[Horror has long been as much about the sources of the scares as the jumps they produce, and American horror is no exception. In this week’s series, I’ll AmericanStudy some of the symbolisms behind our scary stories. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post on a very scary disease, past and present.]
On mindless pop entertainment, and what it can still symbolize.
Roger Ebert wrote of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987) that it ends up
devoid of anything deep or lasting, becoming “just technique at the service of
formula”—and as usual, Rog was right on point. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect
anything else of a film that stars both of the ‘80s Coreys (Haim and Feldman), each
in his own way a symbol of the decade’s tendency toward style over substance. Certainly
hindsight should clarify for us just how much “style over substance” seems to
define Joel Schumacher’s directorial mantra. But in any case, the salient question about The Lost Boys isn’t whether there’s any
there there—it’s why on earth I’m writing about it in this series and this space
when there so clearly isn’t.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to make the case for hidden depths to the
film—I like the “and yet” second paragraph transition as much as anybody, but
it has its limits. But what kind of AmericanStudier would I be if I couldn’t
find cultural symbolism in even the most vapid pop entertainments? For one
thing, I think it’s possible to see The
Lost Boys as originating—or at least representing a very early example
of—one of the most significant cultural trends of the last couple decades: turning vampires into sexy, cool teenage icons. Vampires have been alluring since at least Dracula, of
course; but when it comes to Angel, Edward Cullen, the cast
of The Vampire Diaries, and so many
other teen-demographic forces on our recent cultural landscape, I think Kiefer
Sutherland and his fellow Lost Boys might have really gotten the ball rolling.
Which, given the momentum that ball now possesses, would make Schumacher’s film
pretty darn influential.
But I also don’t think we have to look into the subsequent decades to find
significant symbolic value to The Lost
Boys. I’m pretty sure that Schumacher didn’t think about it on this
level—and I don’t even know that the trio of screenwriters can be credited with
any part of this insight—but the film seems to me to reflect a significant and
interesting cultural tension in its portrayals of the era’s titular young men. On
the one hand, Kiefer and his fellow vampires are pretty much pure evil, young
punks whose appearance and affect precisely parallel their darkest intentions.
But on the other hand, protagonist Jason Patric is drawn to the vampires
because he’s quite a bit like them in every way—and he and his younger brother
(Haim), the sons of an overworked and somewhat absentee single mother, seem
scarcely less lost than the vampires they end up fighting (with the help of a
couple of similarly wayward boys, including Feldman’s character). So are the
lost boys villains or heroes, a threat to their small towns or the saviors of
those places? They seem, in this slight yet symbolic film, to be both and all
of those things.
Next scary story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Scary stories you’d AmericanStudy?
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