WHERE HAVE ALL THE MONSTERS GONE? A post by C. U. Douglas at Ricochet compares the original Dark Shadows gothic soap opera of the 1960s with the campy Tim Burton/Johnny Depp remake. Douglas ponders the changing face of monsters and evil in Hollywood:
Frid is masterful in his portrayal, in my opinion. Barnabas Collins is a creature of depth. He struggles to regain a lost past, yet proves ruthless in his plans to regain what was lost. He coerces a young man into subjugation to him. He kidnaps and attempts to brainwash a young woman. Failing the latter, he imprisons her until she yields to his whims. All the while he exudes proper charm to his cousins and the local townsfolk. He waxes nostalgic before them, giving them images of the past in ways no one else can. Few see the dangerous creature beneath the charming exterior.
Contrast that to today’s vampires and their ilk. I don’t just mean Twilight. Pick most fiction or television surrounding them today. Vampires are as human as human can be; they’re just ‘humans with benefits’. Their drawbacks are nothing more than physical, if they have any. They no longer prey on others — or if they do, they are cast out and destroyed by their colleagues who are more sympathetic to humans. A vampire who falls in love with a human is frequently encouraged by both sides, the struggles to the creature internal.
It’s not just vampires who get this sort of treatment. Dragons, other creatures, more and more they are presented as friendly and sympathetic. There is no longer any danger. Go ahead! Hug that vampire! Make the dragon your best friend! It’s okay!
The disappearance of monsters in general, and Evil with capital-E was a topic that Jonah Goldberg explored over a decade ago at NRO:
Today, monsters are the exact opposite. From Frankenstein to Sesame Street, we’ve become conditioned to believe that monsters are good things. The Cookie Monster is so proud to be a monster it’s his last name for goodness sake.
But it’s not for the sake of goodness that we have abandoned the idea of monsters. The psychologists, sociologists, social workers and other social cleansers have taken it upon themselves to explain that what we call “monsters” are really just things we can’t understand. After all, the old mapmakers used to just throw up their hands when they didn’t have any more info and would just write “Here There Be Monsters.” The social cleansers believe that any time we say “here there be monsters” we’re really just revealing ignorance. “These children aren’t monsters,” we will hear some fool say on the nightly news after some child has done something particularly monstrous. “We shouldn’t demonize so-and-so” just because they have done something so demonic that it takes an act of supreme will to see it as something else.
But why is it such a good thing to understand evil? When we claim that all evil acts are understandable, we excuse them in a way. Oh, he’s a pedophile because his father was a pedophile. That guy? He murders people because society never gave him a chance. Him? He’s a rapist because of a chemical imbalance, etc. etc.
Would it be so terrible for us to say, “He’s a monster” or “he’s just plain evil” and leave it at that? Last August, a man in Merced, California burst into a family’s home and murdered two children with a pitchfork while they cowered under the sheets. The other two children saw it happen. Do we need to explain that?
Being reminded that evil exists, seeing it like a Gargoyle on the wall or, even in a kid’s costume, is a useful thing. For if we don’t think evil exists, if we reject the idea that there are monsters, unknowable in their evilness, we will always make excuses for it when we see it. And when we do that, we forget what the opposite of evil is too.
For more about monsters, see “A Word About Monsters”.
And of course, less than a year after the above was written, America got a (temporary?) wake-up call on what real evil looks like. Naturally, the same efforts to humanize OBL – and/or project his evil elsewhere – quickly began to ferment.
In the comments to the Ricochet post which we linked to above is a link to a fun article at Cracked* on “6 Mind-Blowing Ways Zombies and Vampires Explain America.”
And I’d also recommend Thomas Hibbs’ book, Shows About Nothing, on how Nietzschian nihilism has become deeply soaked into the subtext of numerous Hollywood projects over the years. The title of course, is an allusion to Seinfeld – and Hibbs’ book spends quite a bit of time on that quintessential 1990s sit-com. But he also devotes a fair chunk of his book looking at films such as Silence of the Lambs, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear, and earlier horror films such as The Exorcist. You can hear my February interview with Hibbs at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
* Incidentally, I started to type “in Cracked, of all places,” but I shouldn’t — they’ve somehow transformed themselves from being a Mad magazine clone to producing really fascinating Web articles that are often bite-sized pop culture history pieces.