Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World

CHAPTER TWELVE. Vampires in a Borderless World

CHAPTER TWELVE Vampires in a Borderless World From Dracula (1897) to Blade (1998) and its contemporaries, the cinematic vampire has undergone a process of liberation from the boundaries of space, time, and body and, as a result, embodies a legacy of transformation that expresses the experience of modernity. But where does the cinematic vampire go from here? As we move further into the twenty-first century, the vampire continues to show its presence in the cinema with such films as Blade II (2002), Queen of the Damned (2002), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), Underworld (2003), Van Helsing (2004), Blade Trinity (2004), Vampires: The Turning (2005), Night Watch (2005), and Underworld: Evolution (2006). I have argued in this book that the link between the vampire and modernity has repeatedly forced the vampire to emerge in the heart of the modern world—London in the nineteenth century and America in the twentieth century—and yet it is noticeable that these recent films see the vampire largely return to its European origins. Blade II, Underworld, and its sequel Underworld: Evolution are set in Prague; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Van Helsing follow their characters on their quests across Europe; Night Watch is set in Moscow; and the lead vampire of Queen of the Damned, Lestat, is no longer a modern American vampirelikeMartinorDeaconFrost,butanaristocraticFrenchnobleman.1 Rather than a return to a traditional, premodern vampire, however, these films suggest that the vampire in the twenty-first century continues to be a product of the changing modern world,this time by expanding its freedom of mobility beyond the borders of America. The modern vampire has gone global. While the vampire has, in recent years, increasingly transcended its physical boundaries, world politics, communications, and economy have similarly been transcending national boundaries, favoring the global over 216 CelluloidVampires the local. Zygmunt Bauman argues that boundaries in the contemporary world have become outmoded, suggesting that, in the past, “the divisions of continents and of the globe as a whole were the function of distances made once imposingly real thanks to the primitiveness of transport and the hardships of travel.”2 With the rise of new technologies and the potential for instantaneous communication, distances have not only been brought closer together, in the manner suggested by the telegraph and the telephone, but have been virtually eliminated through electronic messaging and the World Wide Web. As Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor explain, We live in a world that is changing before our eyes. Corporations transcend particular countries and are now global, no longer really “centered ” anywhere. Nations are breaking apart and reforming, and peoples are often far flung in diasporas across different continents . . . All these changes depend on and reflect new telecommunications technologies. As these larger “bodies”—or people, business, and government—are more closely tied to vast technologies, they too become cyborgs and we struggle to find ways to understand and predict how they are shifting.3 According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the power of the nationstate has, in recent years, declined, facilitating a freer flow of money, technology , people, and goods across national boundaries, all of which contribute to the strength of globalization.4 The new global world market demands unhindered flow of capital in a deterritorialized market.5 But how does this relate to vampires? Franco Moretti has already established the relationship between vampires and capitalist consumption in his analysis of Dracula. Moretti saw a similarity in the manner in which capitalism squeezes the life out of its labor force and the way a vampire “manages to live thanks to the blood he sucks from the living. Their strength becomes his strength. The stronger the vampire becomes, the weaker the living become.”6 Confrontations between the zombies and humanity in an abandoned shopping mall in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead have also been read as an allegory for consumerism. The insatiable hunger of the zombies, who, like the humans, are drawn to the mall and aimlessly roam its corridors, is mirrored by the greed exhibited by the human survivors as they wallow in the consumer-excesses of the shopping mall. For Robin Wood, it is “through the realization of the ultimate consumer-society dream (the ready availability of every luxury, emblem and status-symbol of capitalist life, without the penalty of payment) [that] Vampires in a Borderless World 217 the anomalies and imbalances of human...