True Blood
HBO Home Entertainment (TV)
WHEN Andrew Holleran reviewed the play All That I Will Ever Be by Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball in these pages back in 2008, he found Ball’s transition from screen to stage problematic to say the least. He memorably called Ball’s story of a gay hustler down and out in L.A. a “spectacle of decomposition in which we watch someone come apart.” But decomposition may be what the 54-year-old creator of Six Feet Under and American Beauty (narrated by a dead man) does best. His most popular work to date is indubitably True Blood, the vampire romance that just bared its teeth for a fourth hit season on HBO.
As proof of the show’s growing popularity, five million viewers caught the Season Two finale, while more than twice that number tuned in for weekly installments of Season Three. The show’s political subtext has even attracted scholarly attention: the collection True Blood and Philosophy (2010) includes such chapter titles as “Coming Out of the Coffin and Coming Out of the Closet” and “Sookie, Sigmund, and the Edible Complex.”
A distant stepchild of Anne Rice and the Marquis de Sade, True Blood is Ball’s most explicit representation of gay sexuality to date. To get at the show’s central allegory, look no further than the opening credits, which include a neon sign flickering “God Hates Fangs.” A reviled race of vampires raises hell in the mythical town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, and resembles a particular American minority long demonized because of its “strange” desires and, in the era of AIDS, its threat of infection via blood. In the alternative South of True Blood, right-wing pundits on TV denounce vampires for their deviant ways while a ministry called the Fellowship of the Sun specializes in reparative vampire therapy. Vamp blood or “V,” meanwhile, is sold on the streets as an ecstasy-like narcotic, a favorite among vampire-loving humans otherwise known as “fang-bangers.” But Ball has cautioned viewers not to stretch the metaphor too far: “I don’t want to say ‘Hey, gays and lesbians are basically viciously amoral murderers,’” he told Rolling Stone (which featured the series’ stars in the buff and splashed with blood on a 2010 cover), because “vampires are about sex,” not necessarily gay sex. The character of Eric Northam, a 1,000-year-old sheriff played by Alexander Skarsgård, certainly plays out this notion of vamp omnisexuality. Eric’s love-bites, along with those of his Sapphic sidekick Pam, land on the necks of men and women—though last season’s goriest scene featured Eric about to top his rival’s boyfriend when he drove a stake through his back instead. True Blood boils with sex and violence. Then again, there’s nothing new about vampire eroticism. Bram Stoker is usually credited with tapping into the genre’s kinky subtext. True to its Victorian origins, Dracula (1897) is a fairly chaste affair, though you do get occasional eye-openers like this one: “The fair girl went on her knees … licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth.” Ball’s characters are similarly prone to harlequinesque hyperbole. Ashamed that she needs the blood to survive, Jessica exclaims, “It’s in my nature!” Sookie, the show’s heroine, gasps: “I know what it’s like to be a prisoner in your body!” The show is about as subtle as a grand piano falling from a third-story window, but the charm of True Blood is that it doesn’t aspire to be much more than campy horror. With source material from Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse book series, True Blood stars Anna Paquin as a telepathic waitress caught in TV’s only undead love triangle with the statuesque Skarsgård and Stephen Moyers as the 173-year-old Civil War veteran Bill Compton. Paquin, 29, won an Oscar at age eleven for her supporting role in The Piano (1993), and last year declared her off-screen bisexuality before marrying on-screen costar Moyers. A standout among the supporting cast is Nelsan Ellis as Lafayette, the African-American short-order cook who throws his attitude around like he does flapjacks. If you complain that your eggs are too runny, don’t be surprised if he rubs your face in them before reminding you to tip your waitress. The most radical image of Season Three was Lafayette kissing his boyfriend in front of the Virgin Mary right before an anti-gay hate crime in which Lafayette bravely scared off his attackers. Beyond that, the plot is too supernaturally silly to summarize, and understandably so, because the real appeal of True Blood is its action and atmosphere, its swamps and screen doors. Besides, where else can you find the best blood gelato on primetime?
