Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer  (1992)

Twilight  (2008)

Let the Right One In  (2008)

The big love for Let the Right One In and high expectations over the impending release of Twilight has sparked some chatter about vampires as a symbolic narrative construct — or, as Jeff Wells puts it in a post condescendingly titled “Girls Vampire Club,” “the romantic whatchamacallit vampire metaphor.” At this point, it’s not even much of a metaphor: in the fifteen years between the birth of the Buffy franchise and the release of the two teen vampire films named above, the plight of the brooding but well-meaning undead has become so synonymous with teenage alienation that fiction about the convergance of the two “outsider” groups has just about run out of points to make. It’s become refreshing to see vampires function as unambiguous villians, an evil to be dealt with sans angst.

And so you’ve got to give it up for Barackula, just a little bit, just for refusing to engage in the “vampires are romantic subjects too!” cliche. This short, online-only musical (which we first learned of months ago, before it went online, but only got around to watching after last week’s election) re-imagines a young Obama’s circa-1990 induction as president of the Harvard Law Review as song-and-dance-off between our hero and a clan of literally bloodsucking would-be lawyers. Its not exactly a game-changer as far as musicals go, but it’s exceptionally narratively tight and polished for what amounts to a dramatic user-generated campaign ad, and its anticipation of what would become the major themes of the campaign all the way up to Election Day is truly remarkable.

Barackula’s setpiece takes place after the young Obama has been elected to the highest office in Harvard’s budding lawyer land. He shows up for what he thinks is an inauguration, but his befanged colleagues soon set him straight: it’s a “conversion” (is that what’s going on at the White House today?) Vampires, so often coded as cool rebels in teen-oriented media, are here the in crowd, the establishment, an ancient, elite group that’s so wary of Obama the outsider that they immediately set forth to make him One Of Them. When Obama learns that the vampire lawyers want to induct him into their “secret society,” he breaks into a funky protest song. Rather than either assimilate into or conquer his opponents, Obama suggests peaceful collaboration:

We can talk about it, we can compromise…

We don’t need any violence, we just need to unite…

We can live together, mortals and immortals — conversion’s something of the past….

As expected, this is not what the vampires want to hear, but I’ll let you see what happens for yourself rather than spoil it. I do think it’s worth pointing out that the villainous vampires in Barackula are not coded as Republicans — they even brag about being responsbile for the career of a certain “Arkansas governor and his wife” — but the political status quo in general. This young Obama is a potential hero who is charged with reforming a general culture of political toxicity, and like the real Obama, he does it by calmly refusing to engage the negative forces. It becomes necessary that here’s nothing sexy or sensitive about these vampires; this draining of angst from the vampire myth perfectly suits the no-drama Obama. The musical’s songs and choreography are largely unremarkable, but Barackula’s very existence is notable as an artistic snapshot of the obstinate optimism that the Obama campaign improbably sold to a majority of a depressed nation.

Under discussion:

Legally Blonde  (2001)

Bulletproof Monk  (2003)

As Chris briefly noted earlier this morning, MGM has confirmed last week’s CNET rumors and announced that they’re slowly rolling some of their feature film library on to YouTube. But the New York Times story about this, by Brad Stone and the always-skeptical Brooks Barnes, warns us not to get too excited — because MGM certainly isn’t.

“The initial lineup may not be all that compelling,” the authors admit — highlights include full-length streams of Bulletproof Monk and clips from Legally Blonde — but this may be because MGM doesn’t feel compelled to give YouTube the good stuff. Noting that many studios are cranky about YouTube’s past perceived leinance on copyright enforcement (a perception which they’re now vigorously trying to reverse), dissatisfied with the overall look and feel of the site and skeptical over its as-yet-unproven potential as a revenue generator, the authors quote MGM’s bet-hedging co-president, Jim Packer:

But he did not see putting a significant part of the studio’s catalog on the site anytime soon.“We will have some long-form videos up on YouTube, but I don’t think that’s the platform to have 30 or 40 movies up at once,” Mr. Packer said. “I feel much more comfortable doing that on a site like Hulu.”

One of Hulu’s obvious advantages is that there’s no non-professional/user-generated content to compete with, which makes it a playing field much more familiar to mainstream distributors. So why put a hand in YouTube at all? It’s like they know they should court YouTube (think about the marketshare left abandoned on the table if they don’t), but they’re just not that attracted to her. YouTube is the girl that MGM (and other studios) are going to call once a month and take out to a sub-par restaurant, just so that they can keep her in the game in case there’s an unforeseen catastrophe somewhere down the road. Until then, they’re saving all their love for Hulu.