Daybreakers

Daybreakers had a lot of interesting cultural commentary, and I wanted to point out a few things that I thought hung together.

1. The subsiders are clearly meant to represent the dehumanizing effects of poverty: the result of becoming too poor to afford the primary vampire commodity is an unavoidable degeneration into an ugly, violent monster. A few interesting scenes, recurring images:

a. A number of scenes ended with the camera panning downwards to show subsider-on-subsider violence in the sewers beneath the city.

b. There were a couple scenes which humanized the subsiders. In the scene showing the execution of subsider Alison Bromley, she clearly recognizes Frankie and attempts to communicate with him, showing that she has maintained her identity and concepts of her relationships with others. Also, Dalton's neighbor turned subsider wears his wedding ring, with its sentimental / romantic inscription, to the bitter end. A nice addition here would have been for his subsider wife to burst hysterically onto the scene following the fight.

c. A number of vampire characters refer to the subsiders as animals without referring to the processes that produced their state, notably the cop responding to Dalton's subsider home invasion and the vampire mom shown in a newscast near the end of the movie. This is reminiscent of the attitudes of the upper classes in industrial revolution era England, which often held that the poorer classes were intrinsically small / ugly / dumb and ignored the possibility that this was a product of their material deprivation.

2. The characters all clearly view the vampire society as exploitative, and show a variety of different attitudes to this fact.

a. On one end of the spectrum is Bromley. Bromley clearly is happy to profit from the system: "It's not about a cure, its about repeat business." He also seems to viscerally enjoy it, which is clear in the scene where he describes his appreciation for the flavor of fear in blood. Dalton's lab coworker, who is prepared to kill his friend to suppress a cure for vampirism, is another example. The blood substitute, a focus of the plot, is a means to continue exploitation in the eyes of these characters.

b. Dalton is the other end; he is squeamish about being a vampire and is uncomfortable about the way humans are exploited. Dalton views his efforts to find a substitute as a way to end this exploitation, and is repeatedly frustrated by Bromley's refusals to guarantee that a substitute will be used towards this end.

c. Frankie Dalton is an interesting middle ground. Late in the movie, he tells his brother that he turned him to vampirism out of fear for his safety and dependence on their fraternal relationship.

2. Just a few more things:

a. Dalton works for a company called (or at least pronounced) Bromley-Marx!

b. As vampire society is going to hell, there is a shot of vampires on a deserted subway wearing lots of clothes in order to conceal the early signs of subsider mutation.

c. Dalton's hair looks way better after he is cured of vampirism.