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Perception of the Vampire: Analysis

3/25/2022

by Sammi Shuma

From Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) to Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008), many interpretations of the vampire have appeared on screen. Sometimes they appear more monstrous with hideous fangs and claws or look more human to mask their true intentions and (oftentimes) for a young girl to fall in love with them. When it comes to vampire movies, most of these ‘creatures of the night’ are male characters. Their alluring nature traps women into their gaze, lost forever. A male is the predator while the female is the prey. In a film like Fright Night (Craig Gillespie, 2011), the vampire, Jerry, trails after a highschool girl. In the case of Matt Reeves’, Let Me In (2010), the roles are reversed. It is the story of a 12 year old boy, Owen, becoming friends with and ultimately falling in love with a female vampire, Abby. As we find out what Abby is towards the middle of the film, we see where her true intentions lie with Owen. Comparing this to the events in Fright Night, we will see some of the differences between how male and female vampires are portrayed in film. Depending on their gender, their characteristics change the level at which audiences can empathize with them.
There is a distinct difference in goal when it comes to why the vampire is targeting a character. Abby’s main goal is survival, to continue killing to help herself. She is not neat or methodical when she attacks her prey. At the beginning of the film, she has a man, who poses as her father, Hakan, go out on his own to get blood for her. On one of these trips, Hakan gets into a car accident, leaving Abby to fend for herself. While Hakan would attain blood without leaving a trace, Abby was less methodical. Attacking one of Owen’s neighbors, she is impulsive and reckless. She struggles to control her impulses, making her dependent on others to survive. She needs a servant. Hakan’s death was bound to happen, and Abby planned for his replacement to be Owen. As a vampire, she has the inability to take care of herself in a way that will prolong her existence. Due to her lack of self control, she uses her charm to trap Owen into Hakan’s fate. Owen is a tool, an opportunity to continue living an easier life where she does not have to control her impulses.

Jerry is self-sustaining, as he has been able to keep himself alive for over 400 hundred years. We see him be able to have a day job, with enough money to buy a house. When it comes to drinking blood, he doesn’t kill his victims, but turns them into vampires and has them live in his basement. Jerry is methodical and he has a plan in which he can fulfill on his own. He goes after Amy for companionship, but also to get back at Charley, a teenaged boy who is actively trying to kill him. He strides for a larger goal; to have dominion over his subjects. We see that he is actively manipulating his victims through compliments and his charm in his need for power. He is the main driver of conflict throughout the film; Jerry pushes against the other characters, willing to do anything for his goal because he has the strength and confidence to do so. Abby is much more passive, being more willing to have opportunities come to her. As she takes time to form a relationship with Owen, it becomes difficult to realize her manipulative strategies until near the end of the film. Jerry relies on his strength to meet his goals while Abby uses her intellect to swoon a boy into being her caretaker.

While their goals are on a different scale, each of them wants control of others. Their means ultimately change the audience’s perception of Jerry and Abby. As the truth about Abby is unknown to us at the start of the film, audiences are left to fill in the gaps about her past. Being introduced to her, we see her and Hakan walking into Owen’s apartment complex. Abby walks barefoot in the snow, giving us the impression of mistreatment and lack of care on Hakan’s part.
There are common traits that vampire characters have on screen. Dracula (Tod Browning, Karl Freund, 1931) and Twilight show how alluring vampires are. Women are drawn in simply by their gaze. Jerry and Abby accomplish this in different ways. In Fright Night, Jerry captures the hearts of several female characters through his muscular frame and confidence. He’s a lady’s man, able to attain anyone he chooses. It is his predominantly male traits that get him what he wants, succeeding for most of the film’s runtime. He is portrayed as a real villain, an unstoppable force. His charming façade quickly falls apart in the audience’s mind, becoming unlikable. Fitting into the typical vampire model, his dark intentions are clearly laid out to the audience early on. While this is amplified by the story telling, Jerry’s physique and domineering allows him to achieve his goals with ease. As he has no faults, he appears less human to the audience. Empathizing with his character becomes impossible because he has no faults.

Abby is portrayed as weak, lonely and excluded from the joys of childhood. As she meets Owen at the playground of their apartment complex, she doesn’t go for him immediately. She tells him that they cannot be friends and she tries to avoid him. As a young girl, she is shy and reserved, leaving us to feel she is withholding herself from the goal of companionship. The film gives Abby and Owen the time to form a meaningful relationship, where Abby struggles to get what she wants. It is through these struggles that the audience feels empathetic and invests in their friendship. Her gendered characteristics separate her from other vampire characters. Unlike Jerry, Abby struggles to achieve her goal. She appears more human to the audience, which ultimately blindsides us by the end of the film. The idea of the vampire becomes reimagined as is more than a villain to the main characters. Abby is endowed as a trusting best friend to Owen, we see her work to be by his side. She doesn’t just take what she wants simply because she can, but makes discoveries as to what works and what doesn’t. It is in her imperfection that Abby is likable, which is a departure from other descriptions of vampires in film.
Out of the hundreds of vampire movies available to watch, very few show vampires depicted like Let Me In. While she has fangs and kills people, she fails to eat her prey in a way that protects her from being discovered. Abby fails, seeking food and shelter from the assistance of others. Despite the strength she may possess as an immortal monster, her female fragility makes her easy to empathize with. Jerry is a more common example of a vampire in film. He takes whatever he wants without consequence, making his death satisfying to the audience. We see his true intentions early on in the film while Abby’s is masked by her weaknesses. By comparing Fright Night and Let Me In, we have seen how the difference of gender can make a vampire character more likable and easier to empathize with.

The French Dispatch: A Critical Analysis

3/18/2022

by Sebastian Tow

From Stranger Things, to Tarintino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there is a trend in the film industry to profit off a culture of nostalgia. But, is this merely a trend, or a symptom of a deeper cultural sickness? Not only in film, but in music, media, and, indeed, all modes of popular culture and otherwise, there is a growing sense of nostalgia. Wes Anderson’s latest hipster dereliction, The French Dispatch, is the most prominent example of this. It is an anthology, featuring a large cast and following three different storylines within the overarching plot depicting the fictional Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun newspaper as it creates its final issue. The first story follows an inmate and painter (Benicio del Toro) as he falls in love with one of the prison guards (Léa Seydoux), and is commissioned to paint a fresco. The second depicts one of the paper’s journalists (Frances McDormand) as she follows a group of French students (Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri) plotting a revolt, reminiscent of the real May ‘68 Paris protests. The third story of the film features Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, and Stephen Park, and follows the kidnapping of a police commissioner's son. Bill Murray also stars as Arthur Howitzer Jr., the paper's editor, while Owen Wilson appears in a short segment that introduces the film's setting in the fictional French town of ‘Ennui-sur-Blasé’.

The name ‘Ennui-sur-Blasé’ directly translates to ‘Boredom-on-Jaded’, and this phrase sums up the essence of The French Dispatch perfectly. Anderson’s style has gone well beyond that of self-parody, and it is clear that behind the meticulous aesthetics is nothing more than cynicism, and one could say, a vague boredom. But is Anderson to blame for this? On a closer, more sociological reading of the film, I would say no, not completely. Anderson as an artist and a director is, at least partially, unconscious of this, and can even be said to be attempting to counteract this. I intend to argue that The French Dispatch, and Anderson’s work as a whole, can be analyzed and understood as symptomatic of a bored and jaded culture, trapped in a deadlock of nostalgia and self-parody.

To understand this assertion one first has to look at the context the film is coming out of. In our times art is a commodity. Art is in the business of consumer entertainment; the film industry simply looks to maximise consumption of their product, so there is no room for deviation from this goal. Authentic art is always a result of a deviation from the traditions that preceded it, it is an event that results in a bloom of originality. But in a society predicated on business for business’ sake, art is unable to perform this act. In this way, from the 1970s onwards, art has proliferated the postmodern by incorporating every anti-establishment attitude into the cycle of the establishment, the cycle of art as commodity. Anything deviating from the mainstream, or acting against it, is quickly sucked up into the vacuum of production, and sold as the very thing it sought to counteract. This can be seen in Anderson’s work from the outset. In The French Dispatch, the very fact that art is commodified is known, and this is commented on within the film itself. The first story of the film makes the standard postmodern gesture of deprecating its own plot and imagery. The dance back and forth between Moses, the artist, and Julien, who wants to buy the art, reduces the character’s reverence for the art itself to nothing more than a joke. The story plays on this idea of art as trapped in commodification, as Adrien Brody’s character announces explicitly that “all art is for sale, you wouldn’t make it if it wasn’t.”

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher would say that this is only natural. According to Fisher, there is no question of art enacting genuine deviation anymore. The concept of art as an ideal that seeks earnestly to create new horizons is laughable now. Fisher pairs the commodification of art with this cynicism found in contemporary culture. Each story in The French Dispatch depicts characters who are artists and revolutionaries, yet through their self-mocking, blank style of delivery, the characters make fun of the things they stand for. Under the explicit content of the film, depicting artists and manifesto writers, is an implicit subtext of cynicism. This is one of the largest consequences of postmodern culture. And this is a major factor resulting both in a nostalgia culture, and in the nostalgia of Anderson's style. In a comment on Peter Sloterdijk’s book Critique of Cynical Reason, Slavoj Žižek says that “[today] ideology’s dominant mode of functioning is cynical. (...) The cynical [person] is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he nonetheless still insists upon the mask.” One can see this insistence in The French Dispatch. On the surface is the mask of nostalgic celebration of all things vintage, creative, modernist; yet beneath this is nothing but mockery.

Using these insights, we can track the timeline of the emergence of nostalgia culture in Anderson’s work. According to Fisher, the artistic impotence created by these forces reached a new high in the 2000’s. By that time, it became conceptually impossible to create anything new, at least in the mainstream, and ultimately this is when nostalgia culture emerged. From ‘business ontology’ came artistic ‘hauntology’: a depressed nostalgia for new art forms, a nostalgia for a time that was not caught in a loop of recycled forms, endlessly commented on by the metalanguage of cynicism. Anderson's early films, made between the late ‘90’s and the early 2000’s, like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, still existed, at least conceptually, within the time period they were filmed. The development of Anderson’s acutely nostalgic aesthetic was already running counter to this in his early work, and by the 2010’s Anderson’s films began to lose all context of time altogether. Films like The Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom bore the aesthetic of the 20th century, yet no one can say they are period films. They neither exist in the 20th century nor in the time they were created. Anderson’s films are packaged in the new-old, they give the viewer the fake experience of modernist artistic aesthetics, while their form remains within the harshest postmodern disposition. The characters of The French Dispatch, just as the characters of Anderson’s previous works, adorn a closet of perfectly coordinated outfits, pastel and perfect down to the hem. The set dazzles with its reminiscence, Ennui-sur-Blasé reminds one of the streets of Paris pictured in an early François Truffault film; but, unlike the earnestness seen in the eyes of Antoine as the camera follows him to the end of the beach at the climax of Truffault’s Les Quatre Cents Coups, Anderson’s characters speak in monotone voices, filled with mawkishness, and his sets are only the enhancement of recycled references. Anderson’s films are explicitly nostalgic, yet they do not repeat the true gesture of the past they imitate; every gesture, every line in the script, is but a simulation of itself, making fun of the very aesthetic referent its nostalgia is built on.

This style reached the threshold of tolerance in The Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s no wonder that The French Dispatch, Anderson’s first non-animated film since Grand Budapest, has gone past the point of recovery. The pace of the film is excessive, reducing the time for characters to utter a quip here and there, as the plot attempts to cram as much visual nostalgia into two hours as possible. In the third story, that of the police commissioner’s son, the levels of narrative are cramped and confused in pace. The story jumps back and forth to Jeffory Wright’s character, the journalist recounting the story to a TV audience, clad in a ‘70’s jacket that looks like it belongs to a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. The rest of the narrative is depicted by animation and hurried takes between the myriad of characters. In the second story, Revisions to a Manifesto, the logic of nostalgia culture built on business ontology is laid bare in its reference to Paris ‘68. We see here another hallmark of postmodern cynicism, the depoliticisation of culture. In this way, a past event such as the Paris student riots of ‘68, an earnest, yet failed attempt at political and cultural emancipation, is the perfect reference point for Anderson’s aesthetic. Out of the film's sense of nostalgia, covering an unconscious true nostalgia for earnestness and emancipation, it ends up mocking this nostalgia itself, visualizing it with black and white cigarettes, stacks of books, and stylishly dressed students playing chess in Parisian cafes. McDormand’s character blandly comments on the students, writing up their movement as nothing more than the “touching narcissism of the young.” Anderson’s mocking depiction of the sixtyeight-er zeitgeist speaks to the central contradiction that sustains us as inhabitants of nostalgia culture: it is impossible to get out of the loop of cultural recycling, cynical distancing, and depoliticization, yet we long for earnestness and artistic emancipation in culture. We mock the culture of the past, yet we wish it were actualized today. In this way, The French Dispatch is completely turpitudinous; the finality of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun as it ends with its last issue, echoes the very finality of The French Dispatch itself. The cast that has remained in Anderson’s work for years are but variations of the characters they have played in films before, reduced to proliferating the deadlock of nostalgic logic further, so there is no out, no way to go forward.

Analysis of the film raises a question as to how conscious Anderson is of these dynamics. From one angle it appears as though he is aware of the social and cultural dynamics at play in his own work, and one may venture to say that in The French Dispatch he chose to take the logic of nostalgia and cynicism to its endpoint in an attempt to critique this logic itself. This must be partially true, due to the very conscious choices made; was naming the setting for the film ‘Boredom-on-Jaded’ a mistake, or was it merely a sally of wit? Yet, whether or not Anderson is conscious of these dynamics does not redeem the film. I would predict that Anderson’s style has no place left to go but to reproduce a variation of the same blueprint pictured in The French Dispatch in his next film. It is not up to Anderson to break the postmodern logic inherent in nostalgia culture. For art and film in the wider sense, the only way to break from this deadlock is to be liberated from cynicism by emphasizing a new earnestness, non-referential to any imagined aesthetic of the past. The French Dispatch should be seen as the prime example of the existing order of cultural production that needs to be destroyed if there is any hope of taking art to a place of possible new creation.