Both comments on yesterdays’ post were in support of some current pop-cultural phenomenon centered around vampire/human romance. What is it about love between humans and vampires that excites so much interest? I suspect there is something deep going on here.
It can’t be just the whole Byronic-hero sublimated-passion thing. That might explain “Twilight” but not the new HBO series. There is nothing either Byronic or thwarted about the latter.
Any ideas?
Perhaps we have a hint as to what may be going on in a throw away detail from the HBO series True Blood.
During the opening credit montage that mixes swamp imagery with a trucker’s eye view of deepest Louisiana, there’s a quick shot of a back-lit sign, like the kind at a country church, reading the phrase “God Hates Fangs.”
It really doesn’t give anything away about the show’s storyline to say that ‘True Blood’ is a coming-out-of-the-coffin-tale that mines the dramatic potential of human-vampire co-existence.
So maybe what you’re seeing is a pop culture that’s using actual demons to dramatize and process the plethora of issues that American culture is witness to as it works to assimilate various demonized ‘others’.
On a side note, if he did anything, the politician Rick Santorum demonstrated that non-standard concepts of co-existence and demonization could motivate some fairly wild flights of imagination. A Wikipedia search for “Santorum controversy” will give some back story on that.