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A tall, pale and handsome vampire, fangs exposed and muscles rigid, hisses out the words “Sookie is mine.” With a vibrating twitch a body blurs across the screen, pinning down his all-too-eager prey. Every time I hear Bill Compton utter those three words, or watch Vampire Eric flash his smile and flex his physique, I feel the inner night crawler tingle in my darkest being. This connection I have to the sinister world of True Blood came close to becoming all consuming this fall, and I’m not alone.
Fans of HBO’s True Blood rally around the show’s absurd plot lines and vulgar semi-pornographic images because it is unlike anything we have seen before. The social commentary, satirical humor and science fiction paired with blood, lots of blood, and kinky sex, gives meaningful insight into the psyche of our generation, and it’s a twisted world in there.
True Blood takes the sulky, doe-eyed hero of Twilight and turns him into a pair of polar opposite protagonists. Eric, the even huskier blond villain, terrorizes each female he encounters, especially the angelic Sookie. His cunning wit and violent tendencies prove attractive no matter how close he leans towards the barbaric. This is no Edward Cullen, ladies —his burlesque bar is a “fang-banger” safe haven. He is the ultimate alpha-male and when his first tear was shed over the loss of his “maker” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. But my favorite character in True Blood isn’t the reason I keep coming back, or the reason HBO’s ratings have received a huge boost since the debut of the anti-Twilight.
They both revolve around non-human heartthrobs, but to compare Twilight to True Blood is like comparing Barbies to blow-up dolls. These two worlds are so different because of their topics and tactics. The undertones of gay acceptance in American society run deep in the Deep South town of fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana.
Take the next frontier in American social acceptance and drop it into the notoriously intolerant landscape of Southern America. In this case, gay and straight falls to the wayside as vampire-human relations are the latest social taboo. It’s a remarkable social experiment, even in the world of fictional make-believe, for a society to be forced to adapt to a new extreme. Mix in the exploitations of our country’s deepest and darkest sexual fetishes and you have the recipe for the next pop masterpiece of the decade.
It’s genius. Forget the social conflicts of our modern world; True Blood adds another “species” into the mix. Same-sex sex is no longer even considered in the realm of questionable. Now you have young blonde, telepathic waitresses having sex with non-human vampires—and the sex is freaky. The immediate absurdity of it all rests on some serious social commentary. An October article by Stephen Marche in Esquire magazine said it best, “It’s a perfect encapsulation of the American bedroom at this moment: Everyone is a freak, even the people who claim to rail against freakiness.”
As Twi-hards screech and claw their way into the theaters the see the latest installment of Twilight, I know they will enjoy the epic love story of Bella and Edward. The heartbroken Bella does have a lot of soul searching to do in this chapter of the saga now that her vampire boyfriend has gone rogue. I just wish that Twilight held some deeper meaning beyond the world of love and loss that all to often consumes pubescent teenage girls.
This weekend may prove to be the apex of Twilight hysteria, but I urge you, do not forget about our quirky blood sucking friends of Bon Temps as the country journeys back to the quiet Northwest. I will go and see Twilight this weekend, because the 14-year-old side of me loves the innocence of it all. But a part of me will sit in the theater missing the mature nature of True Blood.
I will miss the dry humor, the radical plot lines and, of course, the raunchy entanglements of the beloved and deranged characters. I’ll sit, at least during the trailers, wishing it was already the spring when the bluegrass melody of the opening credits will once again fill my living room and I can finally return to the intoxicatingly disturbed world that is True Blood.
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