The Avathoir/wallflower American Vampire Conversation Installment 9: Some Things Must Pass

 

wallflower:  So, here we come to the end of the Pearl/Henry story, and damn but does Snyder ever stick the landing.  At the end of volume 4, Henry was attacked and left for dead by what we learn now are a coven of Los Angeles-based vampires; in fact, they’re descended from the coven that turned Pearl back in the 1920s.  That leads Pearl to seek help from the Vassals of the Morning Star, which leads to her allying with Skinner Sweet (who’s under control of the VMS), and also Cal comes back, and it turns out that the coven is now led by Hattie, Pearl’s friend who got turned and who we all though Pearl killed, and also Skinner is secretly working for Hattie, and Pearl and Skinner finally get it on (aw yeah), and this all sounds ridiculous, a pileup of plot and contrivance that the writers of Dexter’s final season would consider a bit too much but here it absolutely works.

 

It works because it’s grounded in a crucial point of theme and character, and one that all this plotting leads toward:  near death, Henry twice receives the opportunity to save himself by drinking vampire blood (first from Hattie and then at the end, heartbreakingly, from Pearl) and he twice doesn’t do it.  I’ve been bothered before by Snyder killing off characters and then bringing them back (something that quite often bothers me) but now it makes sense:  Skinner, Hattie, Pearl, and Cal are all vampires, and vampires don’t die that easily.  Henry does.  Humans do, and that’s what makes them humans, not vampires.  One of the strongest themes running through here has been the difference between vampire and human, and the way Pearl is caught between them, but Henry has always been human, always been secure in that.  His final non-act of refusing to live as vampire and instead dying as a man finishes that theme in the most moving way possible, and it sets up the future for Pearl, now on the road with the last words from Henry:  “I’ve always known you were part of something bigger than me, than us.  I knew it before you became a vampire, and I knew it after.”

 

Avathoir: That’s an excellent summary of the plot and the themes we’re going to cover for this entry, wallflower, so let me now proceed to ruin it by talking about literary categorizations. For all three of you who read this and also read James Wood the literary critic, he has a term called Hysterical Realism, which he refers to as a fusion of the elaborately absurd and overbearing, be it in language or plot or characterization (The “hysterical”) and a hyper focused exploration of something grounded in reality (the “realism”). Examples of this include the works of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, but I think we can add Snyder’s work to the list with this volume. I’ll be honest; reading this was almost unbearable. Not because of low quality (god no, I love this arc) but because Snyder, assisted by Nguyen and Albuquerque, are working in an almost operatic mode, a Grand Guignol of emotion and carnage. Not only are you correct in mentioning how ridiculous the plot sounds if you’re not reading it, but the way it all twists together. I mean, Hattie gets the idea for her coven from a cheesy sci fi movie, and…it’s a coven, for shit’s sake. It’s all very silly. But like you also said it WORKS! And for the exact same reasons we listed: it’s grounded in something real, and that’s the fact that Henry is going to die.

We had thought him dead in volume four, but it’s very clear that when Pearl was saying “they killed him” she was talking in the eventual rather than the immediate. He spends most of this volume comatose, and it isn’t until his truly amazing death that he really brings everything together. He’s had a hell of a life, witness to two world wars and an incredible marriage, but it had to end, and he was more aware of it then anyone. Pearl tried to turn him in desperation at the end of the volume, but it didn’t work. I almost wonder though if in his last moments he chose to die like that, in a way that made his turning impossible. It feels a little cruel, but it’s also an enormously beautiful thing, to willingly accept death as a human rather than an undead life.

Which leads me into Pearl again: I want to talk a little bit about Albuquerque’s shift in style for this volume. The designs are more sketchy, less elastic and obvious in its outline then what we got in Volumes 1 and 2. Albuquerque also draws the faces differently, directly responding to emotional state rather than the situation at hand. Skinner is perpetually scowling, like he has a unibrow, and Pearl, poor Pearl, looks like she’s about to burst into tears in every panel.

All that being said, what do you think of the mode and style Snyder and company are using in this arc, Wallflower, and how does it affect the plot for you?

 

 

wallflower:  The style here made the plot.  “Operatic” is the right word, with Alberquerque using both drawing and the inherent unrealism of comics to go for something intensely affecting; if this were a film, we’d call it Expressionism.  It’s a style implied by that last panel of volume 4 with Pearl crumpled in grief, and Snyder and Alberquerque take that image as the starting point and keep going past it.

 

They deploy a lot of closeups on Pearl here, and even when they don’t, Pearl’s face dominates the panel.  She does look like she’s about to cry or scream or fuck shit up in every panel.  Something less active than a plot goes through this story:  Pearl’s journey to accept Henry’s death.  He has already accepted his own mortality, but she hasn’t, and one of the best images on that journey shows Pearl at Henry’s side saying “He might.”  (Alberquerque shades her eyes with just a little yellow here.)  Henry (in fact Cal, Skinner, and VMS Agent Bixby too) get drawn with more stable lines; they’re the same person from panel to panel.  Pearl is not.

 

Such a good visual representation of Skinner here, too.  It’s not just the perpetual scowl, although that’s definitely part of it; it’s the suit, the haircut, and the clean lines.  More than anything else, he reminded me of the utterly hilarious shot of Fox Mulder in the “Humbug” episode of The X-Files (aka the One with the Freak Show), one boot up, and someone saying “I’ve seen the future and it looks. . .it looks like him!”  Skinner hasn’t just been tamed (the VMS have implanted a device in him that releases gold dust into his bloodstream on command; it’s a bit like what the Initiative in Buffy does to Spike), he’s been turned into an employee.  The two styles come together when Pearl and Skinner fuck, a moment that has definitely been on its way since volume 1.

 

What did you think of that?  It felt necessary to me (it’s necessary in all vampire stories) and what was most interesting was that it didn’t come across as a betrayal of Henry.  When Skinner comes back to the VMS and Hattie tries to turn Henry, it’s Skinner who objects, and he doesn’t even try to let Henry know what happened.  The Pearl/Skinner hookup didn’t come across as betrayal or self-loathing for Pearl; it was a necessary part of letting go of Henry, of acknowledging that she is truly not human.

 

Avathoir:  Despite the fact that all vampire stories are fundamentally based on sex (or, in the case of the Republican party, IMMIGRATION!) it’s very surprising that there’s not that much actual coitus in vamp stories. Oh sure there’s the IMPLICATIONS (saxophone music that is very, very dirty) but it’s usually offscreen, if it happens at all. Combined with the fact that we actually see the deed being done when it comes to Skinner and Pearl, it seems like should read as a shock, a betrayal of everything Pearl has wanted, of Henry, of her entire life since her undeath.

Yet…it doesn’t.

One of the reasons I think you made very clear is that there is no emotional core to the sex. To be even more pretentious, I will quote T.S. Eliot to illustrate my point:
Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

-”The Hollow Men”

Pearl and Henry say nothing during the act. There is no aspect of pleasure, not even lust. They have no words because they would mean nothing, neither exaltations or sweet nothings. This is possibly the most meaningless sex ever committed to page, in some aspects. Pearl and Skinner kiss, and are intimate, but it’s more a practice, a routine almost like a dance rather than anything that resembles intimacy. Notice also that the sex comes after a particularly violent battle, which leaves Pearl injured. She asks for Skinner to “take her” but (and this is very important), there is no aspect of those two words that illustrates desire, lust, or romance. This is, in fact, need. There’s the idea of the eros- thanatos dynamic at play in a lot of fiction, and Pearl illustrates it brilliantly here. Take means to take her life. She isn’t having sex with Skinner because she’s hot for him or she’s sad or she needs comforting. She is having sex with Skinner because sex is the closest she can come without murder or suicide to dying.

 

This provides a good change of subject: dying. Let’s talk about it. We’ve already talked about how Henry has accepted his death with grace and that Pearl isn’t taking it well, but let’s talk about Skinner and Hattie’s reactions to Death. Skinner is a curious case: he has come close to dying several times, and he’s never in direct danger in this arc, despite the bomb in his chest (which he later takes out. Who helped him, by the way? I’ll let you guess). Yet curiously, this is the time where he’s the most interested in a larger thing than the moment. He’s the one who saves Henry from a fate worse than death until Pearl gets there, and like you said, he has no intention of saying a single word about his liaison with Pearl to Henry. It’s strange, but it almost feels like Skinner’s become more human over the series, rather than less, and that comes with all that entails.

Now, Hattie we haven’t seen in awhile. We last saw her in volume two, and I want to ask what you think of her reappearance in general, alongside her attempts to control her fate. Was the coven thing perhaps too strange? Was there too much erotic tension between her and Pearl? Not ENOUGH erotic tension? What about her arc stuck out for you?

wallflower:  Skinner here comes off as something other than the Trickster figure he’s always been.  I don’t want to say he’s grown up, because it’s not a matter of immaturity.  It’s that there’s some sense of tragedy hanging over him, like for the first time there’s a sense of what has been lost.  It doesn’t feel like it comes from having been tamed and implanted (since the obvious call as to who removed it would be Pearl, I’m gonna guess that it was Cal), but rather from simply having been around people for too long.  That’s appropriate for this moment in the story, all about finally declaring the difference between vamp and human.  It even plays into an unfortunately cliched moment where Skinner sends Pearl away, the kind of we-just-fucked-now-go-away moment that I’ve seen just too many times.  It’s in character, it’s just not that compelling.  (You know me, though; that something is cliche doesn’t make it wrong.)

 

As for Hattie, I’d say she’s just strange enough, and the Joker-like facial scars are a nice touch.  Love that Snyder takes an idea from Interview with the Vampire (the ageless vamp watching movies) and runs much farther with it; the Giant Mutant Spider Woman (perhaps from the 1953 film Mesa of Lost Women?) has the kind of power that 1950s science fiction has, silly and full of subconscious strangeness because of that silliness.  (You might not be scared by it but you won’t forget it.)  Particularly in its view of films, American Vampire has always been about the intersection of mythical Americas; having drawn on the Untamed Youth movies for Travis, of course we would get a character inspired by horror.  That it’s a character, like Pearl, who first started as an actress in the 1920s just makes that more necessary.

 

Coming back to dying, and to the artwork:  this is Rafael Albuqeurque’s volume like no other.  In addition to the wildly expressive Pearl (and Hattie for that matter), there’s a great control of color tones, shifting into desaturated greens and blues for some of the Pearl/Henry scenes.  One passage, with the two of them looking through photographs and going backwards in time, is almost unbearably poignant; this page lets us know that Henry will not get out of this alive.  (Snyder contributes a wonderful story touch too, with Cal and Pearl reminiscing how Henry’s a great guitarist but can’t sing worth a damn.  His wake has already begun.)  Whether or not it’s flashing before his eyes, Henry’s life flashes before our eyes.  The artwork, the story, even the structure of the overall saga communicate the power the finite lives of humans:  Pearl will go on to other volumes, but Henry will not.  And that is how it should be.

 

Avathoir: I think one of the things that has really shown Snyder’s achievement with the series is how we all didn’t think Henry was going to die even though it was obvious from the first volume. If Henry hadn’t been vamped then, then he wouldn’t have been any time soon. He could have been saved, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even saved, now that I think of it, instead Albuquerque let’s us see that he had a life well lived. In some ways, this first arc was his story, of a damaged young man who met another damaged young woman and how they made a life together, despite immense obstacles and the fact that they know the story will end. They had almost 40 years together. That’s pretty good. Rest in Peace Henry. God knows you’ve earned it, god knows the rest of us aren’t finished yet.

This is the end of the first Cycle of American Vampire. There will be at least two more after this, so I want to, before we break and have Installment 10, ask you where you think the story will go from here. Pearl no longer has Henry, Skinner is free, Calvin is still with the VMS, and Felicia has taken over from Hobbes. Everything has changed. You said before that we weren’t headed for a happy ending, and we didn’t. The question now is…how do we move forward?

 

wallflower: Ha!  My history about “what I think will happen” in these Conversations has suuuuuuuuuucked, so I’ll just stick with what I’d like to see happen.  I’d like to see more engagement with the fringes of history, especially as America moves into the 1960s and 70s.  Cal, in particular, better see some action, especially if he can fuck up some white supremacist shit.  If Pearl hangs around Hollywood, I’d be curious to see her get involved with events there–one wonders if she’ll run into Charles Manson.

 

That’s about setting and symbol though, not character.  What Snyder has demonstrated so well is that although Skinner, Pearl, and Cal have character journeys, they shouldn’t have character arcs, because vampires don’t have a fixed end.  That’s what makes them vampires.  So what I hope to see is more alliances/conflicts/drama with the immortals, our vampires, the families, and the VMS.  I’m less interested in seeing this head towards some kind of apocalyptic showdown than before and more interested in seeing how things keep changing.  History doesn’t have an end either.

 

That’s all for this installment of the American Vampire conversation. Tune in next time as we discuss Travis Kidd’s return, other writers exploration into the American Vampire mythos, and the mystery of the Gray Trader in Installment 10: Coda