The Vampiric Interim: Guillermo de la Cruz and Trans Time
A trans* reading of Guillermo de la Cruz from What We Do in the Shadows and his relationship with time and vampirism: an essay.Â
Trigger warning: non specific descriptions of transphobia.Â
What We Do in the Shadows is a TV show about time.
Well, itâs about a lot of things really: a vampire share-house, supernatural hijinks, incredibly horny bisexuals, and some of the most unhinged accents youâve heard on TV â but one thing the show and its characters keep returning to is time.
The vampire housemates â Nandor, Nadja and Laszlo â are fundamentally characters out of time. As immortal beings they spend episode after episode reminiscing about their past, seemly incapable of understanding the modern day (ergo: the hijinks); and even if they wanted to partake in contemporary life they couldnât, awake only at night to avoid being burnt to a crisp by the sun.
What it means to be out time like this â though maybe in less supernatural ways â is something that is theorised about in many academic fields. One such field is queer studies, which provides us with the concept of âqueer timeâ.
As the name suggests, âqueer timeâ looks to describe how queer people experience, define, and move through time in ways different to the majority of cishet society.
On the smaller scale, this difference can look like variation in daily schedules. Where the cishet may organize their days around âfamily timeâ â schedules optimized for childrearing and productivity â the queer may move through daily time as we like. The vampires of What We Do in the Shadows, likewise, shun âfamily timeâ to the extreme, sleeping through the day and going out only at night. More expansively, queer time may differ from cishet time in how it is measured, where the milestones of cishet life â birth, monogamous marriage, reproduction, death â are denied to or by queer people. Here too, parallels can be made to the vampireâs experience of time â for example, though Laszlo and Nadja are married, they are not monogamous, nor can they, or in fact do they want to, reproduce. Even if they were to have children, they are immortal, and thus could not contribute to a chain of generational inheritance â another measure of cishet time.
Without such schedules and milestones, âqueer timeâ is often theorized as something of an arrested development. Without an orientation towards reproduction or biological legacy, queer time is unscripted, thus allowing for queer potential.
It is no coincidence that in myth and folklore vampires, with their eternal lives undictated by social norms, have been read as queer with such consistency.
Though What We Do in the Shadows may make especially explicit just how arrested the vampireâs development is, and likewise just how queer the vampire characters are, the queerness of their time is nothing new.
What is new is the character of Guillermo, the vampireâs human familiar (see: their indentured servant).
In many ways Guillermoâs experience of time is very similar to the queer time of the vampires â to serve them he is awake mostly at night; and in their service he, at age thirty, has forgone most of the cishet milestones, including not just marriage and reproduction, but dating and sex altogether too. Guillermo is turned away from the monogamous heterosexual and reproductive future dictated to him by cishet society in favour of an orientation towards a goal that represents his motivation for most of the show: becoming a vampire.
And so we come to the concept of âtrans timeâ, especially in contrast to queer time.
Where the vampireâs (queer) time is defined by their lack of future, Guillermoâs (trans) time is defined almost entirely by his future. Becoming a vampire is something he has desired since he was a child and subsequently chased. As a character, Guillermo works tirelessly for the vampires on their promise that one day at their hands his body will be transformed into a new and improved, more powerful and realized form, and himself along with it.
Would it be hitting the nail too hard on the head to draw parallels between a vampire bite and hormone injections?
Long story short: Guillermoâs orientation towards a utopic future of transformation is trans â defined by change where queer time is defined by stationariness.
Yet at the same time, in What We Do in the Shadows, we see over and over again just how static Guillermo really is as a character. Regardless of how desperately he wants to be a vampire, the realization of this wish is denied to him repetitively by his vampire master Nandor, to the point of it being an ongoing joke in the show. As of the shows pilot episode even, Guillermo has been working in the vampireâs house for ten years without being turned.
Thus, we can witness in Guillermo too the lag â the waiting, longing, and frustration â that often defines trans time, particularly in the world in its current state, where access to trans healthcare and legal documentation is achingly slow, difficult, and unequally distributed. In this way, we can see how Nandor and the other vampires act as gatekeepers in the same way that a doctor or administrator might to a trans person in the real world.
And in their gatekeeping, the vampires inarguably abuse their power over Guillermo â forcing him into servitude, demining and humiliating him, demanding his respect, and sometimes physically harming him. Again, it is an ongoing joke that, despite a decade of servitude, none of the vampires even bother to learn Guillermoâs name, in a process not dissimilar to misgendering or deadnaming.
Yet Guillermo persists in his work for them, resolved to pursue his ultimate goal of become a vampire. As a vampire, after all, he will be confident and powerful in ways he presently isnât, and in fact, is denied being by the vampires. At least, that is what he appears to believe.
But three seasons and twelve years deep, still not a vampire and still being treated horribly, one starts to wonder â will anything ever actually change? Will Guillermo ever actually be turned?
In his essay, Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum), Hil Malatino critiques a trans time orientated in the way Guillermoâs is solely towards a utopian future. Rooted in the concept of binaries â present/future, bad/good, male/female â he finds such a model, along with the narratives the promote it, to be normative. Not only does such a future orientation give overwhelming power to the medical and administrative gatekeepers who allow and determine when and in fact whether utopia is reached, but also disallows the potential held in trans presents â the process of becoming is erased and trans people, like Guillermo, are trapped in eternal lag. Harm is allowed to continue, justified by promises of a future good that is advertised as inevitable, but in actuality may never arrive.
We may here draw a line as Malatino does, to Lauren Berlantâs concept of Cruel Optimism, wherein we can recognize the thing we want most of all â to medically transition, to pass, to become a vampire â is also that which harms us the most.
As the show progresses though, we do see Guillermo begin to shed his chains â begin to shift and change, because he is, after all, unlike most of the cast, still human and thus want to grow and transform.
In his essay Malatino asks us likewise to âfocus on trans lives in interregnum, in the crucial and transformative moments between past and future, between the regime of what was and the promise of what might beâ (644).
In this interregnum, Guillermo lives â he gains a kinship network with the vampires; he realizes his power as a vampire slayer; he learns to call out the vampireâs abuse and nonsense; and even leaves their service a few times, though not for long.
And all of this â he relationship with the vampires â changes him, changes who he is and changes who he will be.
As Gwen Benaway writes in her essay A Body like a Home: âthe events that surround our becoming leave an imprint on usâ, and what are the vampires â Nandor, Nadja and Laszlo â if not Guillermoâs becoming? No longer are they just his unreachable future â his eternally deferred transformation â which he still, mind you, desperately wants. No, more than just a bite, a turn, they can be seen too as the process of his becoming â his interim, his trans present.
Cross-posted to AO3:Â https://archiveofourown.org/works/39964686.Â
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