Interview with Marx and the Vampire

In a grotesque Gothic film on vampires (Queen of the damned, 2002), vampires sucked prey's blood. But they operated as if they were in the marketplace. They just did not want to suck anyone's blood but had predilections and eventually prey acquired an exchange value. The crazy thing is that before sucking the blood from the prey's neck, including sucking the blood from fellow vampires, vampires ran through flashbacks in which the life of the prey and the images of prey's prey came to life before their eyes, so to speak. In other words, the fetish value of the prey was being revealed to them, which is quite extraordinary, since in the "normal" relationship predator-prey there is either (1) a relationship exclusively based on use-value (satisfaction of a need) or, on the contrary, (2) extreme fetishism: Dracula falls in love, but without having Dracula undressing his lover's past up to a point were love's magic or spell solves. Mina remains a sexual candy all the way through. Dracula falls in love because he idealises the object of his love.

Quite interesting. Imagine going to a shopping mall, entering into a shop, stopping to contemplate a pair of shoes and then falling in love with them, preparing to produce your wallet and suddenly having a flashback that reveals you all the human suffering of human labour invested in their manufacturing. Suppose you see children performing forced-labour, being slapped by their owners, half-blind women gluing the sole, bare scenes coming out of Slumdog millionaire, nightmares, etcetera.

The Enlightened vampire is now replaced by the post-modern vampire, one who is capable of seeing concrete and abstract labour.