In their essay “Why
Vampires Never Die,” Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan describe the vampire as
an extremely adaptable and therefore extremely resilient cultural symbol of
both our fears and taboo desires (381).
The vampire offers us “the promise of something everlasting” even as it
threatens us with contagion or death. Vampires also herald (and become symbolic
repositories for our fears of) large-scale societal transformation. Just as Bram Stoker’s Dracula was concurrent with “great
technological revolution,” so are the vampires of our day. According to the authors, “We can call,
see or hear almost anything and anyone no matter where we are. For most people, the only remote place
remains within. ‘Know thyself’ we
do not” (381). Hence, vampires in
particular and monsters in general reveal that “we are still ultimately
vulnerable to our fates and our nightmares,” and one of our nightmares is that
we don’t understand ourselves as individuals or as social beings, because
recent technological transformations have changed (and made strange) the very
notion of what it means to be human.
We feel dispossessed or, at the very least, alienated from our
pre-Internet human heritage, and vampires “remind us that we have no true
jurisdiction over our bodies, our climate or our very souls” at the
moment. In many ways vampires
resemble our technologies: both are powerful and selectively invisible; both
are seductive and alluring; both (parasitically) feed on us (vampires feed on
our blood; the Internet feeds on our time and labor) and change our nature as a
result.
Zombies, on the other
hand, are much simpler but potentially more destructive than vampires. They are “more repetitive than
complex,” as Chuck Klosterman notes in “My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life
Feels Rather Undead” (385).
Zombies don’t seduce; they overwhelm. They don’t have charm, like foppish count Dracula; they are
bedraggled, mostly-dead addicts who will pursue you and try to eat at the
expense of their rotting bodies, about which they are indifferent. Thus, they don’t suggest the allure of
the Internet the way vampires do (how the Internet promises to give your
greater voice, greater reach, or greater access to consumerist, social or
sexual pleasures), but rather the endless litany of dull, repetitive daily
tasks, such as “reading and deleting 400 work e-mails…that only generate[]”
more of the same. Literally they
kill you by eating your brain; figuratively they kill you by wasting your time with
mindless and menial labor, and, thus, eating your brain (385).
As Gary Shteyngart notes, whenever he goes online, he is “asking that
consciousness be taken away” from him—that is, he asks to become zombie-like: a mere creature that mindlessly feeds on Internet stimulation (qtd. in Klosterman). Perhaps you are asking the same thing
when you open your Internet browsers or shove your iPod ear buds half way
toward your brain.
In addition to killing us, zombies can also just infect us and turn us into one of their own, and that is what Shteyngart claims the Internet is doing. Hence, on a figurative level, we want nothing more than to abdicate our consciousness, go online, and be the escapist pleasure-zombies of the cyber age.
So, which monster do you think better represents our current collective (and your personal) fears about technology? If it’s neither the zombie or the vampire, what is the monster that best embodies the anxiety of
our historical moment, in the age of Google and Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter and all the rest?
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