Octobriana is a Russian Super Heroine - but what's her super powers ? she can't fly, she can't see through walls, she can't become invisible ... and yet, she is special - because she represents the eternal spirit of Youth and the spirit of Revolution - which means, that she's immortal ; That's why she could be out of the gulag after 30 years and still look stunning.
Forever young and immortal as super power - that's not too shabby !
So where's the connection with Vampires?
Vampires becomes vampire by being bitten by another vampire ... so they are dead, but ironically they become immortal in the process. Living a curse, of having to survive by drinking their victim's blood - not a cool super power!
On higher level of symbolism, we could say that if Octobriana is the force of Revolution, setting people free and protecting the working class - Vampires represents the untouchable upper class, the underground society with the real power over the ordinary people, being driven by the need of killing others to survive. But not only they kill their victims, they're also alienating them by transforming them into monster...
If we push the analogy a little further - we could see an economic system that put profit as the ultimate goal, putting the environment at stake and pushing people into cheap labor or slavery - generating financial crisis, fear and unemployment as an excuse for Wars, crime and violence ...
Interestingly (as far as I recall) Octobriana fought against robots, giant walrus, baba yaga, zombies and many foes but never fought against Vampires, ... Yet ?!
Posts
I agree with this vampirical - dialectics.
ReplyDeleteHere are some quotes from Marx in the same way:
"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. " Das Kapital Chapter 10.
"The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist's caldron of capital." The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Chapter 7.
Through their most notorious men of science, such as Dr. Ure, Professor Senior, and other sages of that stamp, the British bourgeoisie had predicted, and to their heart’s content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labour must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampire like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too."
Karl Marx: The International Workingmen’s Association
"But capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labour as its soul, vampire-like." The Grundrisse
Octobriana versus Capitalist - Elitistic - Vampires? Why not? El Santo did it.
Dracula is a representation of capital, he is presented as a threat to the professional bourgeoisie. He is not capital itself, but a particular form of capital which was emerging in the 1890s: monopoly capital. As Moretti puts it, 'Dracula is a true monopolist; solitary and despotic, he will not brook competition.''
ReplyDeleteFranco Moretti provides a reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula, writing, "If the vampire is a metaphor for capital, then Stoker's vampire, who is of 1897, must be the capital of 1897"
HEY ROY I GOT AN IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!! =D
And a crossover "Octobriana versus Vampirella" don't forget that Vampirella sometime works for the CIA.
ReplyDelete