True Dirty Sexy Blood

This weekend i felt like staying home since it’s the cri$i$ and spending money in idleness is no longer an option – in the best case other people’s money, maybe. So I chose Megavideo idleness : it’s free and legal, try it !

I got myself addicted to a new TV series, Alan Ball’s True Blood. I have to admit that I only tried it because it had Alan Ball in the writing, and as you most propbably know that’s the man behind Six Feet Under, which changed my life and hopefully yours too.

So the show is about vampires. Not dumb valley-girl Buffy-style vampires but sick, twisted, sex-driven vampires who behave like thugs and are a threat to their own community. In a seemingly very near future, vampires are out of the closet in a society that is still keen on prejudice towards them. In this world it is accepted, although feared and badmouthed, that vampired are amongst us, in the open, thirsty of « True Blood » beverages (ie synthetic human blood, making it unnecessary for them to kill !).

Alcoholism, blood, disease, drugs - or legalization thereof, sex - or lack thereof, drugs that make people want to have sex, vices, segregation, prejudice… It doesn’t take long before you realize the vampire thing is just one smart pretext to talk about our very behaviours and society issues.

«Why do you have to fear what you don’t know? »

But more importantly (to me at least) this show is as GAY as a wakame salad ! It has this hilarious queer character Lafayette, a cook and next level drug dealer – he sells what they call « V » AKA vampire blood drops, which looks like it’s quite entertaining if I may say so. He’s fierce ! Vampires are depicted as a subtle transposition of gay people, or just « different people » (be it black, latino, and so on…). This nice and handsome vampire called Bill falls in love with the main female character, causing everybody in the village to activate gossip and fear. Parrallel to that is a series of unsolved savage murdering. But it so happens that of course Bill the vampire has nothing to do with it : the enemy is within the human community.

The show has the best opening sequence I’ve seen lately, and the title « True Blood » HAS to be an homage to Madonna’s early album « True Blue », right ? Also isn’t Fangs only one letter away from Fags ?

Last time vampires were so sexy was in Francis Ford Coppola’s « Dracula », where it was established that these dead people were one horny type of folks.

To start with, vampires have always had something sexy about them : they BITE, after all, don’t they ? Isn’t biting in the neck what sometimes happens when you get a little too excited with a sex partner ?

The show takes place in what looks and sounds like the very Deep South of an America that still holds racism and fear high amongst its malfunctions. There are more than one correspondances between the fictitious elements in this semi-Sci-Fi Dramedy (you do get a big laugh AND a big scare every now and then) and the world we’re living in.

The ethnic factor is one of the many highlights that make the show so brilliant and relevant. It seems to me that out of all the great TV series America has came up with within the last few years (Weeds, Six Feet Under, the L Word) the difference they made lies in the subtlety and realness with which they treat the identity (racial and sexual) factor. It is so delightful to see black and white characters having good and bad sides to them and talking freely about their own prejudice. These great shows celebrate the end of the Politacally Correct age.

Lafayette sells bad drugs to Jason the sex-addict, but he's still a sweetheart to the lead character Sookie. Finally there are good people with bad sides and bad people with good sides. Consequently we as an audience identify to all of them – humans and vampires.