Aprovecho para decir que Neil Gaiman me parece un pedante trasnochado, y que todos los fans de este autor que he conocido siempre han tenido en común enormes dosis de arrogancia, ego sobredimensionado, y una falta de respeto por los "inferiores" (es decir, todos los demás).
Dicho esto, para dejar las cosas claras, doy paso a la información.
Recently, EW's cover story looked at the resurgence of vampires in popular culture, including some thoughts from writer Neil Gaiman about why it's time for bloodsuckers to go back underground. He had a lot more to say on the topic, which we share here.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: In contemporary pop culture, we've seen vampires make that move from horror flick fear agents to more fallen or misunderstood social outcasts, who set moral limits on their nature or who see themselves as beyond morality. How did vampires go from being monsters to anti-heroes?
NEIL GAIMAN: I think mostly it has to do with what vampires get to represent. Because at the point where we begin vampire fiction, you're in Victorian days. And we're looking initially at the sort of antics of...that wonderful Victorian bestseller Dracula. And in each case you have characters who fundamentally represent sexuality. Dracula is a great novel of sexual seduction...and rape and sex. Vampirism is always an excellent way of talking about sex without talking about sex. So it makes complete sense that your solid Victorian vampires were fundamentally evil. And you can have that nice big stake hammered through them as a way of putting them to rest.
Since then, you had a lot vampires out there on the edges of fiction, [like] Ray Bradbury's beautiful [1946] short story ''The Homecoming.'' But I think the next big, huge, cultural, ''somebody's just written a vampire story'' [moment] is probably Stephen King's Salem's Lot, which is 1975. Steve basically wants to do Dracula again, only do it in a small town in Maine and see what would happen if Dracula's plan to take over America had won.... But at that point you've got vampires still sort of representing the ''other.'' I think then what happens is you have a confluence of a couple of things: you've got Anne Rice writing Interview with the Vampire, which as a teenager I thought it was a rather drippy book. I have to say, as a teenager who loved vampire fiction and wanted vampire fiction, I said, ''All sort of sitting around being miserable aren’t they?''
NEXT PAGE: ''But I think then the thing that changed everything and gave vampire fiction, if not a new lease on life a new lease on death, would have been AIDS.''
NEIL GAIMAN ON VAMPIRES (cont.): But I think then the thing that changed everything and gave vampire fiction, if not a new lease on life a new lease on death, would have been AIDS. You hit the early '80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood, an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as metaphor — not particularly as a metaphor for gay sex, but again as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jong quote, that vampirism is the ultimate ''zipless f---.'' And I think you got the resurgence of vampirism in the '80s as ''zipless f---.'' And then in a sort of continuous transmutation, you had Lost Boys, which is essentially vampirism as wish fulfillment — it was really the first time you can absolutely take a pin and point to these great vampire moments on celluloid or on video, or in print, whatever, where people really seemed to have looked around and gone, ''What is the downside of this thing again? Hang on, you get to live forever, you get to be absolutely sexually attractive and you don’t have zits... You have magic powers; what you're giving up is daylight.'' And this [sentiment] from people who aren't seeing a lot of daylight anyway. Seems like a very, very good exchange. So I think now you got vampirism firmly built into pop culture as a kind of beautiful, magical defect.
[As a writer,] I keep looking at vampirism and going, ''Well, the classical vampires, I don't want to go back there, I don't want to do it,'' and then I'll see a way of doing it that nobody's done before, or nobody's done exactly that way. My favorite was when I got to retell Snow White as a vampire story, in a story called ''Snow, Glass, Apples.'' Which is one of those lovely moments, where you suddenly look at something and you go, ''Well, hang on, why was her skin as white as snow and her lips as red as blood and her hair as black as coal — how do you get to be the kind of person who can lie in a coffin for six months and then get up again the moment that some prince rides past and says, 'Hey, she's cute, that dead body is; I've got to take it back to the castle.' '' So that was one of those places I where I was like, ''Okay, I like this.''
More recently, [I wrote] The Graveyard Book. I [took] an enormous amount of joy in having a very sympathetic character, probably the most sympathetic character in the book, be a vampire. And they're never saying that he was a vampire. And [then more joy in] finding out how many of the readers figured it out on their own. Interestingly, I think kids get it faster than adults do a lot of the time. But, [you can only] do that with a character when an entire culture understands that vampires cast no reflection, that vampires only go out at night; then you can use a line like ''Silas only ate one kind of food, and it wasn’t bananas.''
NEXT PAGE: ''You know, nobody's ever really done a good vampire president story. And if they had, it wouldn't be about vampirism any longer.''
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: We kind of touched on vampire as metaphor, what about some other themes, like thrill and fear of power, and fear of death.
NEIL GAIMAN: The glorious thing about being a vampire is that you don't die. And whether you're talking sparkly magic vampires or the intelligent, sympathetic Dracula — Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Tape series for example, or the Saint Germain Chronicles by um, oh God, what's her name? Chelsea Quinn Yarbro — all of that stuff essentially gives you, ''You're conquering death.'' You have limitations, and it depends on how crippling you think those limitations are. The very best piece of vampire fiction, I think, is incredibly short, and it was written by Charles Beaumont [in 1961]. It was just a vampire talking to a psychoanalyst. And it's just a glorious, very, very short story. It's called ''Blood Brother.'' It's the guy bitching about not being able to shave properly. And not being able to cross running water, and what that actually means in a city, and turning in and out of a bat. It's a wonderful sort of grumpy vampire shtick. And a kind that nobody's really done. Then of course there's Sesame Street, which I think may well have really created the sympathetic vampire for the world.
Well, can you touch on the theme of thrill and fear of power?
Well, I think the best one, I was completely fascinated by my old friend Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series, in which it all becomes about power — and the entire thing becomes about saying, ''Okay, what happened if Dracula won?'' And following down everything political, everything cultural from the point of view of a world in which it's pretty much all vampire. To be honest, I don't think vampirism, at least from my point of view, is ever about power. It's not about power because it's always about people exiled to the fringes. You know, nobody's ever really done a good vampire president story. And if they had, it wouldn't be about vampirism any longer. Even when you get to things like 30 Days of Night, you're looking at people going and invading a little town that's on the edge of nowhere and that nobody's going to notice. It never seems to be about power. It never seems to be about taking over the world. Because the moment it does, it's not vampire fiction anymore.
Vampires, I think, should be outsiders. They should probably be sexual outsiders, to some extent. They should, they need to be charismatic. They need to be elegant. They need to be attractive in some way. But they certainly aren't buying nice suits and calling the shots. And if they are, it's about something else.
NEXT PAGE: ''Vampires go in waves, and it kind of feels like now we're finishing a vampire wave; at the point where they're everywhere.''
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What about religion and anti-religion?
NEIL GAIMAN: You can't really do the Jesus vampire story. The great line, of course, is the line from the Bible, ''For the blood is the life.'' And the idea that everything that's going on is fundamentally blood-driven. Ever since I saw Dance of the Vampires, the Roman Polanski film — I think over here it may have been called Fearless Vampire Hunters, which I think may have been kind of stupid, because it made it sound like a comedy, it's funny, but it wasn’t a comedy. But Dance of the Vampires has that wonderful moment where Alfie Bass as the Jewish innkeeper has been bitten and transformed by the vampires. He comes back, he creeps into the bedroom, and she holds up the cross, and he says, ''Lady, have you got the wrong vampire.'' It was one of those occasions where something either crept out of the film and became a joke, or crept out of joke world and crept into the film. The idea it's not that it's a magic cross, it's all about what the vampire believes, it's all about what would have been holy. I'm pretty sure it was Stephen King, and if it wasn't Stephen King, it was Anne Rice who said, basically, ''You have to believe in the cross that you're holding up. Because if it's just a piece wood to you, it doesn't do anything to the vampire.''
Where are we now, in the grand vampire cycle?
Vampires go in waves, and it kind of feels like now we're finishing a vampire wave; at the point where they're everywhere. It's probably time to go back underground for another 20 or 25 years.
They’ve reached the saturation point.
I think so, and it definitely sort of feels like classical vampires have been around enough that if they could go back in their coffins, the next time they come out [they could] mean something really different. That would be cool.
Posted Aug 28, 2009 |
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