I'm at a loss over the astonishing popularity of sexy vampires. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I never made it through Bram Stoker's masterpiece cover to cover, and the only vampire novels that I've read completely are Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. But the Chronicles feature relatively asexual, vaguely homosexual vampires, so there was never a point in time reading the stories in which I imagined --well, you know.
That said, Punkinhead informs me that the hottest read out there right now for high school girls is Twilight, a romance between a human girl and her undead boyfriend. I'm thinking he'd have to be extraordinarily talented for me to get past that small personality flaw.
The truly scary part of this whole trend seems to me to be the validation of horror as sexual.
I'm sounding like a priggish old biddy, I know, but when I want my daughter to practice safe-sex, I'd like that to include no blood-letting in addition to the use of a condom. Really, everyone else's kids can do what they want. This is just about my kid, when I get right down to it. The rest of you just go about your business.
There must be some sort of parental switch for these sorts of things. What's sauce for the goose is definitely NOT sauce for the Punkinhead.
2 comments:
There is no switch. There is an interesting trend here in Hollywood surrounding the Visual Effects boom. As the technology to tell stories on film becomes easier and easier for the industry to manage, the REAL bloodletting has begun. There are only so many choices. My company was just paid millions of dollars in the completion of the annihilation of Washington DC for a video game called "Fallout" - we spent a year and a half destroying the place for this game... coming up with terrors that would exist after a nuclear war.
"Twilight" is a massive money-maker, and will continue - it is the next generation of "Harry Potter." and contains so many dark themes because they are finally not too expensive to illustrate, and companies are scrambling for cool visual effect based projects.
My children are small - they turn their noses up at old style cartoons. They need "Spongebob" or "Batman" - more sound and colour... more vibrant imaging surrounded by chaos.
I read new scripts all the time. They are primarily concerned with death in some way or another. Notations more often than not accompany them anymore; regarding "what this scene will look like" or "how cool the cgi will be when..."
You are seeing more and more stories about blood, monsters and death, because Hollywood can tell them easier. Kids pay for that kind of stimulus.
It will get worse long before it gets better.
My children are still at that age where, as a parent, I try to deceive myself into thinking I can stay the inception of it into their lives. I know that this will never happen... not unless I find the right convent... and even then, they will rebel in time.
Fortunately, awareness is half the battle.
Actually, the Twilight series is really about making sex dangerous and legitimizing virginity until marriage. Since no one today could write a story that would have mass popularity about a young woman waiting two years (and three and a half books) to have sex with the love of her life just because it was dangerous (morally or otherwise) to have sex, the vampire angle legitimizes the fear of sex outside of marriage. The author is a Mormon, and the books have a very deeply conservative religious sensibility about women's roles and sex. You might be interested in my post about changing sexual norms and "Twilight."
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