Saturday, July 30, 2011

The emasculation of the modern vampire?

Would Don Draper really be a better vampire than the men of "True Blood" and "Twilight"? Madness

Screenwriter Brian McGreevy did a guest stint on Vulture today with a diatribe on the emasculation of vampires in modern media, specifically in "True Blood" and "Twilight." "True Blood," at least, began with McGreevy's ideal sexy/dangerous vampire -- if not in Bill Compton, than in Eric Northman. Of course, now that Eric has lost his memory and Bill is playing at being a prissy little king, it's totally reasonable for McGreevy to assert that these characters "have taken the Romantic vampire and cut off his balls, leaving a pallid emo pansy with the gaseous pretentiousness of a perfume commercial. We are now left with the Castrati vampire."
Unfortunately, this argument smacks of chauvinism. McGreevy (currently adapting Bram Stoker's "Dracula" for the big screen) blames this on a new, dangerous "female gaze" -- as opposed to the misogynistic "male gaze" as defined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The female gaze, he suggests, makes these non-threatening vampires "pornography for tweens." When he asserts that "Mad Men's" Don Draper is actually more of a vampire than any of the "True Blood" or "Twilight" characters, what he's saying is that Draper is more of a man.

read on Salon

0 comments: