Molly McArdle: Blood Soup: The End of "True Blood"

Molly McArdle is working on a novel at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

 

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/blood-soup  June 30th, 2014 

 

 

I’M STILL NOT sure how I was convinced to start watching True Blood. I hate blood. As I type this — at this very mention of the liquid that I am admittedly full of — my hands have shrunk back into the cuffs of my sweater and I’ve scrunched my shoulders up around my neck. Few things make me feel as vulnerable as this life stuff, for which there are few available metaphors because it is itself so potently symbolic. Blood is the blood of blood. There, I have disappeared into my sweater again.

True Blood is full of blood. Vampires sucking human blood. Humans sucking vampire blood. Vampires crying blood instead of tears. Bottled blood. Microwaved blood. Walls covered in blood. Fabrics soaked in blood. Hair made sticky with blood. Characters in rubber gloves scooping up, mopping up, scrubbing out blood. (True Blood’s commitment to showing how a mess is cleaned up, not just made, is one I appreciate.) Often, when it is explosive or particularly bizarre (Seasons 5 and 6 had a fair amount of naked people caked in blood), I don’t really mind it. It’s too unfamiliar to be true. But other times, when a wound is mundane enough, I cannot help but sink into myself, to guard the places where my blood beats loudest.

True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries series, first premiered in 2008. I got on board the summer of 2011, precipitating a desperate marathon of the first three seasons in my un-air conditioned apartment, and have followed it faithfully since then. Until Game of Thrones came along, it was the most popular HBO show after The Sopranos. True Blood, all sex and gore and weird silly magic, is a consummate summer show, something to watch with a sweaty drink in hand and a fan blowing in your face. Its seventh and last season premiered this June 22nd (even they cannot resist making death jokes), and soon the bloodiest TV show I have ever watched will be over.

The vampire we know today comes from southeastern Europe in the early 1700s, when its folklore was first recorded in print (and so publicized), pushing local communities’ preexisting belief into frenzy and introducing the stories to an international audience. Vampires terrify for obvious reasons: they are animated, bloodthirsty corpses. (Several bodies in what is now Serbia were exhumed and then mutilated during this time; and over one hundred graves in Bulgaria have since been found impaled with metal.) Just as real as the fear it inspired, this body of folklore also offered a potent (if grotesque) relief to mourners. In those early stories, vampires always sought out their spouses first. So much of vampirism is about the horror of getting what you want.

True Blood begins when Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in the northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps, meets and dates the ex-Confederate vampire-next-door Bill Compton (“Bill? I thought it might be Antoine or Basil or like Langford maybe, but Bill? Vampire Bill?”). Bill was born in a house across a field from Sookie’s own, though he’s moved back to Bon Temps for the first time since he left it, alive, to fight in the Civil War. Creator Alan Ball — whose Six Feet Under shared True Blood’s predilection for death and the surreal humor that accompanies it — has described the show as being about “the horrors of intimacy,” and it’s true the series charts how desire by itself can be complicated, and ultimately unsatisfying. But True Blood is also about the enormity and complexity of the world, though much of it is hidden in plain sight. In Season 3, Sookie’s charming, dense brother Jason balks at the existence of supernatural beings in addition to vampires:

“There’s werewolves?”
“Yes.”
“Shit. Bigfoot, is he real too?”
“I don’t know, I guess it’s possible.”
“…Santa?”

Les femmes vampires by Jean Antoine Valentin Foulquier (1853)

Les femmes vampires by Jean Antoine Valentin Foulquier (1853)

Gheorghe Coşbuc: Strigoii (Vampires)

The Christians that are awake, with fear they call
The Mother of Christ and-light rushed
Incense and garlic on a bronze vessel
She's single in the lodge, poor mother
image sits stunned...

Stephen King: The Night Flier

http://talesofmytery.blogspot.com.es/2015/03/stephen-king-night-flier.html

Kung Fu Vampire: Nightmare Walkin'

Kung Fu Vampire: Nightmare Walkin'

Alfred Kubin: Der Vampyr

Alfred Kubin: Der Vampyr

Becca Rothfeld: Vampire Socials. The distressingly human lives of vampires today

Becca Rothfeld is the assistant literary editor of The New Republic

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/vampire-socials  September 19th, 2014 

 

 

AT HIS INCEPTION, the vampire was a solitary figure. Typically the occupant of sprawling gothic ruins atop a desolate mountain, he was pallid, fanged, and obviously monstrous, occasionally distinguished from other members of his cohort by red eyes and other dramatic deformities. Often, he hailed from Transylvania, sometimes from other remote quarters of Eastern Europe — if we never learned just where, it only enhanced his mystique — where he invariably had an estate and a family fortune of opaque origins.

He was enigmatic, otherworldly, always a foreigner or a visitor from abroad, maddeningly standoffish and stubbornly impenetrable. Lord Ruthven, the protagonist of John William Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyr, had “nothing in common with other men,” and Dracula of the famed 1897 Bram Stoker novel lived in an all-but-inaccessibly remote fortress. Nosferatu, the iconic vampire in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film of the same name, sported claws, pointed ears, and a hunchback. He was strange, sullen and reclusive — nobody’s prom date.

In contrast, today’s vampires have traded their capes for fashionable leather jackets, their claws for manicures — and they’ve taken a turn for the social, crashing all manner of gatherings. From homecoming in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to prom in Twilight, from college fraternities in The Vampire Diaries to Merlotte’s Bar & Grill in True Blood,vampires have rapidly become the life of the human party. They’ve infiltrated our institutions (Twilight’s Edward and The Vampire Diaries’Stefan attend human high schools), and dated — and even occasionally married — our own (Buffy’s Buffy and True Blood’s Sookie boast a string of vampire boyfriends, and Twilight’s Bella marries hers). Starting in the 80s with films like My Best Friend is a Vampire, The Hunger, and Vampire’s Kiss, we’ve witnessed a host of vampires who seek to fit into society. The contemporary British series Being Human goes so far as to center on a vampire named Mitchell whose foremost ambition is to pass for a human being: “I just want something good and normal,” he confesses to his human love interest over a bloodless cup of coffee.

The transition from Nosferatu, so grotesque and off-putting, to Mitchell, who is charming and approachable (if somewhat anemic), is striking: creatures of the night, once satisfied to exist on the margins of society, have irrupted into our communities, intent on assimilation. Vampires like Dracula and Nosferatu helped us make sense of ourselves by differing from us so obviously, so savagely. They were monsters who brought our humanity into acute relief, outsiders who opposed human communities on the “inside.” They menaced us by standing against us, threatening not to obliterate us but rather to alter us — to change us into something terribly, appallingly other. Confronted with their freakishness, we were relieved by our comparative compassion; by what struck us, in the throes of self-satisfaction, as our humanity.

But today’s vampires cannot be counted on to provide such a dramatic contrast with their human counterparts. Where the threat was once external, bearing down on us from without, it’s become internal, originating within — and if it is often imperceptible, masquerading as your high school lab partner or a stranger at the bar, it is that much more treacherous, that much better equipped to chip away at our sense of self. Once, we had vampirism — Dracula — on the one hand, and humanity — Dracula’s righteous opponents — on the other. Now, we have Mitchell of Being Human and Edward of Twilight — vampires who are not quite vampire, humans who are not quite human.