Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Books / Film Concerning the Marxist Implications of Zombies and Vampires
Posted by Mark Asch on Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 4:31 PM
Either because he hasn't seen it or because it'd be gilding the lilly, Leith neglects to mention George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, which makes the Marxist implications of the zombie explicit: they lumber towards, and eventually break into, the gated hierarchical city of the human elite. (One character, turning zombie, says, "I always wanted to see how the other half lives.")
We'll get more pageviews if I talk about Twilight here, right? Ok, after the jump.
By this class-conscious reading, Twilight, in which a young bourgeois woman yearns not just for sexual contact with a cuddly vampire, but to become one as well, is a particularly insidious domestication not just of rape fantasies (via regressive surrendered-wife sexual politics), but of blindly aspirational the-rich-are-better-than-you-and-I class envy.
In the Twilight series, vampires literally sparkle. In "Absolution," by F. Scott Fitzgerald, meanwhile, a conflicted priest conflicted confesses:
"When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering."
(Fitzgerald originally intended "Absolution" to serve as a prologue to The Great Gatsby.)
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