True Blood, Bon Temps, Louisiana 2008–2012
2012; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 127; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mln.2012.0142
ISSN1080-6598
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoTrue Blood, Bon Temps, Louisiana 2008–2012 Paola Marrati The first season of True Blood premiered on September 7, 2008, the fifth season on June 10, 2012: during these years Alan Ball’s series has become HBO most successful one since The Sopranos; episode summaries regularly appear in blogs on CNN, New York magazine, The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets; quite a few scholarly books study the series form different perspectives; Alexander Skarsgård, Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer (playing respectively Eric Northman, Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton) appeared naked and bloodied on a much discussed cover of Rolling Stone (September 2 issue of 2010); passionate debates have emerged among those who take True Blood to be an effective advocate for the LGBT community and those who see it as perpetuating unfounded prejudices and stereotypes about the same community. Meanwhile fans of the series in the USA and abroad continue to talk about its characters, discuss how interesting or disappointing the developments in the story line are over the seasons, and wonder about True Blood’s unusual way of blending the fantastic with contemporary culture and politics.1 As a matter of fact, True Blood exactly overlaps with the election of Barack Obama, his first term in office and his recent re-election, and in many ways the series is a portrait of Obama’s America with [End Page 981] all its tensions and contradictions, where a hopeful and (for now) winning “coalition of minorities, women, and young voters” (as the media obsessively repeat these days) coexists uneasily with racial and economic anxieties, fears of dispossession, fantasies of a lost country, of a “real America” waiting to be reclaimed by any means, petitions for secession included.2 Of course the overlap is a coincidence: the script of True Blood is based on the Charlaine Harris’ The Southern Vampires Mysteries book series which began to be published in 2001, but Alan Ball’s frequent references to actual events in American history and politics (including contemporary ones) are not; nor is it a coincidence that the political strategies of the American Vampires League follow all the media rules deemed necessary to win over public opinion and build democratic consensus.3 In other terms, in spite of its unbound proliferation of fantastic creatures of all kinds, vampires, shapeshifters, fairies, and others, and of its unabashed playfulness, True Blood is also, it seems to me, a quite explicit invitation to think about how our ethical and political perceptions are shaped and, more specifically, how the boundaries between comedy, entertainment, and journalism are more porous then we would like to think (or find reassuring to believe). In short: True Blood calls for asking anew the ancient question of the relation between “truth” and “fiction” not in abstract terms, but in the very specific framework of today’s American society. It is for this reason that when I wrote a first version of this essay on what struck me as some philosophically interesting aspects of True Blood, it seemed useful to open it with a collection of a few facts, seemingly unrelated to the series, but that nevertheless give a good idea of the context True Blood belongs to and, in my view, intervenes [End Page 982] in.4 Since then, the fourth and fifth seasons have introduced some new developments in the internal politics of the vampire nation and their relation to humans as well as in the romance plots, while the presidential campaign and its media coverage offered countless new examples to include in the list of “framing facts,” but because neither the fictional nor the real new events fundamentally alter or disavow the points I was interested in discussing, the several changes and additions I made for the present version only marginally deal with the two new seasons. Before True Blood, a few facts of a different nature 1. In the April 20, 2010 episode of his Daily Show, Jon Stewart seems to take some pleasure in responding to the (at the time) latest attack made against him by a journalist from Fox News, Goldberg, whose dubious methods had previously been exposed by the very same Daily Show. Forced to admit...
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