But there’s no escape. These two movies confront us with a dash of world views as radically different as those of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. The vampire world is profoundly pessimistic; its ethic is, literally, cutthroat competition. The Trek world is optimistic, expansive, humanistic and probably involves pork-barrel spending: does a starship really need a holodeck? Of course, at the movies, unlike the voting booth, it need not be either/or. With $15 and enough stamina you could visit both Trekworld and vampworld in a single evening. But you risk the psychic equivalent of what happens aboard the Enterprise when they cross some throbbing dimensional boundary and everything starts shaking, the actors fall off their chairs and sparks sputter from the surprisingly antiquated wiring.
The world according to “Star Trek” has always been multicultural–even multi-planetary. Back in the ’60s, the crew of the first Starship Enterprise included an Africa woman, a Russian, an Asian and a half-breed Vulcan. Later crews have gone so far as to welcome Klingons (the archvillains of the original series) and an android with pancake makeup. (Producers keep hearing from people who think their group, too, should be included: one such letter came from a neo-Nazi.) The Trek world may be the only place left where ’60s optimism survives intact. “I hove ‘Star Trek’,” says actor Christian Slater, one of the stars of “Interview With the Vampire,” “because of the heroic quality of it all, the boldly going where no one has gone before. It’s a show with a very positive and bright outlook on the future. It says we will evolve, at some point, into intelligent human beings. Not in our lifetime, but maybe by the 24th century. It’s not like the vampire world at all.”
To the extent “Interview With the Vampire” posits a future at all, it’s a joyless repetition of the past: another night, another neck. (But it does posit a sequel; producer David Geffen says he’s already re-enlist-ed director Nell Jordan and costar Tom Cruise.) “Star Trek” is about cooperation and redemption. “Interview” is about alienation and damnation; cruelty, irony, decadence and elegance substitute for kindness, sincerity and virtue. The Trek world is hetero–when duty allows–while the vampire world is bisexual, androgynous and sadomasochistic. Vampires are both a liberal’s caricature of conservatives–the ultimate dead white European males–and a conservative’s caricature of liberals: godless sexual outlaws who dress funny, need haircuts and want to snatch your children. The Trek world is your comfort zone; vampires are the dreaded Other. Which doesn’t mean they don’t attract you.
Slater, who plays the interviewer who’s both appalled by and drawn to the vampire Louis, says he went to see Frank Langella play Dracula onstage at least a dozen times, lured by the vision of “invincibility, the limitless opportunity to do whatever you want.” Such a fantasy is seductive these days. Norine Dresser, an L.A.-based folk-lorist, tells of a woman who wants to become a vampire so she won’t be mugged or raped. “As a woman you feel so intimidated,” says Dresser. “But if you were a vampire you would be stronger than your hunter.” And Nell Jordan sees the vampire as a last emblem of immortality for those too jaded to believe in angels. “It’s the death-in-life thing, isn’t it?” he says. “And we hate sort of–dying, don’t we?”
But hard-core vampire aficionados don’t just sit around intellectualizing. “Suppose somebody came to you and said you can be attractive, brilliant, wealthy, fascinating and you can live forever,” says Meg Reed Thompson, 45, of Ft. Huachuca, Ariz. “Would you turn it down?” No way, thou-sands of Thompson’s fellow vampire fans say-and who’s ever going to call them on it? Thompson belongs to the Miss Lucy Westerna Fan Club, Anne Bice’s Vampire Lestat Fan Club and the Nocturnal Ecstasy Vampire Coven. There are 50 or so “vampire interest” groups in the United States, which give fancy-dress balls and organize Dungeons and Dragons-like role-playing games. But Stephen Kaplan, head of New York’s Vampire Research Center, claims that some 750 of our fellow citizens really are vampires-not literally undead corpses who turn to ash if sunlight hits them (now, that would be crazy), but people who get antsy if they don’t drink blood. Vlad Llecyina, 26, a Chicago-area rock singer, won’t call himself a vampire, but he’s been into ritual bloodsucking for years, despite potential health hazards. “I’m monogamous,” he says, “I only drink from my wife.”
“Star Trek” obsessives, by contrast, are wholesomeness personified. Dave Christensen, 42, a Seattle postal worker and a member of the Klingon Strike Force since 1978, says most Trekkers he knows are “homebodies and mama’s boys.” In his everyday life, he says, he’s “pretty reserved.” But when he goes to Trekker conventions in Klingon costume, “I hug the ladies, they clamor around me, I act fierce, I snarl at everybody. It’s just a lot of fun,” His sinister-sounding group helps the elderly and carries out role-playing games by mail; Christensen gives certificates to players who’ve been “glorious in battle, suffered a lot of wounds, but lived.” A couple of years ago, says Christensen, some rene- gade Trek dubs started toilet-papering enemies’ homes, but “we cracked down on them. They were giving a bad name to fandom.”
But with Stephen Hawking and, it’s rumored, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and Henry Kissinger among them, Trek fans can’t be dismissed as pimply pathetics with plastic phasers. The “Star Trek” world, says Kevin Stevens, who publishes a Trek news-letter, “is probably the most mapped-out fictional universe ever created. The only thing that comes close is Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” The technical manuals and guidebooks keep proliferating; the Bible is now being translated into Klingon, an invented language analogous to Tolkien’s Elvish, The vampire world isn’t so systematized. Still, Katherine Ramsland’s “The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles,” has 500 pages of quasi-scholarly entries on such topics as “Rat” (“a symbol for the negative, disgusting part of the inner self”) and “Rotting Corpses” (“A reminder of mortality”). We’re skeptical about the usual perception that vampire obsessives tend to be women and gays while Trekkers are often straight males. But to the extent it’s true, it may be because women and gays know what it’s like to be the Other. Or it may be that in vampworld the clothes aren’t so stupid.
But pop movies like “Star Trek Generations” and “Interview With the Vampire” aren’t made for cultists and obsessives. They’re made for regular folks who feel the attraction but have lives to get on with. They’re made to push our buttons. Who doesn’t want a better future than the one we seem headed for? Who wouldn’t like, just for a while, to swish around poised, invulnerable, coldhearted and filthy rich? Trek-world and vampworld may be fundamentally different visions, but they spring from the same hopes and anxieties. What else does anything spring from? We all want to live in love and harmony, and die at peace. Failing that, we want to kill somebody.
The split between vamprie sensibility (dark, retro) and “Star Trek” outlook (upbeat, techno) goes way beyond movies.
VAMP TREK East Coast West Coast Letterman Leno Drugs Sports Doberman pinscher Golden retriever Nathaniel Hawthorne Walt Whitman Miles Davis Wynton Marsalis Mercedes Volvo Vinyl CDs First class Business class
