Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula would become a bestseller largely due to its lascivious imagery and terrifying plotline that fed into every anxiety over morality, science, and public health.
Amazing review Jeffrey – I haven't seen the new film but a friend had a similar inspired response to it, so I'm looking forward to watching it. I suspect my reading of the crossover allegories and metaphors will closely match yours, even if I hadn't initially read your afterword here.
Do you think that this remake was intended (however subtly) to be a critique of the pandemic response? Or is what you perceived in the film perhaps the subliminal sentiments of suppressed dissidence coming from the director.
Your point about the "aesthetically inconsistent" as a proxy for immoral impurity is definitely a central point that preceded the pandemic but metamorphosed overtly and spread its evil wings come covid. I've always pondered the relationship between aesthetics and totalitarianism – at least ever since reading Eichmann in Jerusalem where Arendt describes the man on trial just wanting to wear the black leather trench coat, ride in the Rolls-Royce, speak the SS lingo, etc. The new aesthetic of ascendancy (and during covid: of purity) is of course related, generally summed up by the signals on the anti-creed "We Believe" yard signs, which for a short time where flanked by "In Fauci We Trust" placards where I live.
While the Dracula story is victorian, there's something very medieval about the mass-formation that characterized all those absurd contradictions (e.g. insisting on masking, but not when eating in a restaurant, etc). Maybe your review points out: this irrationality, just like an undead vampire, has accompanied us across eras, and certainly not put to rest in the 19th-century.
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My favorite parts of Covid:
#42
All I see are people that gave up on themselves and forfeited their minds.
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Amazing review Jeffrey – I haven't seen the new film but a friend had a similar inspired response to it, so I'm looking forward to watching it. I suspect my reading of the crossover allegories and metaphors will closely match yours, even if I hadn't initially read your afterword here.
Do you think that this remake was intended (however subtly) to be a critique of the pandemic response? Or is what you perceived in the film perhaps the subliminal sentiments of suppressed dissidence coming from the director.
Your point about the "aesthetically inconsistent" as a proxy for immoral impurity is definitely a central point that preceded the pandemic but metamorphosed overtly and spread its evil wings come covid. I've always pondered the relationship between aesthetics and totalitarianism – at least ever since reading Eichmann in Jerusalem where Arendt describes the man on trial just wanting to wear the black leather trench coat, ride in the Rolls-Royce, speak the SS lingo, etc. The new aesthetic of ascendancy (and during covid: of purity) is of course related, generally summed up by the signals on the anti-creed "We Believe" yard signs, which for a short time where flanked by "In Fauci We Trust" placards where I live.
While the Dracula story is victorian, there's something very medieval about the mass-formation that characterized all those absurd contradictions (e.g. insisting on masking, but not when eating in a restaurant, etc). Maybe your review points out: this irrationality, just like an undead vampire, has accompanied us across eras, and certainly not put to rest in the 19th-century.