Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Review: True Blood

Review: True Blood

Rob Buckley reviews HBO's latest offering True Blood

If you want to talk about sexual taboos on television, sometimes the safest way to do it is to talk about vampires instead. Ever since Bram Stoker popularised the vampire in Western literature, touching on issues of sexuality and desire that Victorian society was less than comfortable with, books, films and TV shows have continued to use the metaphor of the carnal, blood-sucking vampire as way of dealing with the forbidden, whether it’s been male or female homosexuality, STDs or simply sexual desire itself.

New HBO series True Blood, adapted by Alan Ball from the ‘Sookie Stackhouse’ series of books by Charlaine Harris, continues in this vein – pun intended – while magically reversing it.

The basic premise of the show, currently airing in the US but still to be acquired by a UK broadcaster, is that a form of synthetic blood has been invented in Japan. With humans apparently having been safely removed from the menu, vampires have chose to come ‘out of the closet’ – or coffin, at any rate. Yet many humans remain apprehensive and unsure if vampires have really changed their ways. Religious leaders and governments around the world have chosen their sides, but in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps, the jury is still out.

Waitress Sookie Stackhouse (played by Anna Paquin of The Piano fame) knows how it feels to be ostracised. Able to listen to people's thoughts, she's also open-minded about the integration of vampires — particularly when it comes to Bill Compton (British actor Stephen Moyer, best known in the UK from Channel 4’s NY:LON but no stranger to playing nuanced vampires thanks to that channel’s earlier Ultraviolet), a handsome 175-year-old living up the road.

The show is essentially a blend of two different strands: the Sookie Stackhouse books, which are really mystery stories and romances for girls and younger women, in which the ever-so-perfect, spirited Sookie and the dark, brooding Bill fall in love (although Sookie soon moves on to werewolves and other creatures of the night); and darker, more adult material from Ball.

The Sookie and Bill romance still remains intact in the show, with the virginal Sookie, always dressed in white, finally able to be herself with the one man – or almost man – whose mind she cannot read. Bill, for his part, is mesmerised by Sookie and her otherness. Not only is she unafraid of him, he’s immune to his powers of persuasion: she is, to put it simply, hard to get.

But it’s the transcendence of this original material by Ball that makes the show more than simply teen girl fantasy or a retread of earlier shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which also featured a perky, super-great blonde heroine and her relationship with a dark brooding, pasty-faced vampire. Ball, who created the acclaimed Six Feet Under, uses the vampire motif as a way to explore intolerance towards various minorities, but in a far less obvious way than might have been expected.

The most literal metaphors are mentions of the “vampire rights act” going through Congress, even though many Americans don’t believe vampires should have the right to vote; there are “vampire rights” spokespeople omnipresent on the TV news channels; and vampires are shunned and stereotyped by everyone in Bon Temps except Sookie, with Bill nearly killed in the first episode by two local criminals. The obvious link here is to the struggle for civil rights in the 60s.

Had that been the extent of the metaphor, True Blood would have been a shallow and dull show that merely tried to reinforce a message that we’ve already heard countless times before: don’t oppress minorities, don’t stereotype them, because they’re just like us.

Instead, Ball’sTrue Blood is a more interesting exploration of sexuality: the vampires aren’t really just like us – plenty of them are still murderous, treat human as cattle, are willing to feed on babies and they get up to pretty extreme sexual practices, which Ball – and the always venturous HBO – has few hesitations about depicting. Ball, who is openly gay, is using the show to put forward a far less commonly considered question through the use of vampire as metaphor for gay men: it’s all very well to consider yourself liberal and tolerant, but if you saw our bad side as well as our good and everything we did in explicit detail, would you be so tolerant then?

It’s the question the supposedly open-minded Sookie has to deal with as she faces death at the hands of Bill’s fellow vampires and one of their ‘cattle’, finds her own friends being killed and sees her priapismic brother’s lovers continually being wiped out by vampires. Can she really have a relationship with a vampire? Are they really all bad deep down after all?

Other more minor metaphors pervade. Sookie’s brother Jason, who seemingly hates vampires, soon finds that watching vampire porn gives him – and his lovers – ideas. But soon he can’t get the vampires out of his head, pushing him on a quest for Viagra to restore his previous potency – when, of course, he needs something else. Sookie, when she opens up to Bill and drinks some of his blood, soon finds her experimentation takes her libido to new heights.

However, the show isn’t all metaphor. Many of the minor characters are as interesting as the show’s main characters, with Sookie’s spikey black best friend, Tara (Rutina Wesley), having to look after an alcoholic mother who beats her; and Jason’s struggles with the police and the local vampire-blood dealer – blood being something of an aphrodisiac – are one of the show’s main sources of humour. The fact that Bill’s family owned slaves when he was still alive also serves as an interesting way to show that the horrors of the past aren’t that far off.

True Blood isn’t without faults. Sooky’s perfection is irritating and Bill’s brooding passiveness is merely tedious. The terrible tussles faced by the cast in dealing with the Louisiana accent mean some miss by a mile while others manage to achieve the most overly Southern accents since television was invented. The show itself is a seething mass of stereotypes: Tara is ‘uppity’; gay chef Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis) is the first port of call for recreational drugs; and just about every Southerner appears to be stupid, intolerant and an Olympic-class bedhopper into bondage, rough sex, fake rapes, et al.

Yet True Blood is refreshingly different enough – and sexually explicit enough – that HBO commissioned a second series of it on the strength of the ratings for its first two episodes alone. Whether the show will continue with its vampire themes or move on to other creatures of the night – and minorities – though is something that will undoubtedly emerge in time.

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