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.
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