Vampire Glamour

[drakkar]

.. and this time it's going to be two 17-years old girls, which of one is a singer with an worshipping audience..... You have it lined up.

[lombano]

If you want to be friends with something that looks at you as if you were a Hostess Twinkie, and you don't know how long it's been since her last Suzy Q, you go right ahead. I think I'll admire her through a telescope.

I couldn't agree more, vampires, including cute litle Eli, are dangerous to pretty much everyone.

Yes, some people have been known to lose their heads over Eli...

In the 'real world' there's a lesser version of this that everyone knows, we call it charisma and because of it even unpleasant people who've made some dubious choices are still perceived as being popular among the general public. Why is this? It's not just good looks or talent or is it?

I think it's above all an ability to tell the crowd what it wants to hear, to show it what it wants to see, with enough skill to make it believe it's for real.

[DMt.]

Possession by the Sun demon Sorat [aka Sorath], the 'Anti-Christ', is useful to a negative demagogue too. In a few of those films of his speeches, you can see Schicklgruber take the stage, a silly, boring, rather shy little man, then watch as he is fairly quickly taken over by the demon and becomes a raving focus of collective hatred and violence.

[TΛPETRVE]

Hitler - or Schicklgruber, if you prefer to call him by his birth name - wasn't a demon's vessel, but a simple, pathetic allotment gardener. An allotment gardener who called his garden Germany and wanted to grow his vegetable straight and keep everything away he deemed vermin or weeds. Imagine an petit bourgeois John Doe with his narrow-minded ideas of law and order, of fortune and pride. Give such a man power. He will continue to be the petit bourgeois he is, only the dimensions of his premises will increase to the size of a nation.

And this was his "glamour". The mere fact that behind all these chesty ranting, there was a man who, at least in the beginning, seemed so down-to-earth and familiar to his people. They could relate to him and that's what deceived them, because eventually they followed him blindly even when his face changed into that of an obsessed, desperate Leonidas. A man, whose garden was trampled and overfertilized and whose only left ambitions were to somehow score off the invidious neighbours, whose gardens he wanted to trump. A personal war fought on national battlefields.

[drakkar]

Der Untergang gave me a glimpse of this dynamics, just like LdRKI showed me the vampire.

[TΛPETRVE]

While "Der Untergang" has severe flaws as a historical film (which it also shouldn't be seen as), it definitely serves as a very good example of how power does corrupt the mentally weak.

[drakkar]

...it definitely serves as a very good example of how power does corrupt the mentally weak.

Exactly, it is a snapshot of a - condition.

[TΛPETRVE]

Being a cynic, I might even go as far as to say "Power doesn't really change a man's character, it merely increases the scale on which he acts out his flaws".

This imho does as well apply to vampires to a certain extend.

[drakkar]

, it's a lot of flaws being displayed in LdRKI.

[gattoparde59]

Hitler in his prime was so persuasive because he really believed in what he was saying. According to Joachim Fest, Hitler was especially good at conveying his own fears. He really believed that the Jews were like a race of vampires, complete with metaphors of blood-sucking and infection. They looked human, but they were really monsters out to take over the world. Hitler really believed that. I have read elsewhere that the original Nosfertu was understood to be a Semitic figure by German audiences, although certainly not a very glamourous vampire in appearance.