literature's greatest monsters (slightly ahead of Frankenstein's monster, but still way behind Ayn Rand) because, in order to do so, almost everything that made the vampire mythos so interesting and enduring must essentially be dismissed, or, at the very least, repackaged as interesting and sexy. A man wants to kill you and eat you. How debonair! How mysterious! It must be love!
At times it feels like Stephanie Meyer is writing the worst ever guidance counselor pamphlet: So You're Settling for an Emotionally Abusive Relationship. Because that's all any of this is. At least Pride & Prejudice & Zombies had enough self-awareness to present itself as a joke.
In both Vampire Diaries and Twilight, it's a female protagonist and a male vampire. Even with the wanton disregard for tradition and archetype (and wit and style and depth), there's an inescapable power structure in place. The man belongs to a world that the woman is separate from, and the story is so thrust forward by the denial of the woman's inclusion, but also her willingness to either sacrifice everything—to the very core of what makes her human—or even simply putting her life in jeopardy for the sole reasoning of being closer to a man.
It's the kind of loathsome relationship dynamic that would normally be prefaced with something along the lines of "this is what it was like before women were allowed to be literate/vote/wear pants." But served in the guise of fantasy, it goes down like a pill.
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