Satyr’s Day (or Saturn’s Day, depending on your mythology) May 17 2003

Friday’s blog entry was among my most popular ever. A total of zero comments, and zero emails, in response. Boy. Tough room.

Well, beat the drum and hold the phone... there’s another good John Cusack movie, to add to THE SURE THING, SAY ANYTHING, and EIGHT MEN OUT. Yes, IDENTITY is a solidly good movie, regardless of what local film wank Steve Persall said about it in his review of a few weeks back.

Mind you, I figured out the surprise twist about a third of the way through the movie (such is my curse). I suspect Steve Persall didn’t figure it out beforehand and that’s why he was so grumpy. Persall also seems to not much like suspense thrillers or slasher type movies. But what can you say about a guy who says the latest MATRIX movie was smart and interesting with a lot of intelligent philosophy in it?

By the way, EMMA... if you look to the right under ARTICLES OF NOTE, you’ll find a link to my article on the first MATRIX movie, which will tell you why I won’t be watching any of the sequels. Nuff said.

Beyond that, I got something in the mail today that has taken a lot of the fear & loathing out of my life, at least, until next month, and just in case anyone in official authority ever reads this blog, I shall claim the Fifth Amendment rather than go into details. But it was good to get this thing. Now if my apartment managers would just get their thumbs out and give me a new lease for after June, I might be able to relax a tiny little bit. For a while, anyway.

No one is going to care, but I’ve gone back to my lazy tendency of spelling out creative artifact titles all in caps, instead of bothering to code in the HTML for ‘bold’ and ‘italic’, which is much more annoying. Doesn’t mean I won’t use bold and italics, it just means I write about movies, TV shows, and books too much to want to keep having to hit so goddam often.

Speaking of books, I’m creeping my way through A FEAST IN EXILE by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. One of her seemingly endless St. Germain novels, this one set in 14th Century India. I enjoy the series because of Yarbro’s talent for doing atmospheric descriptions and her eye for historical detail, but I have to admit, other than the differing historical periods, the bulk of the St. Germain stories are all the same... St. Germain starts out prosperously established somewhere, there are political upheavals that cost him his position and wealth and force him to battle for his life and, generally, the life or lives of people dependent on him, and, in the end, he escapes to fight another day after suffering terrible physical and emotional ordeals, but someone he cares deeply about always dies in the course of the adventure. Oh, and he always gets involved with some woman who either becomes a vampire by the end of the novel, but doesn’t like it, or who dies in such a way that she does not become a vampire, and St. Germain mourns.

In a lot of ways, St. Germain must be Yarbro’s idea of a perfect male lover... since he’s a vampire, he can’t get an erection, and he feeds off the chemical by products of sexual satiation, so he has to make a woman have a lot of orgasms (using his hands and his mouth) per session or he doesn’t get anything out of it. St. Germain also prefers an intimate, loving relationship to the vampiric equivalent of casual sex, making him some sort of really twisted Ideal Guy, or something. Yarbro spends a lot of time in each novel on the sex scenes (without being pornographic) and she likes to use a lot of big words that even I don’t know the meaning of, and I have to admit, a lot of her plots climax with St. Germain managing to survive horrible ordeals that we’ve been told, for the entire novel up until that point, really should destroy him... as in my favorite book in the series, BLOOD GAMES, where we’re told for the entire story that vampires are greatly weakened by direct sunlight and deep water unless they have a coating of their native earth to protect them. Towards the end, St. Germain gets tossed, naked, into a mid day aquatic venation in the Circus Maximus, and despite his ‘weakness’, kills several giant crocodiles with his bare hands.

Still, despite being generally predictable and sometimes silly, I enjoy Quinn Yarbro’s work. And I’ve bored you with this long enough; now I’ll bore you with some more nonsense about BUFFY.

Keep those comments and emails coming. Here at the front lines, we always love to hear from the folks at home we’re fighting so hard to protect from the hordes of the Hun.

THE UNDEAD YET LIVE Part 1

Which is to say, what the hell is up with Undead physiology on Earth:BUFFY?

This one is going to take a while... a while longer than all that soul nonsense, which I understand, were far, far too long by standards of the average 21st Century attention span. But it’s my blog and I’ll completely geek out if I want to.

Into it, with gusto:

Having established (at least, to my satisfaction) that a vampire is not, in fact, simply a monstrous imperfect duplicate of the person it replaces, but instead retains its original human identity, I'll now try to figure out exactly what a vampire, physically, is.

This is a difficult problem. Vampires are supposed to be the walking dead; necromantically reanimated corpses that shamble around attacking the living and draining their blood. In order for them to seem properly horrible and terrifying, this has to be what they are.

However, at the same time, while vampires as shambling corpses works fine when we want to horrify and disgust the viewers, it sacrifices an entire human dimension... something that would greatly hinder characterization, or, at least, standard characterization regarding romance and sexuality, with vampiric main characters... which is one of the fundamental elements of all successful ongoing melodrama/soap opera.

You can't have it both ways. If your vampires are dead, necromantically reanimated bodies, that's fine and horrible and disgusting and scary, but their chances of boning a cute blond Slayer without making use of foreign objects and/or well trained Doberman Pinschers seem to be slim to none. They also can't smoke, shouldn't have to wear glasses, can't be blinded, shouldn't be hurt by a punch in the face or a kick in the nads, wouldn't feel any physical sensation at all, won't have any discernible odor, shouldn't have human perceptions, and can't be drowned or choked into unconsciousness. Clearly, this denies the writers a lot of useful story elements, so... obviously, vampires can't just be dead, necromantically animated corpses.

In fact, if vampires do perceive things the way humans do, can be choked into unconsciousness, do feel pain when thrown into a tombstone or kicked in the scrotum, can and do smoke cigarettes, do have to wear corrective lenses, can be blinded, and do, most definitely, have sex with humans (and, for that matter, humanoid robots)... then, obviously, they're not just dead bodies. They sweat, their hearts beat, they breathe, they have a sexual/reproductive system, must have functioning glands, chemical secretions in their blood, a respiratory system... for that matter, we've seen vampires eat and drink normal food and liquors, so they must have some eliminatory/excretory system, too.

Therefore, obviously, Whedon's vampires in BUFFY and ANGEL are, to some extent, metabolically active and 'alive', just like the vampires in KINDRED: THE EMBRACED. Right?

Well, no... apparently, they're not. Hardly an episode of ANGEL, or of BUFFY if Angel or Spike is around, goes by without someone making some reference (and this has to be deliberate) to the fact that vampires don't breathe, their hearts don't beat, etc, etc, yaddity yaddity yaddity. Spike has even mentioned that he doesn't breathe while lighting up a cigarette, which would seem to underscore the fact that Whedon and his pals know how stupid this is, and they don't care. The fact that no one - not Slayer Buffy, who is intensely interested in how vampire physiology actually works, not the intellectual and relentlessly curious Giles, and not fanboy SF geek Xander - ever mentions, or comments on, these contradictions, is simply more evidence that the writers are aware of them... and don't care.

We're supposed to suspend disbelief and ignore it, like good 1930s Germans or cheerful little morons, pretending never to notice that apparently, Giles has had an aneurysm, Buffy has been lobotomized, Xander must be heavily medicated, and every vampire in the world who has ever noted wryly, "Well, actually, I don't breathe" while puffing on a cigarette is clearly an idiot.

Jane Espenson, on one of the commentary tracks on the ANGEL first season DVD set, makes cheerful note of the fact that fans of the show ‘want the world to be real so much that they will make up their own explanations for apparent contradictions in the vampire stuff’. Honestly, when writers say stuff like this I just want to slap them hard. Lazy ass writers like this don’t seem to understand that making up explanations for their mistakes is not part of the fans’ job. Not making mistakes is part of the writers’ job; it’s, basically, what we pay the lazy bastards for.

However, Joss and his crew seem to be much too busy doing whatever it is they do instead of spending a few moments on intelligent thought about continuity while scripting a fantasy world beloved by millions, to bother getting this crap right. So, as a fan, it’s up to me to provide an explanation for how it is that vampires, who constantly claim that their bodies are dead, can still, somehow, smoke cigarettes, speak on the telephone, and, you know, get rampant hard ons and employ said blood engorged members in the ardent and enthusiastic boning of human females.

So, here we go:

First, let’s look at this ‘vampires don’t breathe’ thing. In our very latest BUFFY episode, Spike has once more regurgitated this nonsense, in a line of dialogue about how another character is a ‘breath of fresh air... good thing I don’t breathe’. And, again, Whedon and his writers must know this is nonsense and absurd, since in a previous episode this very season, the First Evil and one of its uber-vamps were torturing Spike by drowning him and then letting him revive. If vampires don’t breathe, then, obviously, holding Spike’s head underwater for a while isn’t exactly going to be torment, he’s just going to find it boring and mildly uncomfortable.

And this is hardly the first contradiction in the ‘vampires don’t breathe’ thing. In Season 1, Buffy drowns at the hands of the Master. Angel and Xander arrive within moments. Angel arrives first, but claims he cannot resuscitate Buffy because “I don’t have any breath”, leaving Xander to perform CPR. This is especially stupid because, if you listen (not particularly closely, it’s obvious) you can clearly hear Angel panting as he runs up to Buffy’s body right before he gives this line of dialogue.

Vampires also smoke cigarettes, which would certainly require respiration. More subtly, vampires speak on the telephone. You could argue, if you wanted to (Whedon and his bunch clearly simply find the whole subject exasperating and really don’t care if this shit makes any sense) that when vampires ‘speak’, they are actually using telepathy and probably don’t know it, nor do the humans they speak to... but the telepathy model won’t work over the phone, which requires an actual audible signal to electronically transmit, which in turn requires a working biological larynx, and lungs.

Vampires also bleed when wounded, which seems to require a working circulatory system and a working heart, feel pain when struck and pleasure when caressed, which seems to require a working nervous system, and are capable of having cybernetic chips implanted in their brains to control their behavior, which certainly seems to argue that their brains are alive and biologically functional in some way. Vampire senses seem to work, when Whedon and crew don’t want to say otherwise at the moment, much the same way human senses do... Angel turns on lights when he walks into rooms, Spike has torches to illuminate his tomb, both of them have frequently employed their sense of smell, and obviously, vampires hear things really well (although they go rather deaf when, for example, the writer doesn’t want one to hear Buffy dropping from a hole in the ceiling and landing with a discernible ‘thump’ ten feet behind it).

Maddening though all this is, it’s not the biggie. Here’s the really huge thing that makes it absolutely obvious that vampires have functional, biological physiologies that are at least somewhat compatible with normal human metabolisms:

On Earth:BUFFY, vampires have sex lives... not just with each other, but with living human beings (and humanoid sex-bots, as well).

Human sexuality, and the human reproductive system, is one of the most complex organic and biological systems in existence. A whole bunch of stuff that I only vaguely even know the names of has to interact successfully for a human being to have effective and satisfying sexual function. There’s pheremones, there’s glandular secretions, there’s the whole blood flow-circulatory system thing, there’s the salivary glands, there’s mucous membranes, testicular function, ejaculation, natural lubrication for females... it’s a whole big complicated thing, and if any of these subsystems doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, you got problems.

Vampires having ‘sex’ with other vampires, as Angel and Darla, Angel and Drusilla, Spike and Drusilla, and Spike and Harmony, obviously have, isn’t that hard to explain. We never actually see the dirty deed (this is non-cable TV, after all) so it could be anything... some kind of weird psychic interaction, or some odd exchange of necromantic ether-fluids... whatever. Recently, Angel has somehow ‘impregnated’ Darla, which would seem to indicate that vampires have sex the same way humans do... but again, that’s a whole mystical thing, and we could wave that away.

What we can’t explain away with mystical hoo-haw, however, is vampires having sex with living human beings, or sex bots designed for the use of living human beings. One cannot deny that this happens... it happened with Buffy and Spike behind every tombstone, in every mausoleum, and on top of every veranda in north Sunnydale during the sixth season. Spike obviously liked it and Buffy seemed to enjoy it, too, and no mention was ever made (or has ever been made) of how weird and different sex with vampires is from sex with humans... so we have to presume that getting horizontal with Spike or Angel is much the same as doing the nasty with Riley.

And, come on now... this is just ridiculous. Humans having sex with vampires? I mean, they're dead, Jim. Presumably, the only way most male vampires get wood is when someone pounds a big chunk of it through their clavicles.

Logically, 'female' vampires could have almost normal sexual function, assuming they carried around a little KY to help with what would have to be fairly severe lubrication issues... yet one has to wonder how even the horniest and most desperate male (that would be me, actually) could ignore the fact that this bitch's body is as cold as a sno-cone and her breath, such as it is, and given what she normally consumes as food, has to be about four times nastier than your chain smoking second cousin's after he or she has just killed half a keg of Old Milwaukee. Plus kissing someone who's salivary glands haven't actually worked in years, decades, or centuries would have to be a special taste and textural treat I don't even want to try to imagine, but can best sum up with the phrase 'oh EW'.

In short, you'd think that any human who experienced anything more than the most fleeting, casual body contact with a vampire would pretty quickly realize there was something badly wrong with this picture. It seems equally obvious that even if a living mortal knew their potential lover was a vampire, and didn't actually mind (a level of trust that frankly boggles my mind, especially when one considers the combination of razor sharp fangs and vampiric arousal, with, say, fellatio), the pleasures of even just snuggling or making out with a centuries cold corpus would be minimal, without even trying to get past second base.

In much vampire literature, there are ways of getting around these obvious incompatibilities between the living and the dead. Mythological vampires are often attributed with the ability to cast glamours on themselves to deceive their chosen victims, making said humanoid buffet table see, feel, and otherwise perceive whatever the ghoul in question wants them to. There are even specifically sexual forms of vampires, succubi and incubi, that are said to drink human reproductive fluids rather than actual blood, the actual details of which I don't care to dwell on myself, at least, from the incubatory point of view. Yeeeeuch.

However, such explanations simply aren't available to us on Buffy-Earth. Of all the vampires we've seen on Buffy-Earth, only Drusilla and Dracula have demonstrated any psychic abilities... and in Dru's case, she had them when she was human, so clearly, they're not part of the vampire heritage. Dracula is a different matter; I personally suspect he’s not a vampire, just a very powerful demon who claimed to be a vampire in order to mess with Buffy’s head.

Real vampires on Buffy-Earth, like most demons, seem to eschew any and all mental powers in favor of super strength, enhanced agility, and martial arts prowess.

Given that, it seems safe to assume that any sex a human being might be having with a vampire on Buffy-Earth is real, actual sex, or at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof. At the very least, we have not seen any of the various mortal women that Angel has locked lips with over the last few seasons pull away with disgust gasping 'hemoglobin breath, ick!', nor has Angel ever tried to rebuff unwanted advances, even from women who knew he was a vampire, by explaining "Um, you know, I'm dead... ain’t nothin’ happenin’ down there, babes".

Going back to some other stuff... another interesting point about vampires has been established during the ‘Darla’s resurrection’ arc in ANGEL. Unaware that Darla had been resurrected by evil law firm Wolfram & Hart as a mortal, and thus, thinking (as we all did) that she was a vampire, Angel confronted her in a hotel. He refuted her claim that he'd made a mistake and she was someone else by saying "I know your scent, Darla". This tells us pretty irrefutably that vampires smell like living human beings, since, if they didn't, you'd imagine Angel would have been a little puzzled as to why his Undead ex smelled all warm and sweaty.

Now, human scent arises from a combination of many factors, not least of which being, perspiration, but also, the exuding of pheremones, and, to a great extent, the constant deterioration and breakdown of skin and hair cells into tiny, almost microscopic flakes that impinge only on our olfactory sensory apparatus. Classical vampires, being walking corpses, don't have functional sweat glands, nor, really, should they have anything much to sweat. It's doubtful they produce chemical pheremones, and last but not least, as they are immortal, and biologically inactive, their skin and hair should neither grow nor decay. Therefore, a vampire should have little or no scent, not even the usual prosaically Victorian moldering stench of the grave, since they shouldn't rot, either. They actually shouldn't smell like anything, although, as noted, those literary vampires with the ability to throw glamours on themselves should be able to make their victims perceive whatever they choose.

So, we have vampires claiming constantly that they don’t breathe, while lighting up cigarettes, or audibly breathing hard after a sprint. We have vampires claiming their hearts don’t beat, who somehow manage to get normal male erections, and who bleed when cut or shot. We have vampires who ‘know each other’s scent’, although they shouldn’t actually have discernible body odors (being dead) and shouldn’t have any olfactory sense, either (same deal). We have vampires who can see perfectly in the dark, yet turn on the lights when they walk into unlit rooms, or illuminate their tombs with open flames (really stupid, since fire is one of the few things that can kill a vampire, and they seem preternaturally vulnerable to it, as well).

Furthermore, vampires are also subject to certain unnatural limitations and restrictions that, in all honesty, just can't be explained away easily. They don't reflect in mirrors (but, annoyingly, we've seen them show up on videotape, and they do cast shadows). They burst into flames when sunlight touches their skin. They revert to dust (and not much dust, at that) when killed. A wooden stake shoved through their heart will kill them, but a plastic or metal one won't. They can't enter a private dwelling without the explicit permission of someone who legitimately lives there. They're stronger, faster, and more resistant to physical damage than humans. Supposedly, they have superhuman perceptual powers. They live off human blood. They have limited shapeshifting abilities.

Is it possible to reconcile this massive contradiction and provide some feasible, plausible explanation for the nature of vampiric existence? Well, yes and no. Given what we've been told so far, I think it is, vaguely, possible to come up with... something. It won't completely satisfy, and some things I may have to simply ignore, or disqualify, or say "Well, it didn't happen the way they show us it happening on TV"... but I suspect I can assemble some sort of patchwork pastiche of a metaphysical hypothesis that will, generally, suffice to explain away most if not all of these contradictions.

So, that's the 'yes' part. The 'no' part, however, is that I can only do it for right now. Given that it's clear that Whedon & Crew simply (maddeningly, irresponsibly, absurdly) don't care about this stuff, don't take their own internal metaphysical continuity seriously and could care less if they present anything in a reasonably consistent form as long as people keep watching the show, any explanation I suggest at this point is likely... almost certain... to be invalidated by some annoyingly lazy plot stupidity in some future show.

As with STAR TREK, the plotters and writers of BUFFY and ANGEL simply don't care if it makes sense or not. It's 'mythic' for Spock to be a half-human, half-alien crossbreed, so it doesn't matter if that's genetically senseless. Everything is subordinate to the story, nothing works consistently or intelligently, there is no sensible internal continuity... and, on BUFFY and ANGEL, vampires are perfectly happy to remind the human standing three feet away that they don't breathe, while lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag on it and then breathing out smoke... and the human is always too brain-dead to say "Uh... gee..."

See, this is the greatest contradiction of all. It’s not just that these things make no sense, it’s that no one living on Earth:BUFFY notices that they don’t make any sense. Giles has enormous intellectual curiousity about occult matters, Buffy should want to know how vampire physiology works to improve her ability to kill them, and various others should at least notice and comment on these absurd contradictions... and they don't... and the only valid explanation is, the WRITERS DON'T WANT THEM TO.

Or... is it?

Having established the fundamentally absurd contradictions of vampire physiology in some detail, we’ll explore what vampires actually seem to be next time... and after that, I’ll speculate on a hypothesis as to why vampires and humans don’t seem to notice these weird dichotomies between what they seem to believe about vampire metabolism, and what is obviously true.

Yes, it’s just never going to end. Be here next time for “The Undead Yet Live Part 2”... or, you know, just stay home and eat paste. I don’t much care, it’s not like I get paid for this stuff...