Abstract
Daybreakers by the Spierig Brothers shows the vampire not as the traditional manifestation of sublimated desire but a being under self-imposed sovereign restraint and control. Here the vampire body is defined and maintained by external laws that, because of its own inherent abject nature, are continually on the verge of punishing it for transgressing normative proscription. This body is then kept in a state of thrall to an enforced regimen of consumption and expenditure, where disobedience results in escalating acts of public violence and exclusion. Moreover the biological make-up of the tortured vampire body enforces this regime, making it an autonomous one of self-imposed regulation.
However Daybreakers, like Foucault, offers a space of dissension to this framework through the last words of the accused. Within the film this takes the form of a vampire human/becoming where the normally static tension created between the bodies of the tortured and the audience no longer keeps them apart but offers the chance of a potentialised interaction through hybridity, creating an enunciative space allowing for the production of identity positions beyond hegemony and outside both of those taking part in the original negotiation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
For connection between vampires and repressed sexuality see James B. Twitchell, The Living dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, Durham: Duke University Press, 1981, Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, Christopher Craft in “ ‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Representations 8, 1984, 107–33 and Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Literature and Psychology, 27, 1977, 113–21. For the “Eastern Problem” see Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 and Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
- 2.
On an individual level this trend can be seen to start with Louis de Pont du Lac in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and finds its most recent form in The Cullens from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.
- 3.
Ernest Jones, (1951) On the Nightmare, New York: Liveright Publishing Co, and James B. Twitchell, (1981) The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, Durham: Duke University Press, example works that make this connection explicit.
- 4.
See in particular Twitchell above and Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, and Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in 19th Century English Literature, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1988.
- 5.
Karl Marx commented on the capitalist system where “dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” Karl Marx, (1976) Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin, p. 342. Where the workforce is seen as an oppressed zombie-like collective that are “fed” upon by those that control them.
- 6.
A particularly interesting example of this within the genre and as an adaptation of Matheson’s book is Omega Man, directed by Boris Segal in 1971, where the vampire/zombie horde are correlated to Luddite-like religious fanatics who aim to “convert” all their victims, explicitly making the connection between biological and ideological infection.
- 7.
Although the cause of the infection is never explained, images of bats occur throughout the film and specifically at the start and end of it. This links it to Matheson’s earlier work where the books main protagonist, Robert Neville, explains his immunity to infection due to the fact he was bitten by a vampire bat whilst stationed in Panama many years before the outbreak began.
- 8.
Interestingly, the deadly reaction to sunlight did not start until its first appearance on screen in F.W. Murnaus’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (1922). Earlier literary vampires, such as those in Stoker’s Dracula from 1897, Le Fanu’s Carmilla from 1872, and Polidori’s Vampyre from 1819 were reluctant to venture into daylight but it only made them weaker rather than desiccating them.
- 9.
Frederich Nietszche, On the Genealogy of Morals.
- 10.
Michel Foucault, (1991). The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
- 11.
Interestingly, Elaine Showalter in her book Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle, London: Virago, 1992, posits that there is a three-way relationship between “life, death and undeath” and that vampires transgress the borders of all three, 179.
- 12.
This notion of being ‘caught’ in time is explained by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), §6.4311.
- 13.
This connection between the sun and the sovereign gaze was made explicit in James Miller’s article, as well as indicated in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where he says: “[prisoners] were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun.” 217. Here it points to the redundancy of royal intervention due to self-maintenance.
- 14.
See extras on disc and Ethan Hawke in particular.
- 15.
From Greene, R. W. (2002). Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects Through Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics.” in Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88, 434–443.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel, (1977) The Spectacle of the Scaffold, trans. by Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin.
The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Foucault, Michel, 1991 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin Books.
Gordon, Neve, (2002) On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault, in Human Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 125–145.
Gunn, Joshua and Vavrus, Mary Douglas, (2010) “Regulation through the Postfeminist Pharmacy: Promotional Discourse and Menstruation,” in Governing the Female Body: Gender, Health, and Networks of Power, Eds. Lori Reed and Paula Saukko, Albany: State University of New York Press, 112–133.
Hutson, Lorna, (2005) Rethinking the “Spectacle of the Scaffold”: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy, in Representations, No. 89, pp. 30–58.
Markula, Pirkko and Pringle, Richard, (2006) Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self, London: Routledge.
Matheson, Richard, (2007) I Am Legend, London: Gollanz.
McWhorter, Ladelle, (1999) Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Miller, James Miller, (1990) Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty, in Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 470–491.
Moretti, Franco, (1988) Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, (1983), London: Verso.
Nietzsche, Frederich, (2006) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. by Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rice, Anne, (2010) Interview with the Vampire (1976), London: Sphere.
Spierig Brothers, (2009) Daybreakers, Lionsgate.
Stoker, Bram, (1996) Dracula, London: Signet Classics.
Williams, David, (1996) Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bacon, S. (2016). The Expectational Body: The Becoming of the Tortured Vampire Horde in Daybreakers. In: de Valk, M. (eds) Screening the Tortured Body. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39918-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39918-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-39917-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39918-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)