Battle of the Monsters
Posted by on Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 at 11:00 pmWe’ve been discussing in class what makes a something (or a ourselves, for that matter) monstrous. However, recently I’ve started to wonder what happens when a “classic monster,” such as Frankenstein’s creation or Dracula, is faced with a “monster” of the modern age–digital or technological. I’m curious, does Frankenstein’s creature appear as monstrous if he faced with a robot? Or does he somehow seem less infused with alterity and more “human” by comparison?
I’ve always had a particular love for Dracula and the gentleman vampire. While I was doing some research, I came across a mention of “psychic vampires.” They are not entirely a new idea; in fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame wrote a tale about one in Dracula’s Brood. His female vampire slowly preys on a young man, stripping him of all he holds dear: love, respectability, and livelihood. She drains his life without ever touching his blood. However, what interests me now is what they have come to represent: our fears of hackers.
There is little difference between a psychic vampire and a modern hacker intent on identity theft. Psychic vampires don’t need any connection with their victim, they need not even know their victim’s name or face. The psychic vampire impersonally drains them of life, just as a hacker might drain one’s bank account. In the end, the psychic vampires has consumed the host’s life, just as identity theft can destroy all that one has worked to create: reputation, credit, stability, and one’s happiness. Worst of all, the psychic vampire can undermine one’s sense of self, slowly stripping away from one and altering all that was once “I.” We become nothing and they become us.
Compared to these, the classic vampire and his descendants don’t look nearly as bad. They must forge a personal relationship with their victims. They conduct their business face to face. And if they cannot survive without their host, at least the host is offered something in return (in the case of Dracula, Lucy the flirt and Mina the clever one are enhanced through their relationship with Dracula). There is a very good reason why the hideous Dracula becomes the idealized lover and hero: he offers intimacy. The traditional blood sucking vampire, like Byron, is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” but he exists through connections, as intimate as they are social.
Frank Langella as Dracula from the 1979 John Badham film. Langella's Dracula was the culmination of years of evolution for the gentleman vampire from villain to hero, champion of women. Sensual and Byronic, he cares for Lucy as a true companion rather than an object of beauty.
At least compared to the psychic vampire, I feel as though the traditional blood-sucking vampire doesn’t come out too badly. If the psychic vampire represents our fears of technology, the threats it opens us up to, and the distancing effect technology has on people (replacing human interaction with digital alternatives); then the traditional vampire comes to represent a return to intimacy and human interaction. Even if he’s a threat, the traditional vampire is at least one that must stand before us to attack rather than draining us from the shadows, unknown and unseen.
I wonder, if Frankenstein created two creatures–one his traditional creature made, ultimately, of flesh and blood and the other of wires and springs–which would we find more desirable? Would it be easier for us to feel for the creature because his emotions are inherently human rather than the result of programming instilled in him like the memories of the Replicants? Is it therefore easier to see the basic humanity of something when it is opposed to technology? Do we still want to create a dichotomy between human and technological even though we are all “cyborgs?” A sort of monstrous nostalgia?
It seems silly, but I keep thinking of Godzilla. He started out a monster, but with the introduction of new threats he became the hero. (Sure, a few cities are destroyed along the way, but accidents happen, right?) At one point Godzilla is pitted Hedorah, the embodiment of pollution from factories. In another film, he is faced with the threat of a mechanical version of himself: Mechagodzilla.
It may seem rather silly, but it shows how what once is monstrous can become a hero and even an ally in the face of technological changes. Monsters are our ways of examining our fears, but a changing world means changing fears. Our monsters can’t always be the same and rather than becoming more frightening, they become our champions against new monsters as we learn to accept them and ourselves.
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I really like your closing sentence and the discussion about our nostalgia for older monsters, or the relative intimacy they offer. With the Twilight series and any number of Vampire movies and shows, going back to Buffy, we do find Vampire heroes abound, often fighting against less “human” monsters.
Gotta second that endorsement of the closing. Interesting post.
There’s too much legwork required to do proper follow-up for the moment, but the pattern of monsters becoming allies is kind of a working staple in movies, isn’t it? Not only with Godzilla, but with the _Terminator_ movies as well (e.g.). I’m reminded of changing alliances in childhood, endlessly metastable, and the semantic phenomenon of _ad hoc_ categorization. **
The practical and affective import of invisible, network-hidden, remote-acting vampires (however metaphorical) is pretty unmistakeable, as well. That’s a part of your post that has a lot of resonance. It seems to me to have a genealogical relation to science fiction preoccupations with “shape shifters” and their perfidy, possibly resonance as well with mythological trickster figures (but I’ll vouch for the “shape shifter” angle).
Social networks (not the electronic kind, the relations of everyday life portrayed as netting) have their own analogues to this kind of vampire action, as well: What is now identified as bullying, practiced as hermetic social exclusion combined with varieties of unfriendly misrepresentations, from which the intended victim is excluded and denied recourse. The rough pattern is similar: depredations practiced beyond the reach of their target, cloaked by segregation of information.
You concentrate for part of your post on identity theft, and make an illuminating comparison to the vampire’s activities in the Sherlock Holmes story. (Now I want to get down my Holmes compendium and pick it out. Time! I need more time!) It’s a depredation that has to form a perpetual anxiety in anyone who is paying any attention to current events. It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), and get compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible. It raises a kind of bete noir: What if bullies from elementary school had permanent, constant, essentially uninterrupted access to their prey, throughout life? This puts one kind of pressure on society. Many other force vectors push through these networks. After the work cited by Moretti in _Graphs, Maps, Trees_ by D’Arcy Thompson, _On Growth and Form_: the shape of our society, however high-dimensional or abstracted, _has_ to be changing with the changing lines of force that networked, computer-mediated communication introduce within it. For purposes of measurement, these changes may be rapid, broad, there and gone, ephemeral, lost to measure just as surely as non-computer-mediated social changes have been in the past, only their grossest outlines available to us for inquiry.
So, aspects of the individual are abstracted and personified: At one point it was the personified corporation, with its rights to free speech (though “freedom of the press” does not prescribe individual ownership, and seems to presuppose a business entity…); at another point, we find “information wants to be free”: post-Enlightenment cant grafted off onto a non-human and non-corporate structure, the language of rights and freedoms given to spirit itself, in one way of imagining it. Your information wants to be free? Your biometric data have rights that are not reposed in your person? It gives quite a bit of license to a sysadmin with higher permission status than you in a Unix environment — but what sorts of rights to anyone else? The compartmentation of the computer-mediated communication infrastructure imposes severe asymmetries of power, licensed by information’s imputed desire to be free, on the people who were once subjects of liberation. These asymmetries are reversible only by craft (hacking), and so we have Neo’s situation: freedom for the adept. Freedom if you can hack it.
It has its ecosystem, though. A strange ecosystem indeed develops: the erasure of borders invited by some conceptions of Romanticism, leveraged by global capitalism against inconvenient legal frameworks, and a severe pressure on now-local systems of law. The hackers in cyberpunk come up in an ecosystem of computer crime — and the hackers of today are not just the Western “console cowboys” and their cognates, but stables of crime-workers holed up in cities in Eastern Europe and out of reach in (presumably military-administered) sites in China. Etc., etc. (there’s that postmodern list again!). So, at the same time consensually legitimized businesses like Facebook rise to world prominence, a shadow economy — a kind of abjected, monstrous side of the global economic consciousness — thrives largely beyond reach of our law.
So we live in a society of neophilia (not to mention partiality to _The Matrix_ as a movie) and retrophobia. I say this as a more or less careful “late adopter” of the new.
Phil
** I’ve guessed this could have some relation to neurodynamic itinerancy, a wandering among states, possibly described, at least loosely, by work on heteroclinic cycles in neurodynamics, in a previous post response. So, I think it’s not only an interesting issue but one that may have cross-disciplinary connections.
Correction to some badly spun sentences here:
It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), and get compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.
It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them, which are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), leaving unanalyzed aspects of data effectively compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.
I’d probably change the last sentence and half the rest of it, but there it is.
Phil
Correction to some badly spun sentences here:
“DEPRECATE” THIS ONE:
It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), and get compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.
/DEPRECATE THIS ONE
REPLACE WITH THIS ONE
It seems to me (with cyber-harassment and related practices) that the computer-mediated communication environment (including via computers in cell phones) could be changing the society’s dynamics in ways that are, for now, unaccounted, in part because of the kinds of theoretical tools that are deployed to measure them, which are sensitive to the kinds of things that bring in dollars (shopping behavior, e.g.), leaving unanalyzed aspects of data effectively compartmented — encapsulated almost axiomatically, as in object-oriented programming — so they remain invisible.
/REPLACE WITH THIS ONE
I’d probably change the last sentence and half the rest of it, but there it is.
Phil
I just wanted to clarify that the Doyle story about a “psychic vampire” is *not* a Sherlock Holmes one. Sherlock Holmes does encounter a “vampire,” but that is something entirely different. In “The Sussex Vampire,” from the Holmes stories, she is not a vampire, merely a concerned mother. No, the Doyle vampire story I refer to is outside of the Sherlock Holmes series–one of Doyle’s less popular forays into fiction. Just wanted to clear that up.