In response to DC’s feat of cinematic anti-semitism, Batman Returns, Marvel produced and released its own entry in that category with 1998’s Blade. The approaches that the two films take to the “jewish question” are characteristic of the differing storytelling styles of the two companies. Tim Burton’s film adds to an already thematic Batman film elements of Biblical imagery and economic arguments against the jewish race, in line with the more classical storytelling employed in DC’s cast of characters. In contrast, Blade aligns with the more science-fiction elements of Marvel comics, and as such portrays the jewish other primarily as a biological threat, although elements of morality and political corruption are present as well.
Plenty of ink has been spilled over Batman Returns in our circles (Editor’s Note: See this episode of The Final Storm), while discussion of Blade is less prominent. This is understandable. Burton’s filmmaking has its dark gothic beauty and a more timeless feel, whereas Blade is a loud, aggressively modern film with a black lead. Today, I will be taking you into this fine piece of cinematic anti-semitism and look at how once one overcomes their reflexive racism and unlocks their next stage, “postjudice,” Blade can be a quite enjoyable film to watch with your friends, eyes and teeth and all.
The film begins in a violent flash of black and red opening credits before shocking to the sterile white of a hospital room. No location is given, only a year: 1967. A black woman is on a stretcher, standing out in sharp contrast to her alabaster surroundings and the people tending to her. She dies giving birth to our eponymous hero, Blade (played by Wesley Snipes). This prologue is over quickly and we are brought forward with the time simply reading “Now”. A young man, shades of wiggerdom showing through in his dress and mannerisms, is speeding through the streets of a city, chauffeured by a similarly abrasive woman with a heavy accent. This man has turned his back on the higher ideals of life and is instead drawn to the lustful hedonism promised to him as a reward. Like many men, his judgment is clouded by the appeal of a pair of milkers, and the effect only becomes more pronounced when the duo (one dares not call them a couple) arrive at their destination: a repurposed meat-packing plant. Like an animal to the slaughter, the young man is ushered inside, through a freezer, past guards who toss him pitying, knowing glances, and into an orgy of writhing flesh, semi-nudity, and electronic music.
The rave scene, which shames any from The Matrix series, promises escape from his mundane worries, but something is wrong. The multiracial crowd grudgingly lets him in, but he is immediately marked as an outsider, shunned and shoved by those whom he tries to introduce himself to. At a signal from the DJ at the head of the gathering, a single word, “Bloodbath”, is projected on the screens around the scene. The young man is horrified to find blood erupting from the overhead network of sprinklers, screaming as the other partygoers raise their hands to the sky to accept this manna from Hell. Realizing that he is caught up in a literal blood ritual, the man tries to escape. He is beaten to the floor, and savagely kicked as the mask comes off and the true nature of his hosts is revealed to him. The violence visited upon him, the flying fists and feet are unnecessary, merely cathartic releases of hatred from the monsters who will kill him.
Before he can be ripped apart by the crowd of vampires, the young man’s crawling comes to a stop, as does the music, as he reaches the heavy black boots of Blade. The introduction is image-driven, a similar kind of cool to that of its contemporary, The Matrix. There is a similar sense of unreality, the embrace of the ridiculous for the sake of its effect. Not a single drop of blood from the now-petering out sprinklers have tarnished Blade, and no wry, ironic explanation for this is given. This lone, powerful implication of his superhuman status speaks louder than any mush-mouthed Reddit post.
In keeping with his natural predisposition, Snipes proceeds to steal the show. The vampires hiss and spit at him, but they are shrinking back, afraid to make the first move in the face of outright opposition. This even though they outnumber Blade hundreds to one. In keeping with the feminine character of their Talmudic inspiration, it is a woman who instigates the fight against Blade, launching herself at him with her fingers curled into hooks, the harpy behind the honeytrap revealed to all. She is cut down, as are many other vampires who dare to challenge Blade and his sword. Still, numbers begin to show so Blade beats a retreat into a literal shower room and proceeds to cut up more vampires and sets one on fire before finally making his frankly inexplicable escape as the vampires’ loyal VOGbots, the police officers and firemen, start to show up.
We are given a short breather which takes place in a hospital morgue. The film is alternating between painfully sterile and wantonly dirty environments without any in-between, well keeping with the theme of extreme contrasts. Here in this hospital, we are introduced to Karen, a black science lady, a hematologist in fact, and her oil-drilling ex-boyfriend, Curtis. While the young man Blade saved in the prior scene was at least aping some semblance of masculinity, Curtis is a proto-soy boy, soft in his mannerisms and feminine in his pathetic efforts to try and woo Karen back. As a further sign of Blade’s correct instincts, this degenerate is the first human to die onscreen, killed when the vampire-cum-burnt offering which he and Karen were examining suddenly comes back to life and rips Curtis’ throat out.
Even vampires hate race-mixing evidently.
Before the charred vampire can kill Karen, Blade arrives on the scene and cuts off his arm. Rather than tangling with Blade, the mutilated vampire throws himself out a window and Blade and his new gal pal are forced to a similar course of action when the police arrive again.
With nowhere else to go, Blade follows the superhero plot to a “T” and brings the civilian love interest to his headquarters. There they meet Kris Kristofferson’s character, Whistler, Blade’s mentor and father figure. Lest the gunsmithing, tough-as-nails, family man turned agent of revenge, Whistler appeal too much to White men, he is hobbled, fitted with leg braces which keep him at home while Blade goes out to fight the good fight against the vampiric conspiracy.
Whistler explains to Karen and the audience that Blade himself is half-vampire, and that he is able to stave off the thirst for human blood thanks to a cocktail serum containing garlic. They move from town to town fighting vampires, tracking their migrations, and having Blade steal from the vampires and familiars that he kills in order to fund their operation.
After waking up to the dangerous world that she had been unknowingly living in, Karen demands to be returned to her apartment. Blade warns her, “You’ve been exposed to them, one way or another somebody’s gonna take you out,” and darkly intimates that they own the police and that Karen has likely seen vampires before and not been aware of it since her vampdar is not as developed. But, despite these warnings, he lets her go, content only to provide her with some garlic-laced mace certain to give any undead Harvey Weinstein second thoughts.
While Blade and Whistler are explaining the nature of the vampires running the world to Karen, the bloodsuckers are having a meeting of their own. Here we see a dichotomy emerge among the vampires. They are not a monolithic group, but are in fact divided between two factions with competing visions of how they should act and their relationship with humans. The first faction are the so-called “pure bloods”, those who were born vampires rather than turned, or converted. They are coded in the same vein as mafioso, monsters who were suits and talk eloquently in order to grant a level of dignity to their horrific deeds.
Opposing them are the turned vampires, led by the charismatic Deacon Frost, played by Stephen Dorff with a frantic, heroin chic image in sharp contrast to the old man vampire of the comics. Frost and his followers have more in line with gangbangers and are criticized by the old guard for drawing needless attention with their night clubs, and for violating treaties with human politicians with their reckless brutality. While both sects of vampires believe in their innate superiority over humans, they are divided on whether or not to exercise discretion or to openly rule the humans, paralleling the debate one sees in jewish elite circles. While the elites, represented by a vampire council denounce Frost as “a disgrace to the vampire nation”, he counters that “these people are our food, not our allies.”
It is interesting to note that while the pureblood vampires superficially resemble Old World aristocrats fused with the American businessman and the Frost’s upstarts are violent gangsters, both are multiracial coalitions. In the sequel, the pureblooded vampires would be given stronger identification with Germans so as to remind the viewers who the real villains are, but in the first Blade film, the thick European accent of the leader of the pureblood vampires and the repeated references to them having controlling stakes in finances, politics, and real estate strongly reinforces the resemblance of vampires to real-world jewish conspirators.
Karen’s return to the real world does not go as smoothly as she would like. Now possessing new knowledge, she cannot help but notice signs that she is being watched, people following her into the elevator at her apartment building and getting off at the same floor as she does. There is an undercurrent of menace to the world around her now, and she is breathing hard when she closes and locks the door behind her. When the knock comes, it is not either of the two silent stalkers but a young policeman. He tries to talk to her about the incident at the hospital but soon slips up and tries to kill Karen. Her mace irritates him, but does not kill him, because he is not a vampire, merely one of their familiars, a human who wishes to be a vampire and follows one’s orders in hopes of being turned someday. Like other familiars, the officer is marked with a vampire cattle brand, indicating that he is property of Deacon Frost. This is not the first or the last time that humans will be compared to livestock.
Outside, Blade interrogates the cop, slamming his head onto the trunk of his police cruiser when he proves uncooperative and pulling a gun on him when he makes a break for it. As a commentary on the willful blindness and complacency of the general public, no one on the streets in broad daylight bats an eye at Blade roughing up a uniformed law enforcement agent and while there are some screams when he pulls out his gun, calm quickly returns to the scene and Blade faces no consequences for his actions. A similar incident of public apathy occurs later in the film, where Deacon Frost throws a child in front of a bus, whose driver does not even slow down while Blade rushes to get her out of harm’s way.
Following up on the policeman’s hints about Frost’s plans, Blade takes Karen along with him to a club of Japanese vampires complete with dancing girls in schoolgirl outfits. In addition to the katana he wields, this scene provides further evidence of Blade’s weeaboo status. While the Japanese vampires take note of Blade and his human charge, they do not attempt to attack him and let him descend into a secret basement accessible through the kitchen.
There they encounter a third embodiment of the jewish character, following the pureblood blood-sucking capitalists and Frost’s violent revolutionary: an overweight, flatulent pervert hiding behind a computer.
This is Pearl, who is working with Frost to decode the details of an ancient blood ritual that vampires can use to summon their vengeful death god. The ritual is sourced from the vampire’s own “Bible” and is written in an ancient tongue. Under interrogation from Blade and a UV light-wielding Karen, Pearl reveals that the ritual involves the heads of the twelve pureblood vampire families (calling to mind the twelve tribes of Israel). Between selling out his boss and pleading for mercy, Pearl is unable to keep from mouthing off to Blade, and is shown no mercy when Karen finally decides to fry him until there is nothing left but ashes. There is no sympathy for the grotesque creature from the filmmakers and the scene of his death lingers long enough on his screaming and burning flesh to be uncomfortable for some viewers.
After an action-packed fight in a subway with some of Frost’s goons, Blade and Karen retreat to Whistler and the hideout to plot their next move. Frost does the same, kidnapping the leader of the vampire opposition and taking him to see his first sunrise. Another scene of torture follows as Frost, his right-hand man, and his girl Friday, slather themselves in sunscreen and pull out their rival’s teeth with pliers before leaving him tied to a chair to burn under the rays of the rising sun. These teeth are then presented to the rest of the shocked council of purebloods before Frost has them carted off to the scene for the vampiric ritual. The film’s villain also makes time for the obligatory verbal encounter between himself and the superpowered protagonist. Once more, donning sunscreen, Frost holds a conversation with Blade in a park in broad daylight where no one bats an eye at Stephen Dorff and Wesley Snipes dressed in a way to make the toughest Black Panther look like a pussy.
Here, Frost follows the script of asking Blade to join him, but spices it up by demanding that he “spare me the Uncle Tom routine” as well. Frost admires Blade for being the “daywalker”, a creature who combines all of vampirism’s strengths with none of its weaknesses, a sort of “Third Position”, if you will. Referring to the humans who Blade is trying to protect, Frost argues, “Look at them, they’re cattle, pieces of meat, what difference does it make how their world ends?” From their reaction to the action of the film, it is not the worst argument that he could make. Reiterating Blade’s themes of judaism as primarily a biological rather than religious or economic matter, Frost continues, “Morality doesn’t even enter into it, just a function of natural selection.”
Blade rejects the offer to join Frost, because otherwise the movie would be over too soon, and the focus shifts to his hideout, where Whistler and Karen have been using her expertise as a hematologist (don’t laugh) to improve the serum to which Blade is growing increasingly resistant. Karen has seized upon a way that she may actually be able to cure vampirism by adapting the techniques used to treat, and I am not making this up, sickle cell anemia. Before work can be completed on this, Frost and his crew invade the heroes’ sanctuary. Whistler is bitten and left to turn into a vampire or end his own life, thankfully offscreen, while Karen is abducted by the vampires. When Frost, a repeated and unrepentant oil driller, attempts to flirt with Karen, offering to turn her or kill her, she offers to cure him. Again, the biological critique of judaism is laid out as Karen demolishes Frost’s illusion of vampires as apex predators, saying, “Vampires aren’t a species, you’re just infected, a virus, a sexually transmitted disease.” The observation riles Frost up, but he keeps Karen alive to serve as bait, ensuring that the daywalker, Blade, will come to him.
After surveying the damage done by Frost’s attack, Blade gathers weapons and supplies from what is left of the hideout and then sets off to do battle with the “suckheads” (one of the film’s less successful attempts at racial slurs). Bursting onto the scene on a motorcycle for sheer reasons of cool, Blade sets about mowing down the vampires and familiars guarding the temple where the ancient blood ritual is to take place. The orgy of violence takes place among a series of large glass facades, with Blade giving the vampires a very cathartic Kristallnacht. Frost has ordered his minions to capture Blade, not kill him, as the daywalker is required for the ritual, but it soon becomes clear that they are outmatched by the one-man killing machine. It is only when Blade comes face-to-face with his past that he is able to be subdued. It is the face of his mother, bitten by Frost and now one of his many colored lovers, which causes Blade to stop. Frost created Blade, just as jews throughout history have created their own worst enemies through their egregious acts of subversion and exploitation. Furthermore, Blade’s inheritance of his vampirism through his mother’s turning is another parallel with matrilineal judaism.
Blade is brutally beaten and scorned before being placed in a contraption out of the most lurid of paranoid holocaust fantasies, a slab which splits open and will drain Blade off his blood in order to fuel the ritual to revive the ancient vampire god La Magra. It is Karen who comes to Blade’s rescue after escaping her own past in the form of her reanimated ex-boyfriend. Although the ritual has already obtained enough of Blade’s exotic blood to perform its dark goal, Karen is able to free Blade from the elaborate contraption and offers him her own blood to revitalize him. The animalistic noises and vigorous embrace of the two is for all intents and purposes a negro love scene, but the moment passes quickly enough and Blade is ready to go back to blatant acts of anti-semitism against the race-mixing Frost.
Above the pit where Blade was imprisoned, the heads of the twelve tribes of vampisrael are arranged in a circle and marked as sacrifices by Blade’s blood. Lightning strikes their bodies and from inside the pureblood vampires, their true forms emerge, skeletal creatures with bat-like wings. The monstrous apparitions leave the disintegrating husks and swoop chaotically around the room until one by one they are absorbed into Deacon Frost, making him an avatar of La Magra, stronger, faster, and far more resilient than a normal vampire.
Even when Blade is able to cut him in half, his body regenerates. Carrying the scientific diagnosis of judaism to its finale, it is modern medicine which beats Frost’s ancient jew magic. A medical intervention discovered and designed by Karen in her search for a cure becomes a weapon against the vampire menace, causing Frost’s blood cells to expand, rupture, and explode to kill him.
The film thus ends with the leading figures of the American vampire underground dead, with both the purebloods and the half-breeds decimated. But just as with their real-life analogues, vampires are an international force and Blade’s epilogue shows the eponymous vampire hunter arriving in Moscow, ready to tackle the next nest of parasites.
While it’s nonwhite lead may deter many viewers and the film is certainly not suitable for children, Blade nonetheless offers a critique of jews and their role in society in a far more explicit way than any other superhero film with the comparable exception of the aforementioned Batman Returns. In the superhero genre, focus is generally on lone bad actors and minor criminal types while the vast criminal conspiracies which plague real life go unremarked or are portrayed as two-dimensional reimagining of The Godfather, as in The Dark Knight.
Blade is a superhero film which actually makes an attempt at portraying systemic corruption and the figures behind it, as well as the consequences of becoming aware of the enemy. It is by no means a perfect movie, but there is something undeniably remarkable in its ambition.