[bh 3.8] Vampires and their inscrutable bull$#!%

Mar 18, 2011 19:20

MORE SPOILERS AHOY

I love Nina so, so much for that line. SO much. Not that I didn't love her anyway, but.

If there's any one thing I regret most about Mitchell's death, it's that those two never got to be the friends they could have been. It was obvious at various times, even well into Mitchell's spiraling paranoia, that each cared about the other, and while a lot of that was for George's sake, I'm convinced that wasn't all of it. There was a window where, if he'd managed to muster the courage for a confession just one more time, she wouldn't have shut him down the way George and then Annie did, precisely because she didn't love him like they did. She would have been able to face it the way they couldn't. And she would have been appalled, and probably even considered turning him in, but I don't think she would have done it.

Not then. Not before "The Longest Day." She was unnerved when he went so gung-ho after Herrick, but at least she knew where that came from. But then suddenly there's this very intense and (from her perspective) completely incoherent "little bullet" ramble, and Mitchell doesn't even seem to register that he's making no sense. And as ghostinsweats has pointed out, "I'm going to make you so happy" is delivered by body and voice as absolutely a threat, in opposition to the words. And that moment tips Nina over into being actually afraid of him, into seeing him as capable of anything in a very concrete way she didn't before. Mitchell couldn't have primed her more perfectly for Herrick's manipulation if he'd tried. (And no, I don't think Herrick understood everything that was going on, but he damn well knew he was playing with people's heads just to see what they'd do. Revealing the scrapbook to Nina when he did, and especially asking her to keep it just between them, is the prime example.)

In any case, they didn't solidify that bond, and now they won't, and it makes me sad. And that tangent got longer than I intended.

Though it's related to what's on my mind the last day or two (now that the emotional upheaval has settled a bit and the analytical impulses have fully kicked in), which is sort of the culmination of my having observed a few weeks ago that, for all that it presented at various points as guilt or rage, Mitchell's actions this season have virtually all been driven by fear. Primarily, of course, the fear of death, honed into an obsessive weapon of self-destruction by Lia's spurious prophecy.

Mitchell was conceived and overtly presented as an iteration of the addiction metaphor, but over the course of 22 hours he's left his mark on pretty much everything a vampire can stand for: forbidden and/or violent sexuality, primal aggression, existential alienation, mental illness. But the end of his journey crystallizes into a brilliant modern-fiction expression of the most fundamental vampire metaphor of all. Pretty much any scholar examining folklore from a psych or sociology perspective will tell you we created vampires (among a gaggle of other traditions) so we could tell stories grappling with our fear of death. Sex, drugs and psychosis come in WAY down the vampire evolutionary line, well past the point where folklore became literature, and they get a lot more attention. But they all rest on that foundation, don't they?

The foundation is laid unmistakably bare in the cage scene, when Mitchell admits straight out -- to Herrick, and maybe for the first time to himself -- that he will say or do anything to survive. Though it was there from the very beginning, really, in the form perhaps most commonly seen in modern vampire fiction, i.e. unwillingness to let someone else (in that first instance, Lauren) die. But the full-on naked truth of it in this final arc may be unique. It's remarkable at the very least.

And of course that fear is absolutely, utterly human, though it can drive us to do inhuman things. So in the end his peace comes from still having that fear, but being MORE afraid of the monster he already feels himself becoming, and the weapon the Old Ones will force him to be.

It occurred to me yesterday to be impressed that he projected enough beyond ADHD limits (because seriously, he so is, and probably some form of bipolar too) for the "I will kill again" prospect to register as real. Then I realized that no, the prospect was just immediate enough to fall within ADHD limits.

Which isn't all that surprising, really. He hasn't fed in three months, which is the longest we've ever actually seen him go. We have no idea if he had any longer stretches before we met him, but I kinda doubt it. He's always talked like the initial detox is the critical part, but Carl's case in particular would indicate that the subsequent background craving has spikes that don't necessarily correlate with particular high stess or temptation.

If he's just been lurking around Barry trying to figure out what to do next, with no routine or activity to distract him, he almost has to have had multiple instances of finding it nearly impossible to think about anything but killing the next person he saw. No wonder he's terrified, even aside from "they set up some poor guy for the murders, now they're going to want something from me."

So, fear, fear, and more fear. And once again I have to register my gratitude for the plot device of Wyndham and the machinations he represents, as much as I hatehatehateHATE that they're going to have to deal with a whole new batch of vampire bullshit even after losing Mitchell. Without that, in their position, I would have been "Fuck, no, we ARE locking you in the attic, we WILL successfully keep you there whatever it takes, you DON'T get to decide whether it's worth it for us, and we will resume this conversation when you have had some serious downtime that doesn't involve wandering the streets with everyone's heartbeat pounding in your head."

And I do see the other side of it, and would ultimately have come to terms with it, but only at the point where the addiction metaphor breaks down, i.e. because for Mitchell using doesn't just lead to people getting hurt or killed, it IS hurting/killing people. He can't disappear down the self-destructive spiral and end up ODed in an alley somewhere. His OD made national news and destroyed dozens of strangers' lives. At that point, yeah, I can concede that maybe the voices of depression and moral logic have converged.

But not easily, and not with certainty. I'd have lost a lot MORE sleep this week if the deciding factor hadn't been the immediate prospect of his being reduced to a weapon and really, truly, identity-obliteratingly destroyed.

being human

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