Vampire – C'est Moi

by Eva Maria Thury (all rights reserved)

Originally Published in ASK: Arts, Sciences, Knowledge, Journal of the College of Arts and Sciences, Drexel University, January 2005.

It must be the time of year. With Christmas just wrapped up, we've been dumped smack back into the "bleak midwinter" of the carol by Christina Rossetti. Somehow, I lived through the holiday without being warmed by the rays of any divine epiphany. Silver bells. Visions of sugarplums and sleigh rides. Early shopper days. Sales. Coupons. Special savings. In the mall and on the tube, glances of that obese, rosy-cheeked monster Santa Claus. My special solution? Instead of needless fretting, I shrugged off the holiday grab-fest and found consolation in the newly opened Blade Trinity; the least effective component of the trilogy was still good enough to lift my holiday gloom.

I never was a big fan of the red-suited guy who takes over the proverbially innocent hearts of children, as well as the more jaded organs pumping in the rest of us, and perverts them to pie-eyed speculation about what unnecessary objects can be acquired. As Christmas becomes more elaborately consumer-driven every year, I have begun to think of the function of the jolly old gent as stealing our souls, teaching us to be more greedy and less caring. This year, though, I could, in my mind's, eye, chase Kris Kringle from the mall and watch him explode in a cascade of fireworks resulting from the silver barb of the red-and-black-suited vampire slayer Blade. This hero, who became a vampire in utero because his mother was attacked by one, has dedicated his life to stalking and killing the undead.

"Why vampires?" you ask. Good question. Last year I had a student who wanted to study suck-heads, as they are called by those who know and – sometimes – love them. Prescott Perez-Fox was an engineer developing a comic book, and he ended up creating a taxonomy of vampires for an enormous research project titled, "Bitten!" Scott won a first prize at Drexel Research Day, his exquisitely drawn vampires coyly preening themselves amid the studies of fatigue in airplane fusilage structure, liquid crystalline “rod-coil” block copolymers, and the immune response to the flu vaccine, with a wonderful cast of characters he invented himself. As a teacher of mythology, I regularly hear about student fascination with the "mythic" world of the undead. Recently, I started to see it as a trend and began, you should pardon the expression, to sink my teeth into some vampire lore.

To begin with, despite the claims of some enthusiasts, vampire stories are not myths, but legends. Only stories that explain how the world or humankind came to be in their present state are properly called myths. Vampires can be found in literature, popular culture and folklore (Dundes, The Vampire, 59). The first literary vampire story came out of the same highly charged gathering that gave birth to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There they were, in a villa rented by Lord Byron in 1816, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and John Polidori. Kept indoors by electrical storms on Lake Leman, the group passed their time in literary conversation.

Byron challenged his friends to write a ghost story each, but Mary was the only one who rose to the occasion. Later, though, Polidori, created something called "The Vampyr," based on a brief fragment written by Byron on Lake Leman. His vampire was based on Byron and was called Lord Ruthven after a character in Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon, also meant to evoke the poet (Wikipedia). Ever since then, vampires have been a big thing, but increasingly so in the latter half of the 20^th century.

There are actually two kinds of vampires, the attractive Byronic antiheroes like Dracula that represent the suave but predatory narcissism of modern culture and the soulless, terrifying "posthuman" monsters characterized by their sexual desire, hunger or aggression (Day, Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture, 83). It was mostly those posthuman critters I was seeing at the mall, pushing each other out of the way in line and snarling like animals when they didn't get what they thought was the right discount at the cash register. I actually saw one man slide his car into a parking space at 45 degrees to take it from a person patiently waiting for the previous car to vacate it. In Blade II, the best film of the trilogy, Blade helps to hunt the posthuman monsters, but it turns out that these savages are actually pawns of the suave vampires, just as the snarling folks at the mall are manipulated by sleek-suited executives who design artificial Darwinian scenarios so that we will kill each other for "Tickle Me Elmo" or his latest avatar.

But even before I experienced the relief of fantasy at the mall, what intrigued me first was the science in the Blade movies. Vampirism is a condition transmitted by a virus in the saliva. Our hero keeps his condition at bay with intravenous doses of a serum that's a human hemoglobin substitute. And in Blade II he cures his sidekick Whistler of vampirism through the injection of a retroviral cure presumably developed by hematologist Karen Jansen from the first movie.

As a recovering Trekkie who still has attacks of the "science will fix everything" attitude which used to infect that show, I have in recent years kept my disease at bay by shooting up regular doses of The X-Files, where science is very important but just as likely to cause problems as to provide solutions. My serum leaves me about where we are as a culture, I believe, ready to accept science though we are likely to cast a suspicious eye on it.

As a rule, biology fares better than physics in our estimation. A lot of physics has to be done by big teams of scientists funded by grants from big government. All in all, physics is science we are less likely to trust: maybe we're still sore about the atomic bomb. Biology seems, well, closer to home, and it seems that, for a lot of it, all you need is a microscope and maybe a centrifuge, not a tax-burning superconducting collider with a circumference of 54 miles. So in any case, I was "bitten" by Blade's take on science: better living through biology. And the ambiguity is nice as well: in Blade Trinity, the vampire slayer, his sidekick Whistler's daughter Abby, and Hannibal King, a character straight from the Marvel comics stories, design a retrovirus to eliminate vampirism entirely. The intriguing question is, will the cure also destroy our hero who is, in most respects, a vampire himself?

But, for all my enthusiasm, I still didn't completely get the vampire thing. For one thing, why are so many literary vampires men who prey on the blood of women? Is this a repudiation of the nourishment drawn from the female mammary parts? From Homer onwards, in fact, it is because heroes have partaken of mothers' milk that they fail in any quest to become immortal (J. S. Clay, "Immortal and Ageless Forever," CJ 77 (1981-2) 116.). Blade, though, has the regenerative power and strength of a suck-head, as well as "the thirst." However, he is also, like humans, immune from the weaknesses of a vampire: susceptibility to sunlight, garlic and silver – therefore, he is "the Daywalker." All of Blade's traits, good and bad, come to him through his mother. She was turned into a vampire, but he became – something other.

What also bothered me was that in most stories, being a vampire was all about apocalyptic battles between men, usually fought over women. Now I enjoy apocalyptic battles between men, especially half-naked ones who are extremely buff. But what I really liked was the scene in Blade II where Wesley Snipes saves Nyssa, a fellow warrior and love interest, by opening his vein and allowing her to suck his blood. That scene sums up the appeal of Blade for me as well as any other. Here's this six-foot guy, buff by any standard, a dynamic character, the most intelligent superhero I have seen in years. Most of the time he is not given to emotion, but he has obviously fallen for this woman, a vampire woman, by the way, so there has been some racism that he has overcome in the process. And here he rests in the fetid sewers of Prague with that out-of-focus La Leché look while she recovers her strength. Way cool!

The emphasis on vampires occurs, according to Kathleen L. Spencer, at times of uncertainty ("Dracula and Urban Gothic," in H. Bloom, ed., Bram Stoker's Dracula, 121). At times like these, we close our ranks against those we consider aliens and predators in our midst, and we turn to stories that evoke the monsters lurking in our shadows. A recent poll conducted by Cornell University says that 44 percent of us believe that " some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans" (Cornell News). Unfortunately, we are all too often no better at identifying our enemies than Blade is at differentiating who is human and who is not. In the early stages of Blade Trinity, our hero is busted for killing a human he mistook for a vampire. Of course, it turns out he was set up by vampires who wanted to destroy him with a negative public relations campaign. Speaking of which, it may be that for me, the greatest appeal of the Daywalker is that, as writer David Goyer says, it's hard to foresee a McDonald's Happy Meal toy in the form of Blade any time soon (Goyer, DVD commentary, Blade).