Thursday, June 14, 2012

Toward an ideology of monsters

Just now, I read an interesting quasi-Marxist interpretation of our classic monsters. In this theory, each ghoul belongs to its own class.

The vampire: Typically, he is portrayed as an aristocrat of the old school -- the very old school. Highly intelligent, he knows multiple languages. He also knows history, having lived though much of it. He is cultured and always charming. He lives by exploiting others.

The werewolf: This is your basic working class beast. Uncontrollable, unleashable. A creature of the Id. On occasion, he may recall what it was like to be human -- but more often, he lives in the moment. His is a dog-eat-dog world.

The zombie: A.K.A., the lumpenprole. Unthinking, shambling, hideous, not really alive, and (unlike the previous two monsters) utterly asexual, the zombie knows only one thing: He's hungry. Nobody minds if he is killed.

The methods of dispatch are of interest. The werewolf may be killed only by silver, a symbol of the upper class. The vampire may be killed or repelled by wood, by garlic or by sunlight -- all things which we associate with the working class. (Traditionally, the worker eats garlic, toils in the sun and uses wooden implements.)

Zombies may be killed by any method, the messier the better. Alas, they can't be killed fast enough, since this society keeps producing more and more zombies. Zombies were rare in our culture in the days before neo-liberalism displaced the Keynesian consensus.

Now that we have established the rules of our game, let's take it further. Assign a class identity to the following:

Mummies
Ghosts
Witches
Demons (a la The Exorcist)
City-stompers (a la Godzilla, Cloverfield)
Invading aliens

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