They fight monsters, don’t they?: A 'meta' about "choice" and The Vampire Diaries
I’ve seen and done things I want to forget;
I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,
Blown and shot out beyond belief.
Arms and legs were in the trees.
I’ve seen and done things I want to forget;
coming from an unearthly place.
PJ Harvey, The Words That Maketh Murder
(graphic is relevant, serendipitously so)
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Elena’s choice (in collusion with Alaric and Damon) to have Jeremy compelled to leave Mystic Falls. The bulk of the discussion has revolved around the morality of that decision. On one side, there are people crying from the battlements that it was “bad” and “terrible” (which, it was but… it’s complicated?) and on the other side, people rushing to defend and even glorify the act as “right” and even “heroic” and “good” (which, it wasn’t but maybe was… in a way... perhaps?).
This post is just me grappling with feelings on the implications of this act on a narrative level, and why I have feelings about narratives, and just a lot of words. All mistakes are my own.
I. What’s at the root of it all?
I’ll just say it straight-I, personally, am not interested in lengthy discussions about the clear-cut “morality” of the choices these characters are making. Mostly because it’s often a fruitless, pointless discussion. But also because it oversimplifies things and it detracts from what I like to think is the more interesting discussion that we should be having: what drives a character to do certain things, specifically here, to make the choice to impinge on another’s right to choose?
This instance is obviously not the only time this sort of thing has happened on The Vampire Diaries.
No one can dispute the fact that Damon forcing Elena to drink his blood was the “wrong” thing to do back in Season 2. It was an infringement of her rights and problematic in ways that we can spend literal weeks discussing, and that’s a necessary discussion to have, especially for me from a specifically feminist perspective, no doubt. But a lot of my interests lie in what makes Damon Salvatore, a character who occupies this difficult space of being both victimizer and victim, who knows exactly what it feels like to have his own choice stripped from him, and specifically is own choice of whether to be a vampire or not, and has spent the better part of two centuries resenting the fact that he didn’t have a choice when it came down to it-what makes him do the exact same thing to someone else? Someone whom he claims to love?
The same question can be asked of several characters. Why would Bonnie, who spent a good deal of the latter part of season one and early season two defining herself strictly in terms of moral “good” in opposition to vampire “bad”, willfully violate Luka’s will and nearly kill him in order to get into the tomb and get the moonstone. Bonnie who held her own grandmother’s cooling corpse hours after she died from the strain of the two of them trying to get that same tomb open. This particular example is an interesting one because it highlights the very fragility of how these characters self-define. She was doing it for the “right” reasons but what she actually did was unspeakably bad. A few weeks later, she violates Luka’s mind to get information that was vital to the primary characters. Was that a “bad” thing to do? Yes, it was bloody terrible. But the meaning it holds for her narrative as a character and the WHY of it-the fact that Bonnie who was so able to draw stark, distinct lines between herself and the likes of Damon or Stefan at the beginning of the season slowly becomes a person who inhabits a very gray, problematic place in the narrative and because in her mind she’s doing what needs to be done-that’s really interesting to me.
It demands that we stretch our definitions of heroism and villainy, of love and hate, of good and bad, dark and light-and think of just how complicated and indiscrete and messy those things are. It demands that we escape those constraints if necessary and start to think of the very complexity of human nature, and to read these characters as characters with full narratives that need to be explored and examined, weighed and measured, and mostly understood. They can do bad things and they can be bad people, and we should feel free to call them on it and examine that ‘bad’ behavior for what it is. But surely that’s not the sole reason why many of us engage in literature or film or narratives? At least that’s not why I’m here.
II. “Death is my gift”: This is how we’re taught to love
Thematically, the limits of “free choice,” and the impact choices have on other people, the stripping away of choice, are concepts that The Vampire Diaries has been playing with from the very start of the show. They’re embedded in the very fabric of the narrative. (lol, compulsion, duh)
It’s something that’s working on multiple levels of choice as well. How much are your destiny and actions defined and confined by your past experiences (e.g. how does your experience as victim transform into that of victimizer or the story of every single vampire on the show); by factors and pressures outside of yourself or out of your control (e.g. societal, relational or familial); by something that is innate at the biological (e.g. blood) or hereditary (e.g. witches, werewolves, doppelgangers) or instinctive (e.g. the need for blood) levels?
And then there’s the bit where characters willfully strip other characters of their free will-and many times, on this show, it’s not just “villains” like Klaus who are doing this. If it was, it’d be a much easier pill to swallow because of course he’s doing horrible things-that’s what he’s supposed to do. However, since he’s a character with a narrative, I don’t think that means we shouldn’t interpret his reasons for doing so and the layers of meaning in his actions. “Why is he so desperate to be invincible when we meet him?” “Could it be because he’s never fully recovered psychologically from that feeling of utter powerlessness he felt as a human?” Etc. etc., we could do this for days.
The infringement of free will for the sake of “love” is grafted into the very origin of vampires on this show, so basically the fabric of the universe is defined by it. And in that particular instance, the show couldn’t have been more literal about how utterly complicated and problematic “love” is in this universe. Esther and Mikael choose to kill each and every one of their children (brutally, I might add, no tender breaking of necks or smothering with pillows for this family) because they felt the loss of the youngest so keenly and because they want their children to be as powerful as they can be.
They do it out of love. And the price of that “love” is each of their children forced into an eternity of being the living dead, literally; of being slaves to blood; and the kind isolation being a natural predator, a creature that by nature survives by killing others, breeds-really, the punishment of an eternity of simply existing without the prospect of the sweet release of death unless you can hook yourself up with some white ash is cruel enough as it is, let’s be real.
This is the sign and signifier of a parent’s love, their gift to their children: death. Death is their gift. (Note: did you see what I did there, Buffy fans? It was on purpose, to highlight the kind of show we’re dealing with here.).
III. When you gaze into the abyss: how to fight with monsters...
It’s when characters that we deem “heroes” (which, I hate the way that word is used) or the primary characters in our narrative that we’re supposed to “root for” do terrible things that it becomes complicated. I’ve written about the way the world in which these characters live is shaping them, shaping the decisions they make and the way they live. It’s probably one of my favorite things about the narrative. These people are living in a dark, dangerous, monstrous world and for many of them, the only way to navigate that world, and to even survive within it requires that they too become dark, dangerous and monstrous-if they weren’t already there.
These characters live in Mystic Falls, a town with a ridiculously high death rate, they’ve watched people die, they’ve died themselves, they’ve suffered and they’ve lost. They are quite literally fighting for their lives 90% of the time and the rest of it; they’re recovering from grief or some other tragedy. But they don’t really get the choice of just giving up; it’s a show where:
“People do function. They get up, they eat breakfast, they go to school [sometimes] or they go to work; they survive and they function but in a very profound and frightening space of dysfunction.
And the only way to keep going is to be dysfunctional yourself; is to compartmentalize, is to shut down those parts of yourself that hurt too much or think too much or want too much; is to deaden your conscience when you need to; is to make the ruthless choices, the dirty choices, the dangerous choices even if it means hurting the people you love; it means growing accustomed to NOT having choice - like "choice", "free-will"? All of those are a luxury, okay; your lot in life is to simply survive and to maybe help your family survive, at least for another fucking day. There are no plans for the future, there is literally the next sunrise. There are no heroes, there are no villains, there are simply people trying to survive. Fear is as normal and present as your own shadow, as is paranoia, and there's a real sense that you can't escape this--there's no escape, this is your life and you have to live it no matter how hard it is and how much easier it would be to simply give up (in this case, either kill yourself, or maybe turn into a vampire). You grasp futilely at the shreds of normalcy that are possible, a full meal with your family; painting your nails; taking the time to read a book or have a drink with a friend; sleep; homework; your lame job; whatever. At the same time, those things that should be normal and quotidian can become incredibly challenging, so like, it's easier or more natural to deal with ‘vampires, hybrids, and originals’ and violence and horror than it is to deal with your ‘rebellious’ teenage brother or hold down a job.”
I don’t condone the choice Elena made to violate Jeremy’s mind. And neither does the show, by the way. Despite Damon (who is literally the king of unreliable narrators, I’m not sure why anyone would take any of the things he says on that porch as gospel), the show was not presenting this choice as “good”, or even heroic, or purely selfless, or kind. Jeremy is the victim here as much as he might be the luckiest person in Mystic Falls, and I hope the show takes time to play that story out onscreen at some point and to its fullest conclusion whatever that will be. But I do want to understand it, what it means for all the characters involved and their narratives from this point onward.
Mostly, I’m obsessed with how thoroughly complicated it is, how a character who knows intimately what it means to not have a choice would choose or feel forced to choose to strip another of their right to make a decision in their lives out of a “love.” I’ll quote myself again:
“This show-it’s not perfect. But when it comes to characters inhabiting a gray, increasingly dark morality. When it comes to characters having to hold the kind of complexity of being able to love someone so much and yet hurt them in the most terrible way (and often with some misshapen, probably misguided desire to save them or protect them), it is ACES. This is no Corinthian [1 Corinthians 13: 1-13] interpretation of love here. Love is cruel okay. It's not always kind. It's not always patient. It's not always good and full of sunshine and roses and faith and hope. Sometimes it's fearful, sometimes it's vicious, sometimes it's ruthless, [and] sometimes it's selfish and cowardly.”
IV. Who cares about heroes anyway?
So, to end, I’m not sure why I felt the need to write this. I guess I’m just finding the way this show can be so unapologetic about the sheer contradictory fucked-upness of humanity really gratifying right now and a lot of that narrative comes down, for me, to how the show deals with “choice” and the lack thereof in all manner of iterations. This could be down to personal taste as that sort of thing delights me in my narratives. This show is not about “heroes” in the typical sense of the word/as in the way we’re used to thinking about “heroes”. And I think there can be a discomfort with that-one that I’ve struggled with frequently in the past. But. As a general rule? I like my characters messy, and struggling to survive, and sometimes making the dark, terrible choices in order to do so. (Little fact: I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed Elena Gilbert more than I have this season where she’s actively growing to understand/confront how dark she is/can be-and this decision and this episode, actually, are, for this character, pretty fascinating markers of the journey she’s walking right now).
Do I think the show could stand to give some of these characters a little more self-awareness; or textually and explicitly call them out on their actions more? Yes, I do actually. But I still think it’s ultimately one of the riskiest, most subversive things the show is trying to do*.
I end with a quotation that’s used and abused (I just used and abused it in this post and in my life in general) but is always relevant to my interests: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." (Nietzsche)
* Not always well and the way I’d like it, I’ll be the first to admit to that. But that’s another discussion for another day.
** This was written far too quickly, whoops, sorry if it makes no sense.