Martin

Just look at the poster, ofc this absolutely fucks Romero uses surrealism and genre defiance to interrogate Martin as both vampire and gentrifier consuming a post-industrial town. The film conjures a dialectic between Martin's mystical fantasies, rendered in B&W, and his cousin's reactionary fundamentalism. Both seek to reorder reality amidst economic decline, one through extractive non-consensual sexual domination and the other through enchanted tradition, but ultimately both fail to achieve their ends and choose to live in a hyperreal world that rejects both the decay of the surrounding city and their complicity in it. Martin methodically extracts blood from the working class and disenfranchised bourgeoisie while his indulgent fantasies feature objectified romance and sex. He is the gentrifier. His daily life reflects relative normalcy and uneasy peace, but that innocence enables his administering of medicine at a biased cost and preying upon societal divisions as he listens to radio shows that exploit his story. Martin's subjective gaze renders women as objects, suggesting fundamentalism's world of mystified desire. Yet adultery also twists his idyllic murder-love story, hinting at the false securities of enchantment, how, in reality, he and his cousin are fooled to an extent. The blurred lines between Martin's vampirism and mental state cements him as a subject of the cinematic apparatus itself. His gaze mirrors the camera just as his actions mirror post-industrial capitalism’s deconstruction of the wider city. The surreal bleeding of fantasy and reality comments on meaning-making for the viewers and characters as well. There are two rich avenues of interpretation with this film no matter if you believe Martin is a vampire or not. Also, within the film, Martin's cousin clings to god and ritual against modernity, doing anything within his power (mostly idealistic) to uphold traditionalism’s status quo utility. Conversely, Martin chillingly accepts the death of sacralized meaning as he feeds upon the town’s marrow. Martin remains tied to us through the camera's gaze as both a vampire and human. He is not redeemed in his fate but rather haunts any class-conscious lens from ever arising with his mythical ideations of meaning through family myth. We, as the viewers, are left to determine the possibility of relationship between mysticism and material reality in a commodified, disenchanted world.