The Detective and The Vampire

Over the past few months, in my efforts to write a new screenplay, I keep coming back to attempting to pen two types of stories that I am very fond of: the vampire story, and the detective story. Running them both through my mind, I wondered why this fixation existed, and what these types meant to my engagement with cinema as a whole; I offer here a tentative theory.

It seems to me that vampires and detectives are indicative of two basic philosophic questions that cinema as an artform poses: the question of existence, and the question of knowledge.

The vampire is a figure of ontology: rising from the dead every night, subject to folkloric banes, empowered with superhuman abilities but dependent on an incessant desire to consume and destroy life itself. The vampire is the unliving strata that life itself emerges from, but paradoxically given agency in a form we can recognize, a corpse mockery of the human being, the terror of the inanimate world capable of becoming animate, a veiled creature whose actions reveal the origin of how something emerges from nothing -- the vampire is a parasite who seeks to drag us back into the unthinking world of atoms colliding in a meaningless void, one object annihilating another with no purpose other than a blind animal lust to devour and perpetuate a godless order of nature, tooth and claw and bloodstained lips.

What the vampire forces us to confront is the mystery of what reality is; we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the 'actors' upon the blank 'stage' of this world, as if it exists solely to provide us with the resources to actualize our wants and needs. The vampire reverses that perspective entirely: now the animal/mineral world is enlivened with a perverted agency that threatens to topple what mankind has built. The vampire 'undermines' as it conquers us, turning us into more of itself like a virus, seeking not only to kill us but to transform our fundamental essence, inverting our values like a funhouse mirror and rendering the human form as a smiling shell concealing a hungry beast -- all the barriers we erect between what we are and what other things are are flattened by vampirism, the vampire is an entity constantly in flux rather than possessed of a stable identity, it is dead and alive, sanctified and unholy, shallow and mysterious, but it is not a clean Hegelian synthesis of these qualities, it does not resolve itself from its contradictions, but instead flips between them based on the rising of the sun, the presence of a holy symbol, the performance of social relations -- the transcendent will that we take for granted as our birthright is precisely what the vampire lacks, it is dominated by an inhuman fate which cannot be answered, only confronted and survived.

This vampire embodies the cinematic image in the most literal manner: an instance of time, frozen in a state of indeterminacy, given an artificial life through the interplay of light and darkness. The cinema betrays the technological conditions of its creation, just as the vampire betrays the biological and theological conditions of humanity -- film is the real production of lies, the vampire is the unlife that walks among the living. Just as a movie can be ran through a projector or digital file over and over to give us its virtual recreation of existence, the vampire rises again and again from the grave in a repetitive dance of death.

The notion of repetition and reproduction is inherent to both subjects -- that we can watch films made from over a century ago on YouTube or inside archives is very close to if one were to wander through Dracula's ancient medieval library, wiping away cobwebs to witness the way that the past feasts upon the present.

That ontological feeding is central -- a film plays for a certain time, and we passively sit back and witness it, willingly giving over our short lives to experience the ecstasy of the image. The cinema steals time from us so that it may live through the repetitive cycle of being seen and then perpetuated, through screenings and physical media and lists and writings such as this. All the arts have this vampiric aspect to them -- see Dorien Gray's painting, Lovecraft's Necronomicon, etc. -- but the cinema seems closer than the others, perhaps save cave paintings hidden in the deepest recesses. Movies are seen in the dark, and even if one is in a crowd, you feel isolated and hypnotized in a way that isn't the same in theatre productions. The vampire drinking blood would find themselves at home at the movie theatre, each auditorium built like a giant coffin to house many souls wishing to be passively taken over by the aesthetic rapture. Movies and vampires live through our indulgences, our secret yearning to merge with the unconscious senseless chaos of an perpetual cosmos -- no history, no personality, no individuality, only time's relentless march into the unknown.

As for the detective, we do not solely speak here of the real profession itself, or even the fictional variant. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, yes, but also the amateur sleuths, the inquisitive scholars, Hitchcock's 'wrong man' at the right place, John Trent and Dirty Harry, Godard's voice-over journals, and the newspapermen presiding over the corpse of Charles Foster Kane.

These detectives do not posit an ontological question of the cinema like the vampire does -- they are not necessarily interested in what a thing is, even as that is part of their quest. They are epistemologists: how is knowledge possible, what are the conditions of knowing something, and what qualifies a fact versus a belief?

The cinematic detective is functionally identical to Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye, the surveillance apparatus of Fritz Lang's work, the searching steadicam of Brian De Palma. When Jack, the B-movie soundman in De Palma's Blow Out, goes out of his way to reconstruct an assassination using magazine photos and his own sound recording, he is attempting to grasp the truth of an event by staging it in miniature form, building a theory out of the evidence he can obtain. The detective here is both a scientist, an engineer, and an artist themselves: through the senses available to the cinema, primarily eyes and ears, we filter the world through the sieve of our minds in an attempt to create reasonable expectations of it.

In this way we see an opposite movement from what the vampire does: the vampire insists on the impossibility of the world, it imposes itself on us whether we want it or not, while the detective insists on the central practicality of the world, they impose their viewpoint onto the reality principle and try to square their own internal will with an outside will.

The vampire is the repetition we cannot control: the moon, the stars, the seasons, the past. The detective looks for how to expand our agency by creating hypotheses, testing them in real time, using their body and mind as an anvil upon which our paradigm is either created, destroyed, or remade entirely.

There is always the scene in the detective movie where the hero 'gets in too deep', and ends up getting beaten to a pulp by criminals, conspirators, or just plain bad luck -- in an Arthurian mode, the detective suffers for the sake of bringing life-giving truth back to the rest of us. The question of knowledge is a journey into personal peril, because knowledge here is seen as the constituent framework of power relations, so to ask questions is a form of violence against those interested parties who have a predisposition to perpetuate lies. And the detective, even if they fail in their broader social mission, still manages to transform their personal view of the world, they are fundamentally changed by their experience in a way that makes them incompatible with the assumptions that the story begins with.

The detective highlights the cinema's relation to what it photographs: on one hand, the cinema is always 'real' in the sense that it is always showing some tangible image, whether that is chemical or digital, but on the other hand the cinema is always phony in its imperfect duplication of what it shoots. Even the earliest documentaries, before color tinting or CGI or other photo altering techniques, these primal examples of cinematic 'realism' from the 1890s are distanced from what they depict by the graininess of film stock, the decay of storage, the lack of synchronized sound, and how the presence of a camera inherently distorts what it witnesses by virtue of its sheer presence in the scene -- people act differently when they know they're being filmed, something about nature seems to contour itself into a specific pattern when seen in this manner.

So while the detective interprets the knowledge they receive, they also change it, their actions mutate the world into something else, a mixture of subjective desire and objective relations -- the detective begins to resemble the story they put together from the evidence, because how could it not? They're emotionally and physically involved in creating something out of nothing, it is an aesthetic project, and so the detective is a perfect proxy for the director, the cinematographer, everyone who works on a film and is searching for what they want.

If the vampire is the image taking its revenge upon the image-makers, the detective is the image-maker falling in love with their images -- the perfect example being Dana Andrews' private eye in Otto Preminger's Laura, who seems to conjure the title character out of the depths of his private dreamspace.

There are several other quintessential figures within narrative film that could be filtered through this quasi-meta lens -- cowboys, lovers, soldiers, writers, etc. -- but today I will leave those for another time, for someone else. Right now, the detective and the vampire seem the most crucial to my understanding of what cinema is, and why it continues to matter to me.