In one of the early scenes in my favorite vampire-Western Near Dark, Caleb (the cowboy) is trying to hit on Mae (the vampire) when she insists he stop his truck, at which point she jumps out and starts talking about how deafening the night is. Now, you or I might think “Hmmmm, she’s hearing voices? Must be crazy. Get the net!” or perhaps “She’s blinded by the night? Must be another pesky vampire. Good thing I ate that eggplant parmesan earlier…” Caleb’s inspired, libido driven response (as he continues to try to kiss her):
“Sure haven’t met many girls like you.”
To which Mae affirms, “No you haven’t met any girls like me.”
They go on to repeat this exchange about 5 times in the course of 2 minutes. By the end of the scene, you’re pretty damn sure he hasn’t met any girls like her. While I might complain this sentiment is somewhat belabored in this exchange, perhaps it is rightfully so, because I can think of no better way to express the allure of the heroines of the new romantic vampires texts.
The heroines are all similar precisely because they are unique. They have many qualities which differentiate them from other literary and cinematic women, but for this particular post, I will concentrate on the most apparent, their less-than-human qualities, their glaring oddities, the thing that makes them most “other.”
Before I quite get down to it, though, it makes sense to introduce a little bit of theory for context. One of my all-time favorite academics, Linda Williams, wrote a very interesting article entitled “When the Woman Looks,” about the relationship between women and monsters in the horror film. For a little background, Williams is building on an article I’ve already discussed on the blog before, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” by Laura Mulvey. Mulvey talks about how women’s role in film is basically to be looked at by men, for masculine pleasure. Whether or not you agree with this argument, the fact is it’s pretty much the most influential feminist article about cinema EVER. Don’t take my word for it, though–here’s Williams’ introduction:
“Whenever the movie screen holds a particularly effective image of terror, little boys and grown men make it a point of honor to look, while little girls and grown women cover their eyes or hide behind the shoulders of their dates. there are excellent reasons for this refusal of the woman to look, not the least of which is that she is often asked to bear witness to her own powerlessness in the face of rape, mutilation, and murder. Another reason for the refusal to look is the fact that women are given so little to identify with on the screen. Laura Mulvey’s extremely influential article on visual pleasure in narrative cinema has best defined this problem in terms of a dominant male look at the woman that leaves no place for the woman’s own pleasure in seeing: she exists only to be looked at.”
The politics of the gaze are pretty complicated, and Williams goes over them exhaustively. The conclusion that she finally reaches about monsters, though, is most applicable for our purposes:
“The male look expresses conventional fear at that which differs from itself. The female look–a look given preeminent position in the horror film–shares the male fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. There is not so much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned… The strange sympathy and affinity that often develops between the monster and the girl may thus be less an expression of sexual desire (as in King Kong, Beauty and the Beast) and more a flash of sympathetic identification.”
Williams argument goes pretty Freudian after that, but I think the key point is established here. The woman and the monster are both different or other from the male protagonist/male viewer, and so in that sense, the woman and the monster are the same. They can identify with each other, because they both are basically victims of patriarchy. When monsters wreak havoc on the protagonists, women might feel a little vindicated, because the monster’s fighting the good fight against the crushing forces of masculine power. When the monster is destroyed in the end, that’s a bummer for us girls, because the patriarchy is re-established.
Another scholar, Rhona Berenstein, makes a similar argument in an article with a similar title, “Looks Could Kill: The Powers of the Gaze in Hypnosis Films.” By hypnosis films, she means those movies where the female protagonist comes under the power of the hypnotizing monster, like the 1931 Dracula (you know, the one with Bela Lugosi).
She argues that in the hypnosis movie, the woman basically gets to run around acting completely nuts and doing whatever she wants because she has the excuse of being under the monster’s power. While the guys are all stressing out about how to kill the monster, the woman gets to have fun. In the end, of course, the monster is killed and the woman gets a happily-ever-after with some boring human dude who basically did nothing but whine the whole movie, and she has to look happy and demure. Again, the patriarchy comes back in full force, but its not only the monster who suffers–it’s the woman too.
So what does all this academic stuff have to do with our romantic vampires?
The first part of the argument–the idea that the woman and the monster are linked, and can identify with each other, is pushed to its very limit in our stories. Each protagonist, the woman who tells the story, has something that marks her as not-quite-human. For Mae, this is most obvious, because she is actually a vampire. No real mystery about the link between monster and woman there. The woman is the monster. It’s important to note, though, that in Near Dark, Mae is the least monstrous of the monsters. She is the most moral, the most conscious of her role as a vampire. In the end, she’s the hero, so there really is a mix-up of the traditional hero-defeats-monster dynamic. Granted, some have argued that the patriarchy is still reestablished, because she is “cured” of vampirism and is put back in place in a more traditional family. This is the kind of argument that Berenstein might support. Mae got to have her fun as a vampire, but in the end she has to go back to her subservient place in the patriarchy. I guess I would see this instead as the result of the pairing of the romance genre and the vampire genre. Mae is first seen as monster, as other, but then the monster becomes the hero, a totally sympathetic character. Instead of killing her off in the end (she’s still a monster, after all), Mae is accepted by Caleb (who arguably represents patriarchal culture). The hybridity of the romance and horror genres creates a new path through which that which is monstrous becomes normalized.
If that’s still too much about justifying difference, though, remember Near Dark is only the beginning. The most recent texts have come much, much farther in terms of this relationship. Anita Blake is a necromancer, able to raise the dead. She’s not a vampire, but she is certainly more that human. Similarly, Sookie Stackhouse is a telepath. Bella, probably the most human, even has her oddity. She is immune to most vampire powers, what in later books is called a “shield.” All three talents make these women stand out. It’s also important to note that in all three series, the heroines are not the only people to posses their talents. They all meet other minor characters with similar abilities, but their talents are always amongst the most rare in their respective mythologies. These women are not entirely singular, they are just very unusual. Like the monster, they are made to feel abnormal, as if they do not fit. For Anita and Sookie, their gifts are seen as handicaps. Both women lament their treatment as children, as if they were freakish or odd or downright scary. It is only within the monster community that they find acceptance. Sookie appreciates the mental silence of the vampires (she cannot read their minds) and Anita thrills at the idea that her supernatural friends are hard to kill and quick to heal, so when she attracts trouble their better equipped to handle it than normal humans.
Bella’s talent is imperceptible to humans. Instead, she laments her social oddness in a much more mundane way. She complains about her clumsiness, her weirdness, her lack of interests in typical high school interests, like clothes and the prom. She desperately wants to be a vampire, to have the grace and the strength of her immortal friends. When she finally does become a vampire, she is still unusual, because unlike the others, she accepts her role as monster. She turns out to be really good at being a vampire, as if she were “born to be a vampire.”
In all three cases, the monsters are understanding of these women’s role as social outcast, and so the link between woman and monster is made very sympathetic on both sides. Their “otherness” is emphasized by their unusual traits, and its easy to see how the women in these stories would prefer the monsters to the judgmental humans, who ostracize them. Now here’s where I think things get really interesting. ALL THREE STORIES ARE TOLD IN FIRST PERSON! We get to hear exactly what these women think; we are put in their position. Because these women have unique positions riding the line between human and monster, they are in the best possible position to judge both sides from a more objective perspective. Instead of the traditional dualism of humans=good, monsters=evil, there is a spectrum of good and bad on which both monsters and humans can fall anywhere. There are good and bad humans, and good and bad monsters. Instead of seeing things just in terms of normality and difference, we are forced, through the eyes and ears of our female protagonists, to judge everyone, human and monster alike, based on a new criteria, a new morality that is not simply black and white. Monsters become sympathetic, romantic characters. Humans become villains. The stark binaries are dissolved.
Because the romance genre is so thoroughly mixed in with the horror genre, the convention of the return to patriarchy at the end of the horror film is dissolved. Instead, the happily ever after can result in the woman celebrating her difference, alongside the monsters. This is the first way in which I see the generic hybridity of these texts resulting in a more feminist perspective.
Whew! That one got long! If you stuck with me, here’s your reward: another song off the vampire mix!
In honor of our leading ladies:
A Girl Like You, by Edwyn Collins (no relation, that I’m aware of…)
A totally wacky video (no idea if it’s the official music video), but it kinda fits. Notice the monstrousness of the silhouettes!
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