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Obama's Election Means a Return of Vampire Flicks
gyrogeerloose writes "In a column in Saturday's San Diego Union Tribune, Peter Rowe makes a connection between the popularity of horror movie genres and the political party in the White House. A Republican administration presides over a period of zombie movies while a Democrat in the Oval Office brings on a cycle of vampire movies. Why? Possibly because the two genres 'are really competing parables about class warfare.' Hmmmm, maybe. On the other hand, it might just be a coincidence." Socialists are best represented by lycanthropes, and the Libertarians are most closely tied to any sort of horror from space.
During the 90's, there was a lot of what I call "gnostic cinema" - films like The Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City, eXistenZ, and such were all about radical Cartesian doubt ("is the world all lies? Can I trust my senses? etc.") I really do connect them with the Clinton era, and also with the apparent unchallenged dominance of what was called the Washington doctrine. Although Clinton was a Democrat, the idea that unfettered markets worked best and that we were on the road to permanent prosperity was very much the consensus, far more than under Bush. After all, the Cold War was over. With that consensus came gnawing doubt - expressed in those films - that perhaps things underneath the gleaming, shiny surface weren't so good after all. When the dot.com crash came, and then 9/11, such Gnostic doubt was no longer necessary: that optimism disappeared.
As far as why Democrats are vampires and Republicans are zombies, remember that culture trumps economics in representation. The Democrats are still considered the party of the cultural elite. The Republicans are the populists, at least at the base (so much of the last election was a demonstration of the contradictions between the Republican base and the Republican elite.) Democrats may tax you more, but they also, ironically, believe in a heirarchy of cultural values: that a salad at Chez Panisse is superior to a cheeseburger at McDonalds. Republicans like uneven economics, but flat cultures (which make, after all, simpler and bigger mass markets, which creates economic elites like Sam Walton.)