Sam Leith, writing in the respectable magazine Prospect, has a fun analysis of the latest trans-Atlantic craze for vampires and zombies. To understand bloodsucking and brain-munching, he says, you need to know your Marx:
Vampires are monsters of the right; zombies are monsters of the left. Vampires are toffs; zombies are proles. Vampires are individualists; zombies are the mindless, nameless, faceless mob.Vampires are about hierarchies, tradition, bloodlines. They have mittel-European honorifics, live in castles, dress up and have manners. Vampires are the blood-and-soil nationalists of the undead world. Literally. Kipping in the soil of their native land is, in most versions of the myth, vital to vampiric survival.
Allowances made for the noticeable drop in occult quality since the Romantic Age, there's some merit to this argument. The grandfather of the zombie film, George Romero, is seen as a left-wing social satirist whose Night of the Living Dead cult classic was a schlock-and-gore parable about the 60's. The sequels had motives, too. Dawn of the Dead was a joke at the expense of 70's strip-mall consumerism, Day of the Dead was a commentary on the military-industrial complex, and the latest zombie installment, Land of the Dead, was an examination of class conflict, with a miscast Dennis Hopper trading in his Easy Rider hog for corporate domination. Or so claims Romero's Wikipedia entry.
The "hot or not" test here is to inquire how Brecht or Nabokov might have handled such subject matter. Zombies are echt-Brecht, I think we can all agree, while vampires--my sin, my soul--are way more Vlad's speed. But as with all trivial pop culture theories, Leith's has its wrinkles. After all, the first modern "vampire" (if we use the term loosely, although some did literally) was Lord Byron, a blue-blood with the best of them but also a radical revolutionary. Additionally, though this doesn't necessarily contradict Leith, if you consult (ahem) the following exegesis of the HBO series True Blood, you'll note that vampires have more in common with a subtle mythopoetic form of anti-Semitism, purview of the right and the left:
Any talk of glowering immortals stomping the earth in a state of High Romantic sturm und drang always puts me in mind of a different allegory -- that of the Wandering Jew. Perhaps you're familiar with this apocalyptic, anti-Semitic myth, which tells of a Jewish shopkeeper who, upon seeing cross-carrying Christ pause on his way to Golgotha, mocks the rebel rebbe: "Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?" For his insolence, the merchant is admonished by Christ: "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day," an incantation that condemns him to an eternity on earth. The inspiration for this fable of Hebraiophobic comeuppance derives from vague mutterings in the Gospel of Matthew as to the presence of those who "shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
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Elsewhere in literature the image or palimpsest of the Wanderer has been "reclaimed" to self-aggrandizing effect, anticipating today's sexy cool of angsty or amoral immortals. Benjamin Disraeli, England's first and only Jewish prime minister, was equally assailed and envied in his time as a sinister "magician," the Tory arriviste whose outsize ambition resulted in his owning the exclusive attention of one the most influential monarchs in history. Disraeli winkingly satirized himself-not to say his popular reputation-in the fictional character of Sidonia, a behind-the-scenes power broker who appears in three of the parliamentarian's late novels: Sybil, Tancred, and Coningsby, in which he plays a major role. As Adam Kirsch points out in his recent, brilliant biography of Disraeli, Sidonia is the uncanny archetype for every post-Protocols "international Jewish mastermind." He physically mirrors his creator in Iberian pallor, with an "impressive brow, and dark eyes of great intelligence." Despite having the ear of every European diplomat, a bank account capable of rescuing gross national products (a task that often falls to him), and a sexual demeanor to parody Orientalist stereotype, Sidonia is afflicted with an acute disorder: "He might have discovered that perpetual spring of happiness in the sensibility of the heart. But this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organization there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency. He was a man without affections." From Dracula to Barnabas Collins, vampires have warned their swooning prey not to get too attached....
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