Theological Implications of Twilight

Acts 19:19

Roger J Carlson said:

A Levitical Look at Vampires

What do you think?

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I have my doubts about vampires. I think in Freudian terms they simply personify repression and displacement and sexual anxiety. Not much fun if you you've read much Freud. Here's what I said long ago in AWWC:

I think if they had a real Freudian kick to them, I would like them more, but they seem to have a Freudian screw loose in that there is nothing infantile about them, indeed if they are Freudian they are heros of sublimation and not of pleasure. Since reading and writing are already sublimations, reading and writing about great sublimators is just too much sublimation.... for me anyway. Vampires are superego fantasies, not primary or primal libidinal/ego fantasies. They are all about delayed gratification and living forever shows just how delayed all that gratification really is.

For example, just the problem of vampires and oral pleasure alone shows how non-infantile (and therefore sublimated and not really Freudian) they are:

a) you can't just eat, ie food is not food and there is no tasting or smelling involved in food selection (no primal input there)
b) oral pleasure involves using the teeth but never actually eating, this suggests a positively visit-to-the-dentist level of fun and intensity
c) the neck-biting thing, if this is climax-inducing it is the most prissy climax I can imagine outside of auto-erotic asphixiation...

The best you could say is that Vampires are stuck in a pre-genital phase, but all the "romance" suggests that the displacement of sex to the mouth and neck is just secondary displacement and more closely related to sexual anxiety than sexual pleasure. Which in turn suggests that the closest Freudian state to a Vampire is the state of Hysterical Displacement where the primary cathexis of the genitals is transferred to the mouth. So the apparent oral pleasure is actually an hysterical symptom and in Freudian terms the male vampire functions as a disembodied uterus (feeding on blood, reproducing as a sort of menstral cramp gone-wild) .

Anyway...I don't see much primal fun in the vampire arsenal of violence and blood.

Roger J Carlson said:

I disagree completely. Although I'm not sure about what, exactly, but it's tradition.

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I can offer you the traditional list of things to do when people don't find my sallies of discussion altogether to their liking:

1) say I don't know what I'm saying
2) hint that if I were properly educated I would never say what I've said
3) suggest I read what I'm referring to (this would work since I haven't read any Twilight books or any Anne Rice)....but I'm merely claiming to have heard of vampires and not to have found them all that interesting
4) point out that I'm getting pretty far from what the OP was getting at

4) seems reasonable. Is a Freudian critique relevent to Theological concerns? Perhaps not at first glance. But I invoke Mary Douglas Purity and Danger...anyway she wrote about Leviticus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas

5) But what does that have to do with Freud? In a nutshell, Freud's analyses look at the emotional qualities of symbolic constructs and that's where we are right now with Leviticus and Vampires.

Roger J Carlson said:

I would never stoop to such ignoble tactics, which you would have known if you had half the education you claim. Clearly you're speaking from ignorance and not from a firm exegetical study of the Sacred Text (i.e. Twilight). But we're getting a little far afield, aren't we?

Oh, and Freud? Pfffft.

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Farther afield: What about the sometimes-supposed (a la Buffy and Angel, the only Vampiric tradition I am familiar with) "demonic" nature of vampires. If they are a person who lives forever but has no soul (usually?), where does the "demon" part fit in?

http://www.geocities.com/masqthephlsphr/vampires.html

I realize this may not be canonically correct, but it is the only set of vampiric lore with which I am at all familiar.

ETA: Coppola's Dracula (was it Coppola?) was pretty demonic.



AMC

Speaking of Anne Rice, though: Isn't her vampire culture a metaphor for Queer culture? What does Leviticus have to say about that, anyway? *Slinks back into the sunlight

Roger J Carlson said:

Pure Gnostic propaganda. His version was never canonized.

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Speaking of non-canonical Gnostic heros. What's up with Enoch Root?

http://www.cafeaulait.org/systemoftheworld.html

Pure Gnostic propaganda. His version was never canonized.

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Well, his version was called Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is more official than, say, Twilight...

:0

AMC

I think the theological implications of Twilight are that, well, it is convincing evidence against the existence of God. How could such a work be popular and there be a benign force that would do nothing to stop it?

There is Twilight; thus there is no God.