Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (40 page)

American society seemed consumed with the idea of the apocalypse as the new millennium drew closer, expecting the year 2000 to bring either a technological or theological “end times.” Buffy and her friends (who came to include a witch, a werewolf, two somewhat reformed vampires, and a centuries-old demon) avert numerous apocalyptic events, so much so that it becomes a running joke on the series. Buffy’s sometime boyfriend, Riley, comments in season four that his time with the slayer has made him wonder “what the plural of apocalypse is.” When Giles, a heavily redacted Van Helsing who serves as Buffy’s father figure through most of the series, announces dramatically in season five that “it’s the end of the world,” Buffy and her crew respond in unison “Again!!”

Buffy
clearly and deftly satirized the imagery of apocalypse prevalent in American culture. Rather than the foreordained apocalypse of evangelical Christianity, the end of the world is averted again and again through human agency. American millenarianism that imagined the coming of God’s judgment on the modern world is replaced in
Buffy
by an apocalypse of evil, engineered by monsters. These apocalyptic events are often prophesied but are never predetermined and are prevented through acts of self-sacrifice and unconditional love on the part of Buffy and her “Scooby Gang.”
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In the final episode of the final season (“Chosen”), Buffy and her friend Willow (who came out as a lesbian and became a powerful Wiccan in the course of the series) deconstruct the patriarchal source material that formed the very basis of the series. Obviously the idea of the “Chosen One” draws from centuries of monotheistic religion’s fascination with messianic male prophets and saviors.
Buffy
had already nuanced that imagery by presenting a woman as the Chosen One. The final episode subverted messianic imagery completely by having the power that male elders channeled through generations of slayers explode its parameters and become the property of women all over the world.

Buffy
not only deconstructed American notions of apocalypse, it also complicated the American monster tradition. Although
Buffy
centers on the monster slayer and her allies, it also systematically breaks down the narrative of ordered community of respectability that destroys the monstrous other. The show achieves this by frequently exploring the dangers of becoming a monster while trying to fight them. In the classic season three episode “Gingerbread,” Buffy’s mom and the other adults of Sunnydale band together against “occult influences” in their community, a clear reference to America’s satanic moral panics. Joyce Summers issues a rallying cry to rid the town of “the witches, the monsters and the slayers.” If this crusade to destroy the monsters succeeded it would mean, of course, the destruction of her own daughter and several of her daughter’s friends.
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Those who fight monsters should also beware lest they fall in love with them. The dark eroticism of the monster has been a theme running through hundreds of years of American cultural history.
Buffy
explores this idea but goes beyond it. In the first and second seasons, Buffy’s friend Xander falls for what turns out to be a cannibalistic giant bug and a millennia-old mummy. He eventually has a relationship with a vengeance demon (that looks like a young woman) and almost marries her. Willow has an Internet relationship with someone whom we learn is an ancient demon that has escaped into cyberspace. She later has a
long-term relationship with Oz the werewolf and, after she comes out of the closet, experiences a fulfilling, deeply moving, and doomed romance with a fellow female witch.

Buffy’s own romance with two very different vampires became central to the narrative arc of the series. The relationship between Buffy and Angel, a brooding Byronic “vampire with soul,” became the centerpiece of the early seasons. Angel, though reformed and tortured by his past deeds, is presented to us as having once been the cruel and lethal vampire Angelus. In season two, Angel reverts to his monstrous self, though he later finds redemption once again. After season five, Buffy’s romantic interest centers on Spike, another vampire of legendary evil, who seeks and finds redemption in an effort to win Buffy’s love and admiration. Along the way, these “monsters” not only form a romantic bond with Buffy, they become a part of Buffy’s community of misfits whose bonds of love and friendship often prove essential to the salvation of the world.

The possibility that the vampire, and the monster more generally, could be loved and cared for as well as darkly desired marks a new departure for the American monster tradition. The monsters of
Buffy
are sometimes creatures that must be destroyed or made into sexual fetishes. But they are also potential “life” partners and members of a community in which difference and the most extreme varieties of otherness prove no barrier to companionship. The slayer calls into question the need for slayers.

The end of
Buffy
in 2003 coincided with the growth of an even more popular manifestation of the vampire craze, one that borrowed heavily from certain aspects of other undead narratives while rejecting wholesale most of the vampiric tradition. If
Buffy
called into question the notion of slaying monsters, Stephenie Meyer took a very different route. Her monsters are not monsters at all.

Twilight of the Gods

The creature came to Stephenie Meyer in a dream. Meyer, a conservative Mormon, dreamed of a vampire in love with a girl. The vampire also thirsted to drink the girl’s blood. Originally, Meyer wrote the book for her own enjoyment, creating it as something on the order of Internet fan fiction. Submitting her work to fourteen agents before finding someone interested in marketing the book, her
Twilight
series had, by 2008, sold over one hundred million copies and been translated into thirty-seven languages. In 2008
Time
magazine included her on its list of the “100 most influential people” of the year.
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Twilight
tells the story of a romance between teenager Isabella (Bella) and Edward Cullen, a century-old vampire who masquerades as a teenager in a Forks, Washington, high school. Edward and Bella are typical star-crossed lovers, kept apart less by circumstance than by the fact that Edward’s attachment to Bella includes a strange mixture of lust and predatory hunger, a desire to literally fuck her to death. Readers are asked to empathize (indeed idealize) Edward for his effort to keep himself from ripping Bella apart and eating her.
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Over the course of four books, readers watch Edward become Bella’s protector and eventually her husband, introducing her into a secret world of supernatural creatures. Maintaining sexual purity until their marriage, the rather flat characters managed to hold reader interest with the titillating conceit of whether or not they would ever consummate their love. It also gave the opportunity for Meyer to endanger Bella repeatedly, allowing Edward in turn to save her.

Notably, Edward and his fellow vampires are an odd set of monsters, missing almost all the trappings of either traditional folklore or Hollywood legend. Edward is part of a nuclear family, a loving, highly traditional family that seems representative of 1950s dreams of domestic bliss. Unaffected by crosses or holy water, these rather bourgeois vampires can even walk in the sun (sunlight makes them “sparkle” rather than burst into flame). Moreover, many of them are termed “vegetarian vampires,” a particularly silly misnomer given that they use their speed and strength to hunt, kill, and feed on various woodland creatures instead of humans. Perhaps most notably, Meyer’s creatures are shorn even of fangs, the most basic accoutrement of vampire mythology.

Meyer’s reworking of the vampire mythos, to the point that Edward and friends are best thought of as another fantasy creature entirely different from the vampire, reflects a culture of conservatism from which the book came and to which it appeals. Stephenie Meyer’s deeply conservative religious faith worked its way into her dream of vampires. In a time when conservative religious organizations waged “abstinence only” campaigns, Edward fought to control his appetite for Bella’s blood while simultaneously refusing to have sex, since the act itself would likely overwhelm his self-control and lead to her brutal death. Meyer contains the imagery of alternative sexuality almost always associated with vampires, first by completely ignoring the homoerotic dimensions of the vampire present since Stoker’s novel and, second, by only allowing Edward and Bella to consummate within the confines of a highly traditional, hyper-heterosexual marriage.

Meyer’s books, and to a degree the films based on them, attempt to reconstruct the vampire legend as a tale of the struggle for “family values.” Christina Seifert of
Bitch
magazine coined the term “abstinence porn” to describe
Twilight
in a 2009 article. Seifert shows that the first three novels in the series are really about the pair’s successful “struggle to keep their pants on” and a celebration of the patriarchal family wrapped up in literally sparkling supernatural elements. The final book,
Breaking Dawn
, sees the pair finally married when Bella becomes a teenage bride of nineteen to the significantly older Edward. Their marriage replicates traditionalist assumptions about marriage with Bella offering her body to Edward and subsuming herself into the power relationships within his family. When not being brutalized in bed (she is covered in welts and wounds after her first session of lovemaking with Edward), she is making dinner for his mother or engaged in other domestic chores.
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Twilight
also deals with the politics of the womb. Edward immediately impregnates Bella after their marriage in
Breaking Dawn
and, despite the risk to her own life, she brings a monstrous baby to term. Bella must allow her humanity to die in order for the baby to live, in a perfect allegorical symbolization of traditionalist expectations about motherhood. Bella’s willingness to sacrifice herself is matched by Edward’s ferocity at saving his spawn as he tears the baby from Bella’s womb with his teeth. Bella loses both her humanity and any semblance she had of control over her own body.

The religious themes in
Twilight
, combined with its traditionalist ideology, have made it appealing to the Christian Right, some of whom even see it as an ally in the culture wars. The Facebook site “Jesus Christ Is My Edward Cullen,” created by high school student Amanda Boyce in 2009, both praised the books for their traditional representation of romance while investing them with theological meaning. “Only Christ is the true gentleman, the one who will sweep us off our feet,” the site promises. The immature though reactionary cultural agenda of the page is made clear when the author encourages males who want to join to declare their heterosexuality by writing “No homo” on the page’s wall.
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Conservative evangelical youth minister Kimberly Powers sees in
Twilight
a kind of mythical analogue to her own cultural agenda. In her writings, Powers approvingly quotes the teenage girls who have told her that Edward is the “perfect boyfriend” because he “comes from a good family,” and “he continually holds himself back from getting too physically close to Bella.” Powers herself praises Edward’s “insatiable desire to know everything about Bella” and suggests to her readers that “you would be crazy over this too, if someone cared for your every interest, if he wanted to know each of your thoughts so that he could better protect and honor you.”
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Notions of male figures who “protect” and “honor” are key to patriarchal discourses about family, marriage, and sexuality. These views comport well with Powers’ broader agenda. Powers leads a series of successful weekend conferences she calls “In Search of a Princess: A Weekend Celebration.” In sessions entitled “Daddy, I need you” and “soul-tie to the Father,” Powers suggests that the failure of the patriarchal household leads to numerous social and psychological problems.
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The willingness of conservative evangelicals to either praise or borrow imagery from the
Twilight
series shows that Meyer has not so much created a new American monster as sought to defuse the monster’s subversive power. Meyer’s vampires are literally defanged, their immemorial associations with sex and excess fully domesticated.
Twilight
seeks to legitimize white, middle-class, heterosexual values by introducing elements that seem to test that normative worldview and then holding those elements at bay. Meyer fully conscripts the vampire into the forces of reaction. Women frightened of the demands of sexual and political liberation can have their vampire and not be eaten by him too.

The refusal to allow the monster to be the monster, more than its obviously reactionary politics, is the chief reason that
Twilight
will likely make no enduring mark on the American monster tradition (though there is no doubt that its popularity will continue for some years). It is a narrative that literally has nowhere to go except to the safe confines of an idealized married life. Robbed of its adolescent romantic tensions by the marriage of Edward and Bella in
Breaking Dawn
, Meyer’s cycle of stories is unlikely to produce a larger, cohesive mythology.

HBO’s
True Blood
, on the other hand, promises to become a major milestone in the development of vampire mythology. Often knowingly schlocky and over-the-top in its portrayal of extreme violence and polysexual eroticism,
True Blood
has also managed to create a truly American vampire.