Why So Coy?
Okay I lied a little. I decided to watch a brace of shitty vampire movies (the Underworld series, soon to have a third installment) and then followed it up with a pretty good BBC serial called Ultraviolet. This isn't really a review of either one, just a jumping off point for a musing. Maybe gearing up for Buffy.
Both Underworld and Ultraviolet attempt to take a relatively science-informed perspective on the whole vampire schtick, and have the obvious starting point of viewing the vampiric condition as, basically, a virus. Underworld is a little more pretentious with its faux-scientific aspirations and actually tries to just offer a hand-wavy explanation for the virus: a plague swept through a fifth century Hungarian village and killed everybody except one Alexander Corvinus, who, we're supposed to gather, had some genetic mutation that by chance allowed him to survive the plague by mutating it, with the result that he was immortal. So far so good, for what it's worth, and the whole plot of the first movie especially is involved with the fantasy-logic of evolving strains; one of Corvinus' sons wound up being the first vampire and the other the first werewolf. Except that the reason why is that one of them was bitten by a bat and one by a wolf. So this crazy plague-virus-mutation *also* had the ability to, uh, incorporate DNA characteristics transmitted through another animal's saliva. And those characteristics which humans find evocative, rather than the ones which are actually germane. A little dodgier ground. What makes it hilarious is the self-seriousness of the first movie's commentary, where Len Wiseman (the director and co-creator) and Kevin Grevioux (co-creator and the big black dude with the crazy deep voice who plays a werewolf) talk about their desire to make it all plausible within the movie's world. They're not fooling themselves that they're dealing with actual science, but they're gesturing very broadly at the idea that, given their first principles, they've tried to work out something plausible and rigorous, which is an admirable notion that reaches its climax when Wiseman explains that in these movies vampires DO reflect in mirrors because he couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation for why they wouldn't. At which point I burst out laughing because, for fuck's sake, What is the reasonable in-movie scientific explanation for being allergic to ultraviolet light?!?!?! Because the vampire ancestor was bitten by a BAT?! So "prefers the night-time" is glossed as "will burst into flame when exposed to the sun?" JEEEEZ, guys.
(NB1: The "vampires reflect" thing is actually put to very clever and subtle story use in the first film, so props for that.)
(NB 2: The association between vampires and bats is much younger than the idea of the vampire. The word "vampire" in Slavic languages traces back about a thousand years, but the various cultural manifestations of the idea [in Slavic and other cultures] are much older. The vampire bat, on the other hand, is indigenous to South America and wasn't encountered by white men until the 1600s; the bat was named for the beast, not the other way around. Also, vampire bats are a lot smaller than the bats you see in vampire-associated contexts these days. Fairness does compel me to note that bats were considered to have mystical properties in Europe, and so maybe there was some association predating the vampire bat after all. Probably not, though.)
(NB 3: The idea that vampires are allergic to sunlight is less than a hundred years old and seems to date to the film Nosferatu in 1927. In Stoker's Dracula, the titular character is weakened and less powerful in sunlight, but fully capable of walking around in the daytime. Incidentally, the no-reflection theme is considerably older [though not at all universal] and may date to the days when mirrors were backed with silver, which was considered a good all purpose material for fighting supernatural bad guys. Werewolves with silver allergies, by the way, is apparently a sufficiently rigorous scientific concept for the Underworld braintrust.)
This kind of myopic seriousness is indicative of Wiseman and Grevioux's contentions that they're just really big "genre" fans and wanted to make a completely unapologetic and uncompromising "genre" film. I hate the use of "genre" in this sense, where it's deployed as a descriptive noun to mean "stylistic or plot-based ghetto". What they really mean is "horror," except they don't because they admittedly made an action movie. So what they do mean is, in fact, "not-'literary'." What this results in is taking the world-building conceit superseriously, which is a valid way to go except for where the whole "mirrors vs. sunlight" and "being bitten by a bat" thing makes it ridiculous. I certainly wish that at times Buffy had been more careful with its own continuity and world-building, but Joss Whedon was always forthright about that not being his primary or secondary interest. Whedon is a gigantic "genre" fan as well, but his engagement with genre tropes is to play with deconstruction and collage of those elements. Buffy's raison d'etre, particularly in the first three seasons, was the extended articulation of the horror genre as a metaphor for everyday life: your school is a pit of Hell, if your mom won't let you go out tonight it will be the end of the world, sleeping with a boy will change him in very real and upsetting ways. This would be insufferable if the show didn't have a sense of humor and, really, a sense of camp about its own mechanisms; it couldn't be what it wanted and shoot for the straight-faced tone to which Underworld aspires.
(NB 4: Another mechanism of the whole "we're just big fans of 'genre'" thing is the way in which Underworld is sort of fan-service-y. Wiseman talks on that same commentary track about how, filming a particular shot of Kate Beckinsale walking from behind, he told her "I'm really sorry, but this is absolutely going to be in the trailer." And it was. [He doesn't mention, on the commentary, that during filming he and Beckinsale began a relationship {they're now married} and she ended a longstanding relationship with the father of her daughter, which gentleman was also a main character in the movie!] Vampires are sexy, post Anne Rice, and part of being "genre" for these guys is putting attractive women [and let's be honest, Beckinsale in skintight black leather is one of the things that kept me awake through these two flicks] in revealing costumes. On the other hand, there are no female werewolves in either movie, because presumably werewolves as conceived here aren't sexy. In the Buffyverse, werewolves [in their wolf form] aren't sexy either, but there are two female werewolves of some considerable appeal anyway, one played as a somewhat unlikeable femme fatale and one played as a sympathetic romantic interest. Not to mention, of course, Seth Green's turn as Oz. In Whedon's world, the emotional logic rules everything else, whereas in Underworld the allegiance really winds up being "what do we think is cool." Really really really hairy chicks is apparently not cool.)
Ultraviolet is much better. For one thing, it has Idris Elba (fans of The Wire take note!) and Jack Davenport (fans of the original BBC's Coupling take note!) among other players in a very strong cast. It's six episodes long, tells a compact dramatic arc, and works on its own terms much better than Underworld. The show is much less concerned with origins; the science works to the degree that humans have figured it out (yes, it's a blood virus, and you can do things like isolate the active ingredient in garlic and use it in a smoke bomb), but the whence and wherefore of vampires is left unexplained, unknowable. One character deduces that it was exposure as a young boy to vampires which drove another character into the priesthood - what but a vampire could be a clearer sign that there were supernatural powers in the world? By being less ambitious with the extent of explanations, Ultraviolet's science works better and the show overall is much more compelling. It does, however, share a title with a Milla Jovovich movie directed by Kurt Wimmer, and the Netflix envelopes for the show think they're holding the movie.
Fun fact: the Milla Jovovich Ultraviolet is ALSO sort of about vampires! I did not know this from the trailers to that movie! Like, no mention of vampirism, or indication of explicitly and uniquely vampiric qualities! It's like they didn't want us to know there were vampires in the movie. Which by the way, nobody says the word "vampire" in the show Ultraviolet. They call them "Code Fives" - i.e., "Code V" - or, for slang, "leeches", but usually "them". The show's creator has said he thought it'd be easier to sustain the tone he wanted if nobody used the word. Also: while people do use the word "werewolf" in the Underworld movies, the preferred term is "Lycan", as in "lycanthropy". And the reason is because Len Wiseman and Kevin Grevioux thought werewolves were a little cheesy and didn't think they could or their audience could take seriously the use of the word over and over. Hence lycans. GUYS: You developed a whole movie around the idea of a war between werewolves and vampires and then you thought that you were a little embarrassed by the fucking word werewolf?!?! This is what I was talking about before! It's a perfectly good word with perfectly respectable and scary Germanic roots. So anyway, I knew the movies had werewolves when I saw the trailers because I deduced it from the whole clever "lycans" thing, but otherwise I might not have known until I started reading the press. And finally: I haven't seen I Am Legend, and I'm not really interested. But: the early press, at least, for the movie gave no indication as to who or what the monsters were. At the time I assumed that they'd followed the book and made them vampires, but instead they made them, apparently, some sort of zombie-like thing, because they decided they'd rather re-make The Omega Man, itself a profoundly unfaithful adaptation of the source novel, one of the great works of 20th century horror. Some day someone will make a faithful adaptation that actually understands what the fucking point of the book is, but until then I'm left to wonder why only the first movie version - The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price - bothered to use vampires instead of vaguely associated zombie creatures. Are undefined zombielike mutants so much more palatable than vampires?
(NB 5: This, from the wikipedia article on the Will SmithI Am Legend, fucking kills me everytime I read it: "The director [Francis Lawrence, who directed Constantine and a bunch of music videos] had watched The Pianist with a low volume so as to not disturb his newborn son, and realized that silence could be very effective cinema." This is priceless. An adult who aspires to be a film director took until the last few years to realize that silence could be effective as a dramatic tool? He didn't notice this from watching any actual movies that intentionally deployed long stretches of silence? This guy got to direct a fucking movie?)
People seem to be anxious about admitting their vampire and werewolf movies have vampires and werewolves in them. They seem to feel the need to disguise or apologize or alter them so as to not seem so - what, silly? If the idea is silly it's silly even when you call your werewolves lycans. The (late) WB network apparently always had a problem with the title Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I can see why; like with Battlestar Galactica, in addition to struggling with the memory of a predecessor work bearing the same name, the title is a barrier to someone presuming he can take the thing seriously. But I do like Whedon's rejoinder, which is that it's all right there: the show is a blend of comedy (Buffy), horror (Vampire) and action (Slayer). What else do you need to know?
Both Underworld and Ultraviolet attempt to take a relatively science-informed perspective on the whole vampire schtick, and have the obvious starting point of viewing the vampiric condition as, basically, a virus. Underworld is a little more pretentious with its faux-scientific aspirations and actually tries to just offer a hand-wavy explanation for the virus: a plague swept through a fifth century Hungarian village and killed everybody except one Alexander Corvinus, who, we're supposed to gather, had some genetic mutation that by chance allowed him to survive the plague by mutating it, with the result that he was immortal. So far so good, for what it's worth, and the whole plot of the first movie especially is involved with the fantasy-logic of evolving strains; one of Corvinus' sons wound up being the first vampire and the other the first werewolf. Except that the reason why is that one of them was bitten by a bat and one by a wolf. So this crazy plague-virus-mutation *also* had the ability to, uh, incorporate DNA characteristics transmitted through another animal's saliva. And those characteristics which humans find evocative, rather than the ones which are actually germane. A little dodgier ground. What makes it hilarious is the self-seriousness of the first movie's commentary, where Len Wiseman (the director and co-creator) and Kevin Grevioux (co-creator and the big black dude with the crazy deep voice who plays a werewolf) talk about their desire to make it all plausible within the movie's world. They're not fooling themselves that they're dealing with actual science, but they're gesturing very broadly at the idea that, given their first principles, they've tried to work out something plausible and rigorous, which is an admirable notion that reaches its climax when Wiseman explains that in these movies vampires DO reflect in mirrors because he couldn't come up with a reasonable explanation for why they wouldn't. At which point I burst out laughing because, for fuck's sake, What is the reasonable in-movie scientific explanation for being allergic to ultraviolet light?!?!?! Because the vampire ancestor was bitten by a BAT?! So "prefers the night-time" is glossed as "will burst into flame when exposed to the sun?" JEEEEZ, guys.
(NB1: The "vampires reflect" thing is actually put to very clever and subtle story use in the first film, so props for that.)
(NB 2: The association between vampires and bats is much younger than the idea of the vampire. The word "vampire" in Slavic languages traces back about a thousand years, but the various cultural manifestations of the idea [in Slavic and other cultures] are much older. The vampire bat, on the other hand, is indigenous to South America and wasn't encountered by white men until the 1600s; the bat was named for the beast, not the other way around. Also, vampire bats are a lot smaller than the bats you see in vampire-associated contexts these days. Fairness does compel me to note that bats were considered to have mystical properties in Europe, and so maybe there was some association predating the vampire bat after all. Probably not, though.)
(NB 3: The idea that vampires are allergic to sunlight is less than a hundred years old and seems to date to the film Nosferatu in 1927. In Stoker's Dracula, the titular character is weakened and less powerful in sunlight, but fully capable of walking around in the daytime. Incidentally, the no-reflection theme is considerably older [though not at all universal] and may date to the days when mirrors were backed with silver, which was considered a good all purpose material for fighting supernatural bad guys. Werewolves with silver allergies, by the way, is apparently a sufficiently rigorous scientific concept for the Underworld braintrust.)
This kind of myopic seriousness is indicative of Wiseman and Grevioux's contentions that they're just really big "genre" fans and wanted to make a completely unapologetic and uncompromising "genre" film. I hate the use of "genre" in this sense, where it's deployed as a descriptive noun to mean "stylistic or plot-based ghetto". What they really mean is "horror," except they don't because they admittedly made an action movie. So what they do mean is, in fact, "not-'literary'." What this results in is taking the world-building conceit superseriously, which is a valid way to go except for where the whole "mirrors vs. sunlight" and "being bitten by a bat" thing makes it ridiculous. I certainly wish that at times Buffy had been more careful with its own continuity and world-building, but Joss Whedon was always forthright about that not being his primary or secondary interest. Whedon is a gigantic "genre" fan as well, but his engagement with genre tropes is to play with deconstruction and collage of those elements. Buffy's raison d'etre, particularly in the first three seasons, was the extended articulation of the horror genre as a metaphor for everyday life: your school is a pit of Hell, if your mom won't let you go out tonight it will be the end of the world, sleeping with a boy will change him in very real and upsetting ways. This would be insufferable if the show didn't have a sense of humor and, really, a sense of camp about its own mechanisms; it couldn't be what it wanted and shoot for the straight-faced tone to which Underworld aspires.
(NB 4: Another mechanism of the whole "we're just big fans of 'genre'" thing is the way in which Underworld is sort of fan-service-y. Wiseman talks on that same commentary track about how, filming a particular shot of Kate Beckinsale walking from behind, he told her "I'm really sorry, but this is absolutely going to be in the trailer." And it was. [He doesn't mention, on the commentary, that during filming he and Beckinsale began a relationship {they're now married} and she ended a longstanding relationship with the father of her daughter, which gentleman was also a main character in the movie!] Vampires are sexy, post Anne Rice, and part of being "genre" for these guys is putting attractive women [and let's be honest, Beckinsale in skintight black leather is one of the things that kept me awake through these two flicks] in revealing costumes. On the other hand, there are no female werewolves in either movie, because presumably werewolves as conceived here aren't sexy. In the Buffyverse, werewolves [in their wolf form] aren't sexy either, but there are two female werewolves of some considerable appeal anyway, one played as a somewhat unlikeable femme fatale and one played as a sympathetic romantic interest. Not to mention, of course, Seth Green's turn as Oz. In Whedon's world, the emotional logic rules everything else, whereas in Underworld the allegiance really winds up being "what do we think is cool." Really really really hairy chicks is apparently not cool.)
Ultraviolet is much better. For one thing, it has Idris Elba (fans of The Wire take note!) and Jack Davenport (fans of the original BBC's Coupling take note!) among other players in a very strong cast. It's six episodes long, tells a compact dramatic arc, and works on its own terms much better than Underworld. The show is much less concerned with origins; the science works to the degree that humans have figured it out (yes, it's a blood virus, and you can do things like isolate the active ingredient in garlic and use it in a smoke bomb), but the whence and wherefore of vampires is left unexplained, unknowable. One character deduces that it was exposure as a young boy to vampires which drove another character into the priesthood - what but a vampire could be a clearer sign that there were supernatural powers in the world? By being less ambitious with the extent of explanations, Ultraviolet's science works better and the show overall is much more compelling. It does, however, share a title with a Milla Jovovich movie directed by Kurt Wimmer, and the Netflix envelopes for the show think they're holding the movie.
Fun fact: the Milla Jovovich Ultraviolet is ALSO sort of about vampires! I did not know this from the trailers to that movie! Like, no mention of vampirism, or indication of explicitly and uniquely vampiric qualities! It's like they didn't want us to know there were vampires in the movie. Which by the way, nobody says the word "vampire" in the show Ultraviolet. They call them "Code Fives" - i.e., "Code V" - or, for slang, "leeches", but usually "them". The show's creator has said he thought it'd be easier to sustain the tone he wanted if nobody used the word. Also: while people do use the word "werewolf" in the Underworld movies, the preferred term is "Lycan", as in "lycanthropy". And the reason is because Len Wiseman and Kevin Grevioux thought werewolves were a little cheesy and didn't think they could or their audience could take seriously the use of the word over and over. Hence lycans. GUYS: You developed a whole movie around the idea of a war between werewolves and vampires and then you thought that you were a little embarrassed by the fucking word werewolf?!?! This is what I was talking about before! It's a perfectly good word with perfectly respectable and scary Germanic roots. So anyway, I knew the movies had werewolves when I saw the trailers because I deduced it from the whole clever "lycans" thing, but otherwise I might not have known until I started reading the press. And finally: I haven't seen I Am Legend, and I'm not really interested. But: the early press, at least, for the movie gave no indication as to who or what the monsters were. At the time I assumed that they'd followed the book and made them vampires, but instead they made them, apparently, some sort of zombie-like thing, because they decided they'd rather re-make The Omega Man, itself a profoundly unfaithful adaptation of the source novel, one of the great works of 20th century horror. Some day someone will make a faithful adaptation that actually understands what the fucking point of the book is, but until then I'm left to wonder why only the first movie version - The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price - bothered to use vampires instead of vaguely associated zombie creatures. Are undefined zombielike mutants so much more palatable than vampires?
(NB 5: This, from the wikipedia article on the Will SmithI Am Legend, fucking kills me everytime I read it: "The director [Francis Lawrence, who directed Constantine and a bunch of music videos] had watched The Pianist with a low volume so as to not disturb his newborn son, and realized that silence could be very effective cinema." This is priceless. An adult who aspires to be a film director took until the last few years to realize that silence could be effective as a dramatic tool? He didn't notice this from watching any actual movies that intentionally deployed long stretches of silence? This guy got to direct a fucking movie?)
People seem to be anxious about admitting their vampire and werewolf movies have vampires and werewolves in them. They seem to feel the need to disguise or apologize or alter them so as to not seem so - what, silly? If the idea is silly it's silly even when you call your werewolves lycans. The (late) WB network apparently always had a problem with the title Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I can see why; like with Battlestar Galactica, in addition to struggling with the memory of a predecessor work bearing the same name, the title is a barrier to someone presuming he can take the thing seriously. But I do like Whedon's rejoinder, which is that it's all right there: the show is a blend of comedy (Buffy), horror (Vampire) and action (Slayer). What else do you need to know?
posted by medrawt at
21:37
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