Week Two: Vampire-- Love and Pain

This week I watched the movie "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013), directed by Jim Jarmusch. (I was a little unclear on whether we had a choice between the book or the movie, and I've read a bit of the beginning of the book since, but I spent most of my attention on the movie so I'd like to focus on that a bit more).

When an author is writing a vampire novel, they have a few interesting themes to play with. For example, vampire characters are very much like human characters in a sense, at least when you compare them to say, animal characters-- however vampire characters create a certain type of 'trope' for themselves that can be a special kind of playground for the writer. Authors like to follow a certain set of rules for vampiric characters, whether those be rules following popular vampiric lore (asking permission to be let into a residence, sleeping during the day, etc). or lore that the author themselves add to spice up the tired old recipe. This allows the writer to explore the world created within this specific set of boundaries for these characters; in certain ways this can be more interesting and produce different kinds of results than if the author is building a character that has no pre-determined set of rules dictating how they may behave or what their motives may be. The latter way of building characters is often more challenging because of the wider variety of options; I think that stereotypes and literary character tropes exist for this very reason.

Springboarding off of that-- the vampiric characters in "Interview with the Vampire" as well as "Only Lovers Left Alive" operated within a specific set of motives that came from things like their long lifespans/immortality, their need to feed, their lack of companionship and loneliness belonging in a world scarcely populated with their own kind; many vampire characters often deal with similar problems thanks to their similarly dire circumstances. The two main vampire characters in Rice's novel, Louis and Lestat, face this conflict when Lestat turns Louis out of his need for companionship in the lonely world (of course later this turns into trouble for Lestat, as you cannot force someone into immortality without some kind of retaliation). In "Only Lovers Left Alive" there is a similar situation with the two main vampire characters, Adam and Eve, who are traversing through time with only each other and a few others. When the two lose only a small number of vampire friends, because they are so scarce, this forces them into some hard situations, for example when Eve's vampire friend dies-- and his connection to a good blood supply goes with it.

Many vampire tropes are present in almost all vampire novels and movies, and I think the fun that the writer has coming from working within these sets of rules and tropes to give a fun spin on a classic story.