...Where vampires dwell.
"Everything" says Eleanor, the teen daughter of Clara and the narrator of Neil Jordan's fascinating film, Byzantium, "is cold outside of time".
There is enormous maternal warmth though, not outside time per se, but within the mother's heart. The film charts the ends to which Clara, the human-turned vampire would go to protect her daughter from harm.
As a "warm" woman and mother, Clara is a misfit in the "cold" zone of atemporality. But neither mother nor daughter travels into this zone out of free choice.
The women are victims of circumstances that through centuries have befallen women who are shown to be a persecuted minority in a world dominated by men.
Vampirism is a refuge from a predatorial society for mother and daughter. At least being out of time grants them biological transcendence, for biology is the woman's worst enemy in a world where they are primarily food for the male sexual appetite.
Clara and Eleanor are immortal, as is customary of vampires; they are seemingly young but really are 200+ years old. Clara was but a mere wisp of a poor English girl, an orphan, making a living by selling shells and sea cockles during the Napoleonic wars. A brutish captain of the English army covets Clara and sells her into prostitution. He then goes on to repeatedly brutalize her till Clara gives birth to Eleanor and also falls ill with tuberculosis.
Despite a life of inhuman suffering, Clara loves her child and gives her up to an orphanage to protect Eleanor from getting similarly brutalized by nasty men.
In the meantime, however, Clara gets hold of a map that leads to an island where, inside a cave there resides the power of the "faceless" disembodied saint who converts humans into vampires if they are willing to "die". The "death" is a figurative one, a code for immortality and perpetual youth. The map was meant for the captain who had brutalized her because the vampiric legion is an all-male legion open to only men of high-birth.
By stealing the map from the captain and shooting him in the leg, Clara, by virtue of her "low" birth, her gender and her profession, becomes the quintessential interloper into the brotherhood. She goes to the cave and transforms into a vampire, illness-free, immortal and stuck at the ripe young age of 25ish for eternity.
To wreak vengeance on Clara, the brutal captain rapes Eleanor and infects her with a venereal disease. Clara is flabbergasted by this event; she kills the man and to save her daughter from certain death takes her to the cave.
Eleanor is thus converted to a vampire as well.
The film begins in the present, when mother and child are shown to be fugitives, always on the run, hunted for eternity by the brotherhood.
With its perceptive gender inflections, Byzantium is a wholly refreshing take on the vampire genre. The teen-pandering Twilight series has all but diluted the woman's place in the universe of vampires, by making them subservient to males. Even Bram Stoker's Dracula, which had a powerful male at the center of the action, reduced women to vessels for the master's life-bequeathing sperms.
Byzantium has a saucy, sexy, powerful woman, who is confident in her own sexuality, as the ur vampire. From her originates the actions.
In Byzantium, the vampiric demesne is shown to be filled with the same kinds of social biases that afflict the human world. Power is what the members of the brotherhood lust after, not women, but as in human societies through ages, the pursuit of power is peculiarly gendered: Men seek it, men exclude women from it and ultimately men overpower women with it. The disdain which the leader of the brotherhood for Clara doesn't diminish an iota for 200 hundred odd years. This kind of unabated contempt is eye-opening to say the least. As a prostitute, Clara was an outcast in human society; she is also an outcast within the brotherhood. There is no winning (of respect and equality) for the female sex.
One would think that the vampiric domain, being a domain that goes against the grain of everything temporal, would be a domain free of human bigotries. But the brotherhood has a poor opinion of women like Clara and believes that she is undeserving of the noble mantle of a vampire. The stench of male privilege emanates from this brotherhood. Here's an eye-popping instance of this stinky privilege: Between Clara and the Captain who is irredeemably immoral, the brotherhood chooses the Captain because he is a man of some birth and learning (as a result of his status). Clara, on the other hand, is a thoughtful, vivacious woman with a primal loyalty to her daughter. Yet, her gender is an automatic disqualifier.
It's at the very end that Clara expresses her pent-up (for over two centuries) outrage at the utter disrespect she gets from the brotherhood. She tells Savella, the brotherhood's leader, that she has, for 200 years resented the brotherhood's relegation of her to a position beneath the worst of the blood sucking, conscienceless vampires.
In his poem Sailing to Byzantium W.B. Yeats writes of a man's quest for eternal life; Byzantium is historically the site of timelessness as through time it has survived under various names such as Constantinople and Istanbul (and many prior and in-between) under the ebb and flow of global empires. Symbolically Byzantium is the elemental life that goes on ceaselessly despite the march of history.
Neil Jordan's Byzantium is an old, going-out-of-business hotel in a seaside resort just outside of London. The hotel becomes a metaphorical battlefield--of decisions and unfurling--for both Clara and Eleanor. The story reaches a crescendo and a crisis in this hotel; the owner of the hotel is a man whose mother has just died and left the failing business in his hands. He is a soft male who shows signs of having been ruled by a mother all his life and with the departure of his mother, he is at a loss of how to navigate life. Clara becomes the surrogate mother to this weak man; but the man is highly sympathetic to women and constantly reassures Eleanor that she is safe in his house.
The course of destiny within time has come full cycle in the hotel Byzantium; the hotel is momentarily a brothel, a space of female empowerment of a strange yet potent kind. Clara reigns in the hotel Byzantium till the moment when Eleanor betrays her and all hell breaks loose.
The film ends on a note of triumph for Clara; she defeats the orthodoxy of the brotherhood through guile and perseverance and saves her daughter's life for eternity.
The film ends on a note of triumph for Clara; she defeats the orthodoxy of the brotherhood through guile and perseverance and saves her daughter's life for eternity.
