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"Blade: Trinity" (http://www.bladetrinity.com/)
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0359013/)
Directed by David S. Goyer
New Line Cinema
R / UK:15
2004
Reviewed by a contributor January 5, 2005
"Blade: Trinity" is the third movie in the "Blade" series, based on Marvel comic books. In "Blade: Trinity," we find out that vampire hunter Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) has been working with other humyn vampire hunters in the united $tates for an unknown amount of time. These other vampire hunters are organized into geographically dispersed groups: "sleeper" cells. One of the Nightstalkers, Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds), is a former vampire. Hannibal's group rescues Blade (Wesley Snipes) after vampires capture Blade with the help of Familiars, who are capo-like, humyn lackeys of the vampires. Police chief and Familiar Martin Vreede reveals that the vampires have been operating a blood farming facility in each "major city" in the united $tates. The vampires keep comatose humyns in tightly sealed bags and suspend their bodies vertically in midair; they 'drip' blood. The vampires target homeless humyns of seemingly diverse nationalities.
In their review of "Blade" (1998) , MC5 states that the militarily tactically superior vampire hunters have isolated themselves from the masses.(1) In fact, in "Blade: Trinity," the tactically superior vampire hunters still have isolated themselves from the masses; there are just more of them. Now, there are vampire hunters called "Nightstalkers," the most prominent of whom are Euro-Amerikan in "Blade: Trinity." Blade is depicted as needing the Nightstalkers, but not as needing the masses.
Blade reluctantly works with the Nightstalkers and is still reluctant to do so even near the end of the movie, treating the Nightstalkers as annoyances and unnecessary baggage. "Blade: Trinity," is correct to portray heroes as having limitations, but does not do enough to oppose the notion of the lonely revolutionary hero. At the end of the day, the trinity of Blade, and two Nightstalkers, Hannibal and Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel), are three superheroes, and we are no further away from the previous two "Blade" movies' orientation toward the masses. Interestingly, a blind scientist (Natasha Lyonne) is a member of the Nightstalkers, which suggests that disabled persyns are able to participate in real-world struggle, but the movie doesn't show any lumpen-proletarian as being part of the Nightstalkers. Yet, the vampires target lumpen-proletarians for their blood farms disproportionately and mainly.
There is a difference between the masses, and the population or even the majority of the population.(2) In the real world, the majority of Euro-Amerikans are not among the masses. With the "Blade" movies, the temptation is to say that the majority of Euro-Amerikans are among the masses since the vampires oppress them, too. But this depends on whether they really are in not only a stupor, but a self-defeating stupor. Certainly, in the "Blade" world, it seems that most Euro-Amerikans do not even believe that vampires exist. But do they have any reason to believe in them, is the question. Interestingly, "Blade: Trinity" depicts homeless persyns (whom nobody would miss, Chief Vreede explains) as suffering the brunt of the vampires' systematic blood-harvesting efforts. In this context, the intensely targeted homeless persyns, including some white homeless persyns, have more reason to believe in vampires than the majority of white people. For them, it is a matter of survival. For others not sleeping rough on the streets, it is more a matter of seeing stories about strange disappearances and serial killings on the news, on their TV sets, and dealing with feelings of unease.
To the extent that the movie actually has a concept of the masses, "Blade: Trinity" is confused about whom the masses in the "Blade" world consist of. "Blade: Trinity" depicts the Familiars as willingly using homeless persyns as lightning rods for the vampires' thirst for blood. For example, the technician at the warehouse blood farm is a humyn who hesitates to shut down the blood production units after intimidating Blade instructs them to. This accurately reflects the orientation of real-world bourgeois workers, who (however irrationally) fear being re-proletarianized, toward exploited workers, but the movie implies that Blade is doing the whole humyn population a service by fighting the vampires. Supposedly, Blade kills humyn police officers, those who aren't Familiars, for their own good. This probably reflects a lack of understanding by the movie makers that the majority of Euro-Amerikans aren't among the masses in the real world. A lot of "Blade: Trinity" is fantasy, but the movie can't be considered in isolation from the real world.
In a less supernatural version of "Blade: Trinity" made in a socialist people's republic, vampires, Familiars and blood "donors" would be the same species: humyn. Instead of being non-humyn nationalities, the vampires are fascists with cybernetic implants (they had to invent their superiority). They are composed of capitalists and bourgeois workers, and attack lumpen-proletarians and undocumented workers. Blade doesn't need any serum in the literal sense; what the original "Blade: Trinity" calls "serum," the new version of the movie calls doses of "correct ideas." Among other things, these changes to the original "Blade: Trinity" would reflect the reality that the majority of the u.$. population is neither exploited, nor being oppressed by a nation inside or outside u.$. borders.
One of the better redeeming elements of "Blade: Trinity," keeping it the way it is, is that the movie goes out of its way to ponder Blade's future, and this future seems to lie near the revolutionary struggle. The Nightstalkers themselves don't think Blade is the kind of persyn who will go back to their desk or office job and be a well-behaved citizen after the war with the vampires is over. Blade defeated the Reapers in "Blade II" (2002). Movie viewers know Blade will probably defeat the vampires at the end of "Blade: Trinity." So, what conflicts will Blade focus on next, with the vampire nation's oppression overthrown? Blade himself tells Sommerfield's daughter, Zoe (Haili Page), that the world isn't "nice." (Although, this is in response to a question about why Blade needs to take his serum, which suppresses his thirst for blood.) At the beginning of the movie, a Familiar tricks Blade into killing him, setting him up for pig repression. Abraham encourages Blade to be more careful. Blade replies that he didn't know this was a "popularity contest."
The point about revolution not being a popularity contest is interesting from the viewpoint of MIM's anti-Menshevik line. Unfortunately, Blade's comment has the context of endless violence, which is extremely repetitive in "Blade: Trinity" to the point of monotony. True, the vampires are killing people. But in the real world, so is imperialism, and at this point, MIM advocates only protracted legal struggle in the united $tates with the exception of some First Nations' struggles. Blade could get a camera and film vampires (even if invisible to the camera) preying on humyns, and distribute that undeniably bizarre and shocking video in order to change public opinion, but he doesn't. The real world is not as simple as the "Blade" world--for one, more is involved in creating public opinion than simply showing photos of imperialism's dead and dying victims--but the "Blade" world is that simple, and Blade's actions still do not make sense.
To its credit, "Blade: Trinity" seems to recognize that its own violent imagery and content are unnecessary. Hannibal remarks that Blade might want to get therapy after Blade, without blinking, lets a Familiar fall from a building rooftop onto the street. However, not only does Hannibal pay too much attention to a particular instance of Blade's violent strategy, rather than Blade's strategy itself, he confuses a political mistake with mental illness and supports the therapeutic culture .
"Blade: Trinity" is purposefully over the top in its violence, even for a movie based on comics, and pokes fun at itself. There is a lot of phallic imagery--for example, Blade's standing erect, the camera focusing on his crotch, after he takes his serum at the police station--and there is the whole deliberately Freudian vagina dentata thing between Hannibal and the vampire womyn Danica Talos (Parker Posey). Another Nightstalker scientist (Patton Oswalt) calls Abigail a "hottie," which is the movie commenting on its own sex appeal.
Some reviewers will say that the violence in "Blade: Trinity" is gratuitous or exists for its own titillation, especially when a strong, but expectedly sexy, "hottie" metes out much of the violence. "Blade: Trinity" is obviously a popcorn movie. The interesting question is, what are the ideological effects of the gratuitous action violence.
On the one hand, the violence is related to the theme that full vampires are automatically deserving of lethal violence, while half-vampires and former vampires are not. Importantly, former vampire Hannibal has to be at least part-humyn to be part of the Nightstalkers. "Blade: Trinity" has almost no concept of class or nation traitor. When the war is with the vampires, it is impossible to work with any full vampire--full in a literally genetic sense.
At one point, Blade, in a moment of bravado, tells Drake (Dominic Purcell) that he was "born ready" to die, which may be a reference to Blade's desire for revenge against the vampires who bit and killed Blade's mother, and caused Blade to be born as a humyn-vampire hybrid. What would otherwise be just a metaphysical idea about how one hybrid had always had an inclination to be revolutionary is put in the service of an exaggerated bloodline theory.(3) The idea in "Blade: Trinity" is that being humyn, without any qualification other than non-Familiar, is the best; being a vampire is just plain evil. The sentiment is that humyn-vampire hybrids are naturally undesirable. In part, Blade's part-vampire ancestry motivates him to oppose the vampires. Roughly, this is like a biracial, part-"Caucasian" persyn wanting the deaths of all light-skinned people as revenge for having to suffer social exclusion as a biracial persyn. Of course, there are good reasons to view Euro-Amerikans as predators, but these do not translate into a bloodline theory, which both the movie and Blade seem to uphold.
On the other hand, the movie effectively uses violence in a way that suggests that Blade is a revolutionary. This reviewer would agree that Blade is a revolutionary within the fantasy "Blade" movie world and all its incredible constraints, including even homeless persyns' being unable to testify to the existence of vampires and being unable to work with the Nightstalkers, but "Blade: Trinity" tends to make the mistake of equating armed action with being a revolutionary. When dazed and asked by the police to name the President, Blade replies, an "asshole"--most Demokrats will laugh, and most Republikans will feel insulted, which makes Blade at least a likely Demokrat so far. (Hannibal says that Drake woke up in Iraq six months ago, "pissed.") Would the Nightstalkers still consider Blade to be discontented with more than the vampires--maybe even the whole imperialist system--if he weren't so violent? This isn't clear. It's as if Blade's discontent were defined by his violence since the movie doesn't get into any other aspect of Blade's strategy. Without his violence, he could be just a Demokrat or an "independent." "Blade: Trinity" doesn't get into what Blade is thinking other than to reveal his disgust with the warehouse blood farm, for example. Although the Nightstalkers briefly discuss Blade's future, it doesn't show what Blade plans to do after he defeats the vampires. "Blade: Trinity" may be the last movie of the "Blade" series, so the lack of sustained interest in Blade's post-vampire future is unsurprising. However, "Blade: Trinity" could have elaborated on what Blade was thinking when he reacted viscerally to the sight of the homeless persyns at the blood farming facility. In the first "Blade" movie (1998), Abraham Whistler reveals that the early Blade, his thirst for blood uncontrolled, fed off of homeless persyns.
Finally, not only does "Blade: Trinity" conflate class origin and class position, it does so in a way that supports genocide as an option for progressives. The vampires have no "final solution" for the humyns by the Nightstalkers' own admission, but the Nightstalkers themselves have a genocidal plan for the vampires: a deadly virus that is specific to vampires biologically. ( Interestingly, Sommerfield mentions the possibility that "hybrid" humyn-vampire Blade could be wiped out along with the rest of the vampires. But Sommerfield's biological weapon is supposedly 100% effective, killing 100% of vampires, 0% of humyns.) What is disturbing is that "Blade: Trinity" makes ideas of "race"-specific viruses sound already scientific and then proposes that such viruses be used against unquestionably evil enemies--and without distinguishing between enemies of the u.$. white nation, and enemies of oppressed nations inside and outside the united $nakes. However, genocide has typically been a tactic of imperialists and other capitalists facing their own doom.
"Blade: Trinity" is a marginal improvement over the previous "Blade" movies in introducing more vampire hunters and pondering Blade's post-vampire political future, but these Nightstalkers are mainly confined to bourgeois Euro-Amerikans, who are supposedly indispensable and work with Blade as equals despite Blade's petty objections. Identity and line are two separate issues for MIM, but the only Nightstalker whose history is discussed is Abigail, Abraham's daughter; how we got to the point where there are mainly Euro-Amerikan oppressors in the Nightstalkers, but no lumpen-proletarians, is not important to "Blade: Trinity." There is nothing wrong with the depiction of Euro-Amerikans as being revolutionaries by itself, but Blade and the Nightstalkers do nothing to work with those whom the vampires oppress the most, in the struggle against the vampires. At the same time, while portraying Euro-Amerikans as lone heroes and saviors of the masses, "Blade: Trinity" does almost nothing to oppose the theory that equates class position with class origin, which allows it to suggest genocide as a way to defeat supposedly inherently evil enemies. For that matter, the idea that the vampiric thirst for blood can be turned on and off with some kind of switch has no correspondence with any kind of oppression in the real world. For the sake of having an alternative, we can refer to the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" character Angel, who is friendly to that show's vampire hunters, but still drinks blood of some kind.
Notes
1. MC5, "Gory thriller needs Maoist interpretation," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/movies/review.php?f=long/blade.txt
2. MC5, "Again on the subject of the 'masses' in the imperialist countries" (April 19, 2001); http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/onmasses01.html
3. "Resolutions on Cross-Cultural Breeding," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/cong/crosscultural2004.html