I saw Daybreakers this afternoon, and found it couldn’t live up to its compelling premise.  In the world of the film, an outbreak of vampirism results in nearly the entire population becoming vampires ten years on.  In the exposition of the movie, great pains are taken to demonstrate and explain how day-to-day vampire life exists:  cars have a “daylight” mode that blacks-out all windows, forcing the driver to navigate by cameras; homes are equipped with heavy louvers; and everyone gets their sustenance from coffee laced with human blood.

Humans, of course, are a rare breed.  Large numbers are grown in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) designed by the art department from The Matrix. Ultimately,  I liked the film better as an allegory for industrial food production, with humans standing in for cows or pigs (others read the film as a metaphor for “creeping progressive socialism”).

Driving the vampire population’s desperation is a sudden drop in the availability of human blood.  You’d think that after ten years, the vampires would have been able to domesticate the human population more successfully, and would have an unlimited, cheap supply of humans. Maybe since they can’t go outside during the day to cultivate subsidized corn, they’ve got nothing to fatten the humans on.  Or maybe, and more to the point, maybe their human mono-culture had suffered from a destructive pestilence: staph infection from farmers who forget to wash their hands before changing the IVs on their crop, or whatever.

A large corporation simultaneously cultivates all blood for the vampire population to consume, looks for a viable artificial blood substitute their own labs, AND maintains a standing army of vampires to hunt down any free-range humans.  Its as if Arthur-Daniels-Midland (ADM) and Blackwater became the ultimate military-industrial-food complex from one of Michael Pollan’s sweaty nightmares.

Of course, these free range humans, when not being hunted by the vampire army, lead an idealized life on a Napa Valley winery, of all places (because there’s so much sun and no shade, they say).  They grow their own tomatoes.  The have great skin.   And the vampire ADM loves to hunt them down.

The vampires aren’t immoral though.  Some seem to be genuinely trying escape death (Sam Neill, who says he prefers the taste of free-range human blood over farmed because it has “fear” in it), some have been turned against their will and struggle with their existence (Ethan Hawke).  It is the internal struggle of Hawke’s character that finally drags out the solution to the vampire’s food shortage: again become human.   I won’t get into the details, but it involves allowing a vampire to eat the blood of a human that once was a vampire.

In a way then, once the vampire eats what he once was, he is saved.  The eater-vampire becomes physiologically aware of his food and is transformed (grok?).  Thankfully, in real-life the human eater only has to become intellectually aware of his food’s sourcing to free himself from the physical perils of the military-industrial-food complex.

Fittingly, Hawke’s character in the beginning of the film is a vampire who is trying to invent artificial blood (read, corn derived food products), and by the end has actually saved the world by forcing it to return to the food culture of an earlier time.