Where to Get a Good Bite

Let’s start with vampire bats. These creatures are so cool in all their creeping stealth. In full frontal photos, they look like mini Nosferatu's caught by the paparazzi.

They nip the flesh, usually around the lower leg of an animal, and then lap it up. They are all about sneaking up on a sleeping animal, not disturbing it, having their meal, and getting away asap so they can return and feed another day, I mean night. Their method does not require a vein or an artery, which is where we enter the realm of the undead.

The classic vampire of fiction and film traditionally prefers the neck, and more specifically the jugular vein. Dracula just wouldn’t have the same cachet if after gazing deeply into Mina’s eyes he then bypassed her creamy neck and heaving bosom to lift her skirts and bite her on the ankle. Hmm, actually now that I think of it . . . . so many places to bite, so little time.

The undead are obsessed with the jugular, but their knowledge of human anatomy may be limited. The carotid is located on both sides of the neck and right next to the jugular. It’s the artery in the side of your neck where you take your pulse. Only a true artiste in bloodsucking could narrow their bite to pierce one and not the other.


Since the carotid is a part of the aorta, the usual six- foot stream of blood would be apparent, not all of which the vampire could swallow. A huge mess would be made. More than likely the vampire wouldn't drain a victim. They need to hide things a little better. How do you explain a corpse with no blood left in it? You don't. Assuming discretion is somewhat important in the vampire world, the undead might take a few lessons on tidiness from the vampire bat.

Folktales suggest vampires bite above the heart, or between the eyes (Ouch! On the temple, maybe. Very thin people sometimes have visible veins there, some even look knotted and throbby.)

Other places to get a bite:

The median cubital vein-- This vein is the one in the elbow where, if you've ever had blood drawn, that is where they stick you.

The ulner artery-- This is the artery in the wrist. After the neck it seems to be the second favorite place for vampires to bite.

The greater saphenous vein-- This vein runs along the inside of either thigh. The vein is large and deep; it would take a big bite to get down into it.

The femoral vein-- This vein is the one at the back of the knee. It lies close to the skin and is an easy bite if you have a victim face down and not kicking.

I think the big toe would be a good source. Earlobes are full of blood, and erect penises. The list goes on.

I've squeezed the bloody pulp out of bloodsucking, but please comment if you have some juice to add.

Only Lovers Left Alive

     How about a vampire movie with no biting, no sex, and no thrill-a-minute action sequences, but where the millennial-old vampire lovers sleep a lot, don’t comb their hair, but really really love each other?  Sound like a hot date movie?

         

Wait, there’s more. Well, kind of more. Yeah, these vampires sleep a lot during the movie, but it’s Tilda Swinton, whose natural vampiric good looks require little enhancement, and Tom Hiddleston, both sleeping naked atop a chaste coverlet. Your heart rate might go up just listening to their light snores, but only if you’re a Jarmusch hipster and so totally cool that you feel his aesthetic. If so, Only Lovers Left Alive is the vampire love story for you.

A testimony to Adam and Eve’s eternal love is that although they live apart–he, in the abandoned and economically desolate suburbs of Detroit; she, in a surprisingly clean Tangiers–they keep in touch via Skype. “I want to see you,” Adam says to Eve. She presses the video display on her iPhone. Yes, Eve has the Apple. Adam does it his way. He’s using a gigundo dinosaur of a cell phone with a pull out antennae, then connects a few wires and aims an equally ancient remote at a TV console similar to the one my grandma owned. Eve’s face appears. He looks momentarily happy; this soon passes. He’s embraced technology, but not the latest thing. He’s stuck in a vinyl world of classic 45s and bemoans the loss of the Packard plant.

The tree of bummed out vampires is vast and includes Louis in Interview with the Vampire, Angel in Buffy and even Bill Compton in True Blood, but they were known to glory in the occasional bite or have sex with the woman they loved. Adam puts the bleak dollop of mope on brooding. If he had a lawn, he’d be screaming at the kids to get the hell off it.

          Only black market blood is good enough for Jarmusch’s vamps, and not because they’ve morally put aside their predatory ways. “It’s how they treat their world,” Adam says, explaining his disillusionment with humans and their self-destructive lifestyles. He calls the humans zombies.

“Who you calling a zombie, bro?” I longed to hear those words from some soulless musician in the nightclub Adam and Eve deigned to visit.

I’m sure Adam and Eve sucked blood from the occasional syphilitic or plague ridden human in the past, but in Jarmuschland, vampires no longer tolerate diseased blood. Or, is it that like many humans who prefer bottled to tap water, these vampires are the ultimate consumers? They like their human blood bottled or packaged and with advance hype. In Eve’s words, “The good stuff.”

Adam and Eve are mismatched lovers, proving that opposites attract.

She’s more books, art and using the latest technology, he’s more music and scientifically inventive. She maintains contact with others, he prefers cruising Detroit’s abandoned manufacturing hub, its decaying buildings etched in moonlight like Roman ruins. She’s intent on surviving into the next millennia, he’s stuck in the past and contemplates suicide with a wooden bullet. There is an upside to all of this: the music is very good and my favorite scenes involved those nighttime cruises through Detroit.

Only Lovers Left Alive is not a story so much as a whimsy, and a conceited one at that. Their snobbery is dangerous. It leads to estrangement from all that they value. Creativity and destructiveness are part of humanity, their life source. If they lose that connection, what good is their art?

An acute appreciation of irony is at the core of their aesthetic, as it must be with all intellectual snobs. In the end, they must return to their primitive state and prey on young lovers in order to live. “What choice do we have,” Eve says.

Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch; director of photography, Yorick Le Saux; edited by Affonso Goncalves; music by Jozef Van Wissem; production design by Marco Bittner Rosser; costumes by Bina Daigeler; produced by Jeremy Thomas and Reinhard Brundig; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.

WITH: Tom Hiddleston (Adam), Tilda Swinton (Eve), Mia Wasikowska (Ava), John Hurt (Marlowe), Anton Yelchin (Ian) and Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Watson).

  

 Vampire Musings and Reviews: 

Byzantium: the Eternal

The Dark Good

Mortals and Vampires

Vampires and Evil: The Romantic Antihero Reborn

The Vampire Priest and His Nemesis in "Thirst"

Let the Right One In

Byzantium: the Eternal

"Vampires cannot exist without us. We will never let them die.”

            

          They are an enduring archetype of humanity. Their stories are as variable as our own. For example, once upon a time, there was a fraternal order of vampires who did not allow females to join their never-ending party. They loathed women, calling them witches and bitches, cunts and harlots. 

          What would happen if a woman stole the secret to their transformation? 

          That question is at the heart of Byzantium, an atmospheric and misogynistic story, with a byzantine commentary on vampire culture, and director Neil Jordan’s (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire) latest foray into the vampire universe. Vampires are excellent fodder for contemplating humanity, as we wrest with mortality and morality in our limited time on earth. 

           In Mortals and Vampires, I wrote that  the relationship between the two entities is confounded on many levels. For the vampire, “the human is a test in restraint, a nostalgic foundering. For the human, the vampire is overlord . . .  perhaps the ultimate parent.”  There's an element of the rescuer on both sides.

           Such is the case in Byzantium, in which a mother and daughter are on the run from the Pointed Nails Of Justice (PNOJ), the fanboy name of a fraternal order of vampires, who stood in judgment of Clara (Gemma Arterton), the mom, when she stole her way into vampiredom:

“We should not permit her to survive.” 

          She’s not allowed into the boy’s club, but she’s not killed, only banished. Clara learns that immortality is unendurable alone, a lesson all of Anne Rice’s vampires knew well. Her vampires busily set about making families. Louis, that gloomy soul-searcher who narrates Interview With The Vampire, was so lonely he made his own child, Claudia, and thereby broke a cardinal rule in that realm. But Rice’s vampires also learned a few things along the way and sucked their way to riches.

           Clara does pretty much the same thing when she shares the secret of immortality with her human daughter, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), who is not unlike Rice’s Louis. He reveals all to a journalist and Eleanor sheds her secrets every chance she gets.  She was born before her mother’s transformation, and goes on the run with her from the PNOJ for two-hundred years.  Mother and daughter live nondescript lives in rundown hovels. Clara pays the rent by giving blowjobs and doing lap dances.  She doesn’t even kill the men she services.

           Wait! Why doesn’t she move to New York and seduce some billionaire with a bad combover in order to control his empire? 

           That would be too Twilighty/True Bloody and I’m always up for the vampire twist and some social history, as in Let the Right One In, a coming-of-age tale in which bullying and pedophilia rule the story, or Thirst in which a vampire priest deals with his nemesis.

           Here are two definitions of Byzantine: of, relating to, or characterized by a devious and usually surreptitious manner of operation as in Byzantine power struggle. And then there’s this from the Urban Dictionary:  Getting head from a girl, you come in her mouth, pull out, and punch her hard in the face. Tell her to clean herself.  I gave her a Byzantine.

            Both of these definitions apply to Byzantium’s vampires.  A vampire’s behavior can be characterized as devious, but in the second definition who is the vamp, the sucker or the suckee?

            Duh! The vampire is always the sucker.  But why would someone blessed with vampiric powers allow herself to be abused like this? Some things never change: not the orthodoxy of the PNOJ toward females, nor the fact that Clara is a product of her time . . . when human. Prostitution is the only life she’s ever known. Like many of us, she sticks to what she knows.

"Becoming a vampire doesn’t make you smarter." S. Ramos O'Briant

            In the 21^st century we haven't eliminated antiquated, even biblical, prejudice against women, or made women less likely to be abused by men, or even less likely to defer to them in body and soul.

“Vampires have changed. Our notions of evil have changed as well.” 

           The vampires in Byzantium don’t seem that hungry; they’re not rapacious in the least. Daylight is not a factor and they have no fangs, but grow a gruesome thumbnail which they wield with either anger or pity to puncture an artery in the human. The bloodsucking in the film was usually circumstantial, as when Clara is protecting her daughter, or to fulfill her career plans by eliminating a pimp.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How They Met Themselves, watercolor, 1864

           Even the holy grail of vampire transformation is not through a blood exchange, but achieved only by entering a Neolithic shrine reputed to have healing powers. Once inside, the human comes face-to-face with their own doppelgänger who announces that it is “the end of time” before stabbing them with the macabre thumbnail and greedily sucking their blood.

           The finale of the film is stupendous.  “Look forward, not back,” Clara tells Eleanor, after saving her from the brotherhood with the help of Darvell, whose character is pivotal for the plot to work.

           “Your instinct is to hunt the powerful and protect the weak,” he says to Clara. “I’d like to try to live that way.”

             The cast was outstanding: Saorise Ronan, brooding and passive-aggressive, dwelling like any 16-year-old on the outcast aspects of her eternal  self. Her human boyfriend, Caleb Landry Jones, looks more vampiricly pale and twisted than the actual vampires. Gemma Arterton, described in the movie as “morbidly sexy” which she certainly is, attacks the role of Mother with all the strength and vicissitude the title deserves. The real winner is the cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, who shot the film in a lush and moody style that seamlessly bound the two eras of this decaying seaside town.

Amy Winehouse she go, "no, no, no."

So typical that I make a special stop to buy Amy Winehouse and then a friend informs me that Winehouse's daddy said to boycott her albums until she deals with her drug problem.
Not that doing so would matter, of course.
Her Wikipedia bio details family conflict between the in-laws with each side blaming the other for their child's addiction. It reads like my sister’s life story (substitute crack for huff, or is it puff?).

Might explain why Winehouse wasn’t sold out at Best Buy. Either she's selling like crazy, or people are heeding the Amy Daddy call.

Wouldn't it be neat if the latter were true? Like a massive intervention.

It's got to be tough being gifted at being sad, writing and singing about it. If you got happy your whole image, not to mention your creative spark, might dry up.

Not that unrequited love in all its renditions — usually lying and cheating, but in reverse order — affects all artists the same way. James Blunt manages to sound sad, yet copeful. It’s not a word, but it says so much. Wrote him (unnamed) into a climactic seduction scene between two vampires. He's falsetto guy in the background singing about night in endless time and love and hearts and souls. Maybe I could work in Amy Winehouse, too.

Hey, when vampires start out dancing the merengue (expertly), and segue to James Blunt, anything is possible.