Popular Culture and Twighlight - Essay Example

?Introduction Vampires have been a part of popular culture lore for centuries. These blood-thirsty creatures are the embodiment of feelings that we all have inside, and feelings that were felt by French society in the French Revolution. Just as the French peasants and noblemen and women felt a desperation – the peasants because of the desperate economic situation they were in, and the noblemen because of the eventual events that caused many of them to be be-headed – vampires reflect desperation. Just as the prisoners of the Bastille were tortured, physically and emotionally, vampires often are portrayed as tortured, as are their victims. Just as there were forbidden passions and loves during the French Revolution, vampires also embody this as well. The novel Twilight, with its central romance between a vampire and an ordinary teenage girl, also brings these emotions and feelings to the fore, as the lovers feel desperation, torture, the burn of forbidden love, as well as the pain of immortality and the loss of reason. Through it all, the vampires in vampire lore, and Edward in Twilight reflect societal consciousness, while assisting society in accepting that sometimes that which might seem evil is not really. Discussion The French Revolution was a period of despair, tortured beings, and forbidden loves. The desperation was felt by the peasants on the eve of the French Revolution, in 1789, as the peasants in the French countryside was increasingly subjected to undue taxation and social polarisation became a rising problem. At some point, the French peasants were faced with the choices of moving off their land or rebelling, due to a tax system that had lost all semblance of rhyme and reason.1 Meanwhile, they suffered a harvest deficit, and some farmers saw their livelihood wiped out during the harsh winters. The food deficit, the long winter, the social polarisation and increased taxation of the peasants led to an increase in vagrancy and vagabondage, as “desperate hordes besieged monastic storehouses.”2 Moreover, this sense of desperation was not limited to the peasants, as the laborers and managers also felt the financial pinch, “having to juggle their resources in order to make ends meet.”3 Meanwhile, the tortured beings were represented most effectively in the French Revolution by the prisoners in the Bastille, the storming of which was one of the cataclysms for the Revolution. Of these is the infamous “man in the iron mask,” who lived in the Bastille from 1698 to 1703. Also, there was the case of Denyse Regne, who “was spared nothing, from endless interrogations and torments of hunger to injuries inflicted by doctors to torturous treatment at the hands of a nun lodged with her and her enchainment in an underground dungeon.”4 The cells of the Bastille were places where toad, newts and rats and spiders resided with the unfortunate prisoner, and the prisoner lay on straw for their bed in six by eight foot cages.5 During the French Revolution, as during all times, there was also forbidden love. Such as example is Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, who was a moderate French Revolutionary. He won the heart of a lady who was the consort of a colonel, which caused him to be imprisoned. Released from prison, he went to Corsica, where he engaged in yet another scandalous love affair.6 While this was one individual who engaged in forbidden love affairs during the time of the French Revolution, there undoubtedly were many more. Therefore, the French Revolution was a time of desperation, torture and forbidden love. The vampire is emblematic of all of these feelings, as well as being a symbol of destructive power and abstract horror, that invades our imaginations and sensibilities. As a symbol of desperation, however, the vampire perhaps has more in common with the desperate French nobility during the time of the French Revolution, such as the Princesse de Monaco, a noblewoman of the house of Choiseul-Stainville who died at the guillotine in 1794.7 This is because the vampire is often the epitome of nobility, and “well-groomed horror,” and is often portrayed as wealthy.8 That said, the essence of the vampire is often desperation, even if the image is not of nobility. Part of their desperation comes from their status as being outsiders in society, an alien other, just as the French peasants felt during the French Revolution. This causes the vampires to be stunted in their growth, as they cannot grow spiritually, in character or in relationships.9 They have pathos because of their misrecognised identities, as they are innocent, but their innocence is hidden by their bodies, who are the very essence of evil.10 The modern vampires of the twentieth century, states Williamson (2005), as the allure to modern audiences because of their sense of pathos about what they are and the fact that they are painfully aware of their outsider status.11 Yet they also are a mirror for the desperations that human beings feel as well. Therefore, their desperation is felt not only by themselves, but also performs the function if reflecting mankind's own desperation. For instance, Margaret Carter, in her essay, “The Vampire as Alien” tells of a psychologist who, upon reflecting upon a human patient who destroyed the helpless for profit and created a hellish home for the aged remarked about a vampire “W. not my first predator, only most honest and direct.”12 In other words, the vampire is reflecting the desperation, or, in this case, the degradation of the human, and the vampire thus serves this purpose. The vampire also should not really be considered to be an outsider because he is so much like the human, only better, as he does not try to hide who he is, where a human might. Charnas (1997) concurs with this analysis in her essay “Meditations in Red: On Writing The Vampire Tapestry.” She states that the vampire is an embodiment of the monster within us, and serves the purpose in showing that human monsters are not so bad once you get to know them, while also allowing us to feel powerful as the monster himself.13 For Charnas, the vampire is the embodiment of evil, yet, with their trappings of wealth, they make the evil somewhat appealing and with positive aspects. As Charnas asks, rhetorically, “Who wouldn't take Count Dracula over Dr. Joel Steinberg, say, as their contact with what we know in the world as evil?”14 The vampire also is portrayed as a tortured being, much like the prisoners were tortured in the Bastille during the French Revolution. The torture sometimes takes the form of actual physical torture, such as the scene in Return of the Vampire (1943), in which the vampire is dragged into the sunlight and staked, leaving behind a rotting corpse. In Horror of Dracula in 1958, the death of Dracula by sunlight “is presented as a painful attack upon the victim's body...burning the vampire's skin to ash.”15 The victims of the vampires are also tortured beings, such as the victims in George Romero's Martin. These victims have their wrists slit with razor blades, as the vampire drinks the blood that spurts from their veins.16 The torture that vampires feel may be real, physical torture, as certain acts, such as being put into sunlight, results in excruciating death, burning their skin off their body literally into ash. The torture is felt by their victims, as well, as the very act of consuming the victim is the very definition of torture. Forbidden passions and love is a theme that often appeared during the French Revolution, as indicated by the story of the French Revolutionary above. This is also a theme that is reflected in many vampire stories. An example of this is in the tale The Vampire's Ghost, a 1945 film. This film focuses upon a 300-year-old vampire, Webb Fallon, who became a vampire because of a terrible crime that he committed in life. Webb is described as “an appealing figure,” who embarks upon a passionate affair with Julie, who is the fiancee of Roy, the protagonist. This leads to Webb's demise, as Roy, with the help of a priest, hunts Webb down and slays him.17 Other forbidden passions and loves help to fuel the sense of desperation and torture that the vampire feels, as these passions and longings come at a terrible price to the vampire and the object of their desire. One example of this is the vampire protagonist, a lesbian, in the film Carmilla. In this film, Carmilla falls in love with her victims, including Laura, who falls in love with her. Carmilla “feeds on women with a hunger inseperable from erotic sympathy.”18 Similarly, the vampire Lucy, whose slaying is considered to be the “symbolic centre of the tale” of Dracula, has forbidden passions and love, and, she, like Webb, pays for this with her life. Lucy is portrayed as sexually aggressive, and Williamson states that it is this wantonness that causes her to have a stake driven through her heart by the man that she loved, followed by her decapitation.19 Thus, it is clear that vampires are not able to love like normal people, because their passion is often portrayed as forbidden. The vampire Webb's passion for a human, who is a fiancee to the protagonist, leads to his demise. Similarly, Lucy's unbridled passions and sexuality leads to her demise by her lover. Carmilla must feel the pain, torture and regret for her passions, for she has passions for her victims, and falls in love with them. Yet, they become her victims, nonetheless, which demonstrates, once again, the inability for vampires to have normal love relationships. The book Twilight also embodies all of these qualities – torture, desperation, forbidden love – and more, including the curse of immortality and the loss of reason. The lead vampire character, Edward Cullen, is the portrait of a desperate soul in some ways. In other ways, he is a like an ordinary teenager. The ways that he is tortured, however, is that he feels, or at least he felt, prior to meeting Bella, that he could not fall in love with a regular girl because he could not control his ravenous appetite for blood. In fact, when he first met Bella, he did not believe that he could control himself around her, either. This led to a desperate, lonely life for the romantic Edward, for Edward did not have a lady love prior to Bella, despite the fact that he was around 105 years old at the time that they met. Edward's need for Bella also represent a form of psychological torture. Edward's feelings towards Bella represent a powerful connection, for Edward stated that he could not stay away from her, even if he wanted to. This is similar in some ways, according to George Dunn, in his essay “You Look Good Enough to Eat,” to fall of Adam and Eve. Edward's need for Bella paralleled the way that Adam and Eve could not resist temptation, and this led to Adam and Eve's fall from grace, and the desperation and torment that follows.20Like Adam and Eve, Edward has a need for Bella, so much so that he endangers her life by bringing her to a baseball game, thus exposing her to James. James is a tracker who has his own designs for Bella, and this leads to a series of consequences in which Bella's life is endangered and Bella is forced to leave her home and hurt her father, Charlie. Thus, Edward is tortured by his need for Bella, as his need for her leads to her endangerment, and this is something that Edward has a problem living with. As for forbidden love, the forbidden love forms the very heart of this novel. There is simply no getting around the fact that Bella is human and Edward is a vampire, albeit a beautiful vampire. While Edward is able to conquer his desire to kill Bella early on in the novel, thus taking away the main barrier that would exist between the two lovers, there are other barriers as well that makes their love forbidden and wrong for Bella. For instance, there is the issue of age – while Edward is destined to be, literally, forever young, this would not be the case with Bella. Like the titular character in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, in which the protagonist starts out an old man and grows progressively younger, Edward's destiny is to watch Bella grow into an old woman and die while he remains a teenager. Beyond the emotional ramifications of this inevitable fact, there are practical considerations as well. When Bella is 90 years old and Edward is still 17, they would never be able to present their love to a society and have it accepted. Their love would be forbidden, at this point, for that reason alone. Moreover, Bella would be committing herself to live as an outsider by being with Edward, as this is what Edward is and what he always must be. Then there is the inevitable question of having children, if this would even be possible – what kind of child would these two produce, and what kind of life will this child have with a mother who grows ever older and a father who will always be 17? Therefore, there are a multitude of reasons why Bella and Edward's relationship would never be accepted by society, let alone Bella's family. Although their passion and love is real, it is also wrong in so many ways for Bella, and, ultimately, Edward, for the reasons listed above. The age issue explained above also brings in another theme that presents itself, and that is the issue of the curse of immortality. Edward's immortality is a curse. Not only is he destined to lose Bella, his one true love, but he is also destined never to be reunited with her in a different life, for those who believe in reincarnation, or in heaven, for those who believe in the afterworld. In other words, once Bella is dead, she is lost to him forever, and he must live throughout eternity with the loss. Edward also will problems finding other loves after Bella passes, for he has to live with the knowledge that he will outlive every one of them. It would be better for Edward not to love at all, or, like Carlisle and Emmett, find another vampire to love. But, alas, it is his fate to fall in love with a mortal, so his immortality becomes a curse instead of a blessing that it could be. The loss of rationality is another theme that is touched upon in Twilight. Specifically, the person who loses all sense of reason is Bella. Edward warns her, early on, that he cannot be trusted, and implies that he is liable to kill her. Yet Bella goes to a meadow with him, where she is basically a sitting duck. Of course, he does not kill her, but Bella's willingness to be alone with a man who threatens to kill her represents the very height of loss of rationality. Bella's obsession with Edward, and Edward's obsession with her, represents another kind of loss of rationality, one that leads to Bella's life being endangered, due to the fact that she went to a baseball game with Edward and was spotted there by James. These two, Edward and Bella, are not being rational in falling in love, because of the complications that come through their falling in love, complications and consequences which are felt by both. Because they are not rational, but are driven purely by passion and emotion, they endanger one another and embark upon a love affair that is doomed from the start due to the fact that one is immortal and the other is not. Despite the fact that the novel represents a tortured, desperate and forbidden love, it is still useful in today's society, as it is a reflection of some of the frustrations that are experienced by modern society. Just as other vampires are useful to society, in that they embody evil and make evil mundane, thus more palpable, Twilight presents the evil as romantic, thus taking the sting out of something that might scare us. Edward is a cuddly type more than anything else, and, although there is a hint of bloodlust, he does not indulge in this, so he is able to make the vampire less evil and more relatable. Also, there is a sense in society that forbidden love is something that is wrong – an example would be gay relationships, which still are not quite reflective of the mainstream thought. The relationship between mortal and immortal suddenly makes these non-mainstream, “other” relationships seem more acceptable, and this is another purpose that Twilight serves to society. Twilight also embodies the frustrations that we call feel inside, about unrequited love, loving the wrong person, endangering the person that one loves, etc. By reflecting these values and romanticizing them, Twilight brings acceptability to all of these values which might be difficult for the individual to bear one one's own. And, by showing a person who is different, such as Edward, in a sympathetic light, it helps others who feel different to embrace their difference instead of shun it. Edward thus serves a variety of purposes in our society, as does the novel. Conclusion The vampires that are portrayed in the film and in books are representative of us, representative of society. Just like us, they feel desperation and loneliness. Just like us, they can be tortured and feel the pain of loving somebody they shouldn't. They are us, and, because they are so close to humanity, they are able to hold a mirror to humanities griefs and flaws and make everything seem not so bad. Read More