Lesson 10: ideologies

cinema as ideological product

Vampire as Terrorist

As part of your examination you will be expected to understand that texts in addition to their many other functions always carry within them some sense of the spirit of the times that created them – what we have come to refer to as the zeitgeist.  In this idea, we see texts as cultural artifacts that reveal much about the way that we interpret the world around us and the values we hold dear and our fears, both general and specific.

Given their actions, it could be argued that the vampires of 30 Days of Night function as metaphors for terrorists and terrorist actions. In the wake of 9/11, such an analogy is all the more relevant: it is suggested that these people, who come from another country, instigate a planned and coordinated attack on American soil; they strike first without warning and with such an incredible force that the majority of the population of Barrow is killed. Although those that survive try and defend themselves against the attack, they soon realise that they are fighting a faceless, relentless and seemingly remorseless enemy, a situation that suggests the vampires function as an organised group of dangerous Others; threatening outsiders that must be stopped, at whatever costs. As one of the survivors comments, ‘Next time they’ll take out Point Hope…’

If the vampires of 30 Days of Night are indeed a metaphor for terrorists and terrorism, then the emergence of a strong and capable representative of Law and Order who is able, at personal cost, to vanquish the threat suggests a certain sense of catharsis. In this fictional world, as in the real world, innocent people are killed but the threat is finally understood and, partially, resolved so that recovery and healing can begin to take place. 

If the vampires’ leader is Dracula, then Sheriff Eben Olesen must be Van Helsing. As an officer of the law he represents the values of the good and the moral in the face of the Other, so making it his responsibility to resolve the threat. Whilst he struggles with this responsibility throughout the majority of the narrative, Eben does, eventually, realise how to resolve the situation: he must become the threat himself; to turn himself into the Other in order to ensure the safety of those he loves and for the few that remain of Barrow’s survivors. 

Eben’s reaction to the threat presents to the audience the ultimate sacrifice as he willingly surrenders his mortal body and his pure soul to the immortal body and impure soul of the vampire, to become that which is Other in order to save that which is ‘normal’.

Whilst the vampires of 30 Days of Night clearly pose a threat to the safety of the family unit, their presence also allows the family to come back together. It is the very terror the Other poses that reunites Eben and Stella, suggesting that from the pain of trauma positives can emerge, that a police officer can do his duty by serving and protecting his community and that a husband and wife can reconcile their differences, if only briefly. In this respect, Eben’s sacrifice becomes all the more poignant as, in the midst of the siege in which families are literally torn apart and friends are killed, the young husband and wife reunite in a symbolic gesture that implies once the threat is resolved a new, safe and more experienced family can be formed. 

Such positive connotations are quickly, if not immediately, dissolved upon Eben’s decision to become a vampire. In his state as the Other, the possibility of a safe and normal family unit cannot occur, leaving Eben with only one choice: to sacrifice himself again, this time to death itself. In a cruel parody of the romantic moment, Stella cradles Eben in her arms as they sit on the edge of the ice floe and wait for the sun to rise for the first time in thirty days. In these final moments they acknowledge their love, embrace and end their time together with a single kiss.

Media theory:

Binary Opposition:

 IIn the mid-20th century, two major European academic thinkers, Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, had the important insight that the way we understand certain words depends not so much on any meaning they themselves directly contain, but much more by our understanding of the difference between the word and its 'opposite' or, as they called it 'binary opposite'. They realised that words merely act as symbols for society's ideas and that the meaning of words, therefore, was a relationship rather than a fixed thing: a relationship between opposing ideas.

For example, our understanding of the word 'coward' surely depends on the difference between that word and its opposing idea, that of a 'hero' (and to complicate matters further, a moment's thought should alert you to the fact that interpreting words such as 'hero' and 'coward' is itself much more to do with what our society or culture attributes to such words than any meaning the words themselves might actually contain).

Other oppositions that should help you understand the idea are the youth / age binary, the masculinity / femininity, the good / evil binary, and so on. Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another important feature of these 'binary opposites': that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other.         

Levi-Strauss searched for common ideas in myths across centuries and cultures looking for what he called the mythemes - the essentials of myths that were common across all cultures and languages

 Within the media field, binary oppositions are used very frequently in films to clarify points of view and also as to where we are to align ourselves.

 Such representations enable a more considered view of character actions that go beyond the merely simplistic of 'good vs bad'.  Many horror films include sets of binary oppositions in their plots such as  good and evil, sane and insane, rational and irrational and human and supernatural. 
     Westerns are about sophisticated vs primitive; domestic vs wilderness; 
     christian vs pagan; homesteaders vs wilderness etc.