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Last night I did quite a bit of field research about Halloween. I am a sociologist of pop culture and so I like to think of my life as a rich source of information.
First, I helped my own kids get ready for trick or treating. The younger one, following the cultural scripts of her generation, was a vampire. This makes sense given the utter and complete saturation of popular culture with bloodsuckers. Between "Twilight" and "The Vampire Diaries" and the more adult "True Blood," she almost had no choice but to succumb to the spell of blood sucking monsters.
The other one is older and therefore trying to resist the vampire obsession. She hates vampires, hates all the silly girls her age who adore vampires, and wants nothing to do with them. Still, we are all trapped in popular culture and so her resistance is in the form of embracing another popular culture, Japan's, and going as her favorite animated character, "Death Girl," or something like that.
But apparently my daughter's resistance is completely futile since;
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Alas, Vampire mania is nowhere near over. In fact, it appears we're at some sort of absurd vampire apex; even the damnable "Twilight" thing has a few more movies to go before total flameout/burnout, before 10 million teen girls finally make it through puberty and switch back to real boys... Would it not be lovely to think it's just about over? To believe we have finally reached saturation, that the rather insane, relentless vampire craze re-launched for the jaded Facebook generation by the ceaselessly twee "Twilight" series -- AKA "Oh my God, just shut up and have sex already you whiny Mormon teenagers" -- was nearing its end? You bet it would.Let the vampire backlash begin! / Why do we keep regurgitating the same old bloodsuckers?. But based on the numbers I collected among the young trick-or-treaters at my house and then later among adult sorts at a variety of bars, it appears that vampires are not a popular Halloween costume, that the real monsters, the ones we like to scare ourselves with, are mostly of the "harmless" variety. Given just how much monstrosity there is in our world, that seems like a collective and willful denial. First, the most popular costumes among boys and men last night were: Michael Jackson, Spartans (or Romans) (because of "300"?) , Waldo from the "Where's Waldo?" series, Caveman (because of "Year One"?), Jon (of Jon and Kate), Balloon Boy and any and all things Mario. The most popular costumes for girls and women: princesses, skanky princesses, fairies, skanky fairies, witches, skanky witches. Where were the vampires? Why are vampires more for everyday imitation rather than Halloween? And more importantly, how come people aren't scary anymore? Maybe they are. Maybe what scares men is the knowledge that they are trapped, like Mario, in a endless cycle of pop culture consumption from which there is no escape? And maybe girls and women fear the endless cycle of romance (princess) and porn (skanky princess) in which they are trapped? So rather than going as the real monsters that haunt us, the greedy bankers or even the gang raping high school kids, we go as representations of what is actually our prison: video games, movies, romance, and porn. Maybe last nights costumes really were scary?