Vampires in the Elevator

I was on duty the other night and pulled the movie run and so was off to Buellton, that wide spot in the road where the burger franchises fight their seemingly endless, cutthroat war. Buellton with the Blockbuster Video store waiting, like a patient etherized upon a table for the next techno assault that cannot be repelled from behind bricks and mortar or even the optimum location, location, location.

The kids all went to see 2012 which takes us back to the pre-ColombianYucatan for messages about the apocalyptic earthcrack and then all the way to Nepal for the launching (not without some hitches) of the New Arks with their exotic livestock and a boy named Noah. Ararat is submerged early on as are all the architectural icons of the old and the new worlds. It is a profoundly insensitive movie: the relative handful of survivors are politicians or magnates who toast their survival without even a nod to the 6,000,000,000 human beings who have been crushed, burned, scissored by the earth, drowned. All the mayhem does not require a simple suspension of disbelief but a wholesale devaluation of human life, history and whatever gods might be. It would appear, (who would have known and don’t tell Lou Dobbs), the Mayan pantheon has a distinct and, evidently, insurmountable lead in this final highest stakes sweepstake.

But I didn’t go there. I went to New Moon and I saw something for which I was unprepared, an assault on years of research and one extended werewolf hunt in the forests of Croatia, years of trepidation and respect for monsters as monsters (which is why they are called ” monster”) pitiless, scornful of our species, insatiable and chock full of more power than we are capable of imagining. And there they were, in the afternoon, five vampires in an elevator dropping into the catacombs of some Dan Brown designed conspiracy womb where reason is without value, and knowledge accumulated is rendered moot. Even the most prosaic of stereotypes are employed for exposition and the right light for the glitter to catch as the blood drinker has his existential high noon moment.

I don’t mind twaddle and doggerel and hoohaw. The Three Stooges were funny and sad and provocative all at once. I admire Swift’s Modest Proposal, Johnny Depp as Keith Richards as a buccaneer in the Caribbean, Glen Beck in tears, Charlie Chaplin and the Big Gears, bad jokes well told, the Cheshire Cat, the lovesick and ripped-off frog ribbiting about the princess who got away. But there are rules to senselessness and the first is you don’t take yourself seriously.

Vampires need elevators in much the same way as women in the 60’s needed a man- less than a bicycle. Their power is sublime because they need all the lightness they can get because their guilt and sin and rue are so great. When they have the opportunity, they pull themselves out of gravity itself. A vampire in an elevator is as inappropriate and absurd as a ski slope in Dubai or a library without books.

They are almost all heartbroken, made as they were for love, and loving that which is ephemeral, brief and imminently predictable- the mortality in us all that makes youth so glorious and senescence a shadow.

We can no more accept a world inundated with all souls lost than we can a world where monsters don’t drive fast cars, work on their pecs and take the elevator cryptward for a little internecine Kung Fu while outside the flagellants flail and everyone dresses in red, watching the clock- just like in the other movie- on the other side of the multiplex in Buellton where they’ve just opened a new Jack in the Box.