Vampires

It appears that every day Stephenie Meyer’s vegetarian vampires (“Twilight”, “New Moon” and “Eclipse”, among other books) shape pale sheltered adolescents who hide behind residential walls. What else could have generated this culture of globalized comfort? Cloisters for boys who compulsively update Twitter, while digging through photos of their friends on Facebook — which exists thanks to the cell phone — after the party that they couldn’t go to because their parents thought that being surrounded by boys of the same age was too dangerous.

Here is where the gothic figures, designed by Meyer in her bestsellers, fit perfectly with them: dark, misunderstood and codependent. Always looking for destructive relationships in order to obtain a little of humanity in their lives. Always sitting in the back seat of the family car, wishing for nothing more than to belong in this world of strange diets, depressing music and uneven hair. Casual readers of stories that display the world as less naïve and more damned than a Disney movie. Loneliness full of easy keys to maneuver through the omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent public.

Something should also happen to the parents, who are bogged down in the world of providing for their children and don’t realize that a larger danger exists for their children: loosing the necessary contact with reality. From this distance, I understand very well the success of this type of publication: It speaks to a generation that sees its self as completely distanced from the problems of the world, perhaps because they believe that they have already exhausted all the possible solutions or because, in this grand womb of consumption, the only way to be happy is to stop absorbing through a system infected with promises. But the confinement ends as the light of day comes. Then, like in the vampire novels, everything turns to ash.