Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Once again I delve into pop culture and philosophy, a dangerous combination I'm sure. I'm still willing to brave these depths!
Thanks to Netflix Streaming, I've been able to watch movies and programs that previously would have required a lot of bother. Lately, I've taken to watching "Dark Shadows", perhaps interest piqued by the movie's recent release. The first season, though a bit slow and clunky to start along with having a few foibles of live television, provides entertainment and is engaging in ways modern television does not.
We are introduced to Barnabas Collins played by the recently late Jonathin Frid in the second episode, a mysterious man claiming to be a distant relative of the Collins clan. The family takes little convincing. It may seem strange, but he's a dead ringer for the original Barnabas Collins whose painting adorns the entry hall of the Collinswood home. Of course, we the audience know more is going on than meets the eyes of the Collins clan, for Barnabas wears a ring that we saw at the end of episode one -- and by the end of Season one the mystery man who exudes charm has been revealed as sinister and deadly. The clues are laid out and we known Barnabas as a vampire.
Frid is masterful in his portrayal, in my opinion. Barnabas Collins is a creature of depth. He struggles to regain a lost past, yet proves ruthless in his plans to regain what was lost. He coerces a young man into subjugation to him. He kidnaps and attempts to brainwash a young woman. Failing the latter, he imprisons her until she yields to his whims. All the while he exudes proper charm to his cousins and the local townsfolk. He waxes nostalgic before them, giving them images of the past in ways no one else can. Few see the dangerous creature beneath the charming exterior.
Contrast that to today's vampires and their ilk. I don't just mean Twilight. Pick most fiction or television surrounding them today. Vampires are as human as human can be; they're just 'humans with benefits'. Their drawbacks are nothing more than physical, if they have any. They no longer prey on others -- or if they do, they are cast out and destroyed by their colleagues who are more sympathetic to humans. A vampire who falls in love with a human is frequently encouraged by both sides, the struggles to the creature internal.
It's not just vampires who get this sort of treatment. Dragons, other creatures, more and more they are presented as friendly and sympathetic. There is no longer any danger. Go ahead! Hug that vampire! Make the dragon your best friend! It's okay!
I know it seems like a minor point, but I sense we lose something when we no longer declare a monster to be monstrous. I think we lose something when we create romance with monsters, with things that would prey upon us. It seems to me it reflects our present attitude where we reject the idea that evil exists in the world. We seek to flirt with it, try to tame it, try to make it our friend or even lover. And perhaps in doing so, we open ourselves to a danger greater than the wary imagined.
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Comments:
Nov '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Well put. I agree.
Jul '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
John Gardner wrote a brilliant book in the heart of the counter-revolution called Grendel, it was a portrait of an outsider's doomed struggle with a resumé padding king wannabe. Kind of a Holden Caulfield meets Odysseus thingy except Grendel actually brings some game.
The irony was lost on the current lot of monster rehabilitators with their unintentionally hilarious misappropriation of civil rights memes to produce a preposterous if wholly unintentional mockery of modern identity politics. When our time is studied, assuming there are future historians, these things will be an amusing coda on the Fall of the West.
May '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
And Charles Manson and Ted Bundy were just... different.
Mar '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
But Dark Shadows is what started the whole sympathetic vampire meme in the first place. Anne Rice just refined it, and Stephanie Meyer made it teenaged-girl friendly.
Stoker had it right all along: the vampire as a Satanic monster out to steal your soul as well as your blood. THAT's a vampire, not this sparkly crap.
Mar '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Remember The Thing, the John Carpenter movie? Some guy wrote a story called The Things, written from the viewpoint of the monster, who saw itself as an innocent victim and couldn't understand why "the things"... people... were rejecting the "gift" it wanted to give and were trying to kill it.
Jul '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
While we are at it, would you consider the Munsters and the Addams Family in the same light, or is a comedic investigation of monsterhood sufficiently insulated from the factual and mythic base material to subvert the dangerous aspect?
Jul '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Douglas: But Dark Shadows is what started the whole sympathetic vampire meme in the first place. Anne Rice just refined it, and Stephanie Meyer made it teenaged-girl friendly.
Stoker had it right all along: the vampire as a Satanic monster out to steal your soul as well as your blood. THAT's a vampire, not this sparkly crap. · 6 minutes ago
And if the sparkly crap is designed to undermine your cultural inoculation against monsters, leaving you unwary of their real life analogs? That strikes me as way more sinister a story than the one Bram Stoker left us.
Barnabas in the first season was evil with a charming face. The character became popular and so, under the laws of television marketing, had to become softened by his association with the Collins family and other villains found that they could combine their efforts against.
Edited on May 11, 2012 at 9:08pmNov '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
I love the pop culture/philosophy combination! I think it's an important discussion, and for sure interesting. Thank you for your well-written post.
Many months ago, a main feed contributor on Ricochet had a rich essay about zombie movies. I don't watch scary stuff, but I sure loved the post. I will link if I get a chance.
Feb '12
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
It's the trend of making monsters sympathetic that had me so impressed with "The Dark Knight."
Heath Ledger's Joker is presented as 100% chaotic evil. There is no sympathetic back-story, no traumatic event that unleashed the sociopathy, not even a familiar vice taken to extremes. He is just plain evil.
Even in superhero movies where one is allowed to have heroes and villians, that's a rarity.
Apr '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Being a latecomer in the show, I've not entirely seen the show in its full run. My experience is with the monstrous Collins -- and it's one I prefer, really. Evil often has a charming face; it pretends to be one of us until it can strike us unawares and destroy us.
I can most recall the change in view after the Anne Rice novels. Those presented the internal struggle of Monster vs. Human, but in these the Human tended to prevail. The Monster only wins with tragic circumstances that the Human must contend.
As for Munsters and Addams Family, I give a bit more leeway in that they were comedys. The overall gag of both was that though abnormal, they considered themselves normal and the rest of the world was weird. The Munsters had an episode demonstrating that where a home and family magazine published their picture describing their monstrosity and a family of average Americans. The Munsters just assumed the magazine mixed up the pictures and captions. That was the joke: Wrong was right; good was evil; monstrous was normal.
Nowadays, the last is played as serious and true.
Apr '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Amy Schley: It's the trend of making monsters sympathetic that had me so impressed with "The Dark Knight."
Heath Ledger's Joker is presented as 100% chaotic evil. There is no sympathetic back-story, no traumatic event that unleashed the sociopathy, not even a familiar vice taken to extremes. He is just plain evil.
Even in superhero movies where one is allowed to have heroes and villians, that's a rarity. · 2 minutes ago
Bonus points for using "chaotic evil". I liked that about The Dark Knight as well. The Joker was not evil to be understood, as Warne attempted to at first. He just sought to destroy.
Apr '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Hear, hear! C. U. Douglas.
The sympathetic monster, who is nothing more than a human with a problem is a terrible inversion. It actually just ruins the very idea of monsters. Which are these pitiless forces of nature that man must struggle with and overcome.
I think one of the driving things behind this was the attempts by sci-fi writers to alter perspective as a means of challenging the readers assumptions. This is is an interesting tool, but it can go too far when it is used by people who have a weak grasp of good and evil. It is one thing to try to see the world from the perspective of the monster, but to loose site that this is a monster negates the whole reason for the creature to exist.
There are still movies (I don't read vampire books) that take a more traditional view. Have you seen "Let the right one in"? It is a Finish or Sweedish movie about a boy and a vampire who is a little girl. It perfectly captures the essence of the beast, but is still subtle and very eerie...I highly recommend it.
Nov '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
Valiuth: I think one of the driving things behind this was the attempts by sci-fi writers to alter perspective as a means of challenging the readers assumptions.
I do wonder if the change is driven by an effort to make fiction more powerful. I didn't pay much attention to the fiction advice in Writer's Digest, but one tip that I internalized was that the author should have a complex villain who struggles internally with real issues. A villain with layers was a way to get the reader really involved.
Notice how black and white Tolkien was. His bad guys were always evil through and through. This was not true of Lewis.
Edited on May 11, 2012 at 9:32pmFeb '12
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
sawatdeeka:
Notice how black and white Tolkien was. His bad guys were always evil through and through. This was not true of Lewis. · 25 minutes ago
Edited 24 minutes ago
I don't think this is fair to Tolkien. Sure, Sauron was all evil, all the time. But frankly, the compelling conflicts of the story aren't the Fellowship v. Sauron. It's the characters v. their own struggles (Aragorn's responsibility as king, Boromir's and Faramir's duties to their father, Gollum v. Smeagol) and the characters v. each other (Legolas v. Gimli, Gimli v. Eomer, Sam v. Gollum, etc.). Sauron is just kind of a backdrop against which they struggle, and to say each villain is black and white is to completely ignore the character arcs of Gollum/Smeagol and Saruman.
Nov '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
I guess I wasn't thinking about those, Amy. I was thinking more about the legions of orcs and hordes of goblins, none of whom showed any inclination to defect to the good side.
Apr '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
If anything, the strongest representation of evil in Lord of the Rings is The Ring itself. It lures people, draws them towards it. It promises the power to solve their problems. It traps them, makes them want it, desire it, be jealous of it -- and knowing all this, even the greatest cannot set it aside.
Apr '11
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
I have always wondered about the drive to have complex villains. In a way the most complex villains are those that are hard for the audience to name as villains. Because we sympathies with them or because we can not quite be sure they are wrong. But, what I think it is is that the complex villain is the villain we believe can be redeemed.
Suaron is beyond all redemption and remorse, having committed his very existence to his evil craft and purpose, Golum though is almost redeemed. So I agree with everyone that Tolkien has both complex and simple villians.
I think though without the irredimable evil how can one appreciate the struggle we see by protagonists and antagonists. Without knowing what Sauron is how can we really appreciate Suroman's fall? There is little reason to focus on irredeemable evil, but if it is not there one looses perspective.
May '10
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
C. U. Douglas:
There is no longer any danger. Go ahead! Hug that vampire! Make the dragon your best friend! It's okay!
I know it seems like a minor point, but I sense we lose something when we no longer declare a monster to be monstrous.
Agreed.
I'm a little disturbed whenever my nephew and I are playing with his dinosaur toys and he corrects me to say, "No, he's a nice dinosaur" or "No, they're friends." Nice dinosaurs? The word "dinosaur" means "terrible lizard"! I blame Dinosaur Train.
At least he loves monster and ghost stories. Too soon for The Dark Crystal? ;)
The Joker as envisioned by Heath Ledger is perhaps my favorite villain. He doesn't want to completely defeat Batman. "Kill you? [giggles] I don't want to kill you! What would I do without you?" He's not evil because he's compelled to be. He's evil because it's fun for him.
Apr '12
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
So much here. I vaguely recall a study that looked at monsters in the twentieth century and compared it with the politics of the times. So, there were plenty of monster movies in the 50's as we were in the Cold War. The monsters changed in the 60's, both because of Democrat leadership and Vietnam, etc. In the 80's, Zombie movies came into vogue because Republicans were in charge. I wish I could remember more and find it.
In some ways, I think the old monsters are no longer as relevant. Many of them were both explanations and cautionary tales from old agricultural societies. By this I refer to monsters like dragons and shapeshifters, redcaps and kobolds. They warned people away from dangerous places and activities.
More modern monsters were spurred by more modern events and sensibilities. Frankenstein was the "modern Prometheus" making monsters through science, taking God's power into his hands. The novel was partially spurred by demonstrations of the effect of electrical current in dead frogs. Dracula was written during the Victorian era where sexual repression was rampant.
And then there are zombies, also known as Democrats, who project their mindless state onto others.
Feb '12
Re: Where Have All the Monsters Gone?
This may be what you were thinking of, Ara.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19402_6-mind-blowing-ways-zombies-vampires-explain-america.html
Short version: The right fears vampires because they're immoral sexual deviants, foreigners, and parasites, while the left fears zombies because they're mindless consumers, they're here to stamp out all non-conformists, and they can't think for themselves. (Warning: written from left-wing perspective and CoC violation language)