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(UPDATED: Friday, November 19, 2010 21:59 )
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THE CHRISTIAN RECLAMATION OF RATIONALIST MYTH IN 3 SCREEN VERSIONS OF RICHARD MATHESON'S NOVEL "I AM LEGEND"
Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I am Legend is a classic of vampire literature second only to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was here that the vampire myth was examined through a scientific rationalist perspective for the first time.
I am Legend postulated a near future in which humankind was ravaged by a bacteriological pandemic resulting in vampire-like behaviour. No superstition – just science. Indeed, the novel’s protagonist Robert Neville – the lone man to survive the plague unaffected – in the course of his research finds a psychological reason for the vampiric plague victims’ fear of crucifixes, also discovering that a Jewish “vampire” reacts in a similar way to the Torah. At a certain level it’s humorous: a decade later Roman Polanski would release into cinemas the eccentric parody The Fearless Vampire Killers and a decade later still the “blaxploitation” cycle of Afro-American exploitation would spawn the likes of Blacula exploring similar cultural appropriations of the vampire. But the irony in applying scientific rationalism to horror myth for Matheson was much more profound than playfully debunking superstition.
The ending of Matheson’s novel is a bold conceptual achievement. Neville lives alone in a house besieged by nocturnal “vampires” who he stalks in the day, intending to exterminate them all if he can find their “nest”. Neville finds a woman who has the virus but is resistant to it, indeed living in a community of such-like who fear Neville as a mad killer hunting them down in the daylight. Neville realizes that in his former reality the vampire is the myth but in his current predicament, alone in a world of vampires who have mythologized him as a monster, he is a legend. Matheson’s ambiguous relativism transformed the vampire genre from dark sexual fantasy into a discursive rationalist, even existentialist nightmare – Neville was a man of reason. Although in the novel Neville was a factory worker who reads about science to try and find a cure for the plague, Neville in all three film versions of Matheson’s novel – The Last Man on Earth (1966), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007) – is a scientist who alone can “save” humanity from the bacteriological pandemic.
Ironically though, Neville as a scientific rationalist must also be held accountable for what the films’ nightmare premises successively postulate as resulting from the failure of said rationalism.
To which: the three films successively weave messianic interpretations of the premise into their narratives so as to introduce the theme of redemption. The dialectic between rationalism and redemption-ism underlies each film to vastly differing intents. Such redemption in The Last Man on Earth is, for instance, a repugnant illusion worthy of mocking blasphemy. In The Omega Man it’s a self-conscious narcissistic religious allegory drenched in wretched irony. Yet in I Am Legend it’s the impetus for the film’s narrative structure. What is a rationalist interpretation of a horror myth is by I am Legend transformed into a religious, specifically Christian, reclamation of what the first film ridiculed and the second film allegorized. I am Legend imposes Christian faith onto the source material, saturating it to the point of propaganda. Perhaps that’s not surprising: I am Legend star Will Smith remarked that he responded to the role as a version of the Biblical book of Job (Moreman 2008) – amusingly enough the same Bible story that Robert DeNiro’s psychotic ex-con in director Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear used to justify the most horrific sexual violence.
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