Review of Dark Shadows (2012) by John L — 22 Apr 2013

Barnabas Coffins is an old-con veteran capitalistic bloodsucker which established himself during the English industrial revolution, compelled to be eternally profit-thirsty due to the curse inflicted on him by a gal with Eva Green's ugly face, representing the tormenting goad of capitalistic economy, capitalism itself, as well as the clashes among and inside the social classes.

Barnabas, in fact, being an exploiter, lives by the workers' blood, which he kills and drains as soon as he is enfranchised from the prison of the casket, and, being a conservative, dehydrates of their plasm and hemoglobin the idiotic hippies dreaming of a different world, built on peace and on love (*).

Peace and love which, incarnated in the object of his most pure desire, Barnabas lost precisely because of the thirsty capitalism which haunts him and oppresses him. Eva Green is an unconscious and polyvalent symbol representing another two psycho-socio-economical issues: the subordinated classes rejected by the elitist welfare and wealth, seeking revenge, hence Barnaboh's bad conscience, and, in addition, sexual discrimination. Coughins's fight against Eva Green is an intra-bourgeois clash, but also the conservative ache for a time when women didn't take up a career - a homesickness for the totally male-dominated, patriarchal era.

Overall, we see the emerging of Burton's clear headed political awareness, which condemns and makes history condemn the very protagonist of the movie, as well as his false nemesis - in reality, as a matter of fact, akin to him. Sure enough "now I will show them what we really are" is what Birbaba transparently exclaims, preparing to reveal to the public his vampiresque attitude and the witchy nature of bitchy Eva Green.

And it's he himself which recognizes his own hypocrisy and cruelty, mentioning the workers' and countercultural slaughters that he commited, and analyzes how this is inevitably connected to his relationship with his lover and torturer. And he realizes that the only possible solution is the destruction of this relationship, and the creation of a new one - based on love - in order to transit from capitalism to communism as well as destroying the long, dark shadows which haunt the bourgeois family's abode and its sanguinary and cynical secrets - false conscience's festering fruits.

A ghost wanders about the world, terrorizing the capitalistic horror.

A ghost of Tim Burton.

By Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, taken from Das Kapital Cinereview (may 2012 issue).

(*) and he also sinks the too much sneaking underlings - which would like to worm out the blood that he steals (the profit) - see Helena Bona Carter.