Since the eighteenth century vampires have served as a metaphor for a number of political, social, and psychological conflicts and complexes.¹ But now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we may be seeing a deeper and more nuanced transformation in the meaning of this apparently unkillable idea. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire changed our relationship to the vampire by making him a mildly sympathetic first-person protagonist.² Now, thirty-five years later, in what is turning out to be a watershed period for the popular culture of vampires, this once horrific creature has finally lost the connection with absolute evil that has been an attribute of the vampire at least since the first American film version of Dracula in 1931.³

Past and Present

In the world of True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries, the moral distance between human and vampire has been reduced to something akin to the political opposition that now polarizes contemporary America. Indeed, there are frequent visual references throughout the show to the talking-head antagonism that characterizes contemporary political discourse. Television talk shows discussing vampire rights provide on-screen commentaries on some plot point of the episode, while references to the growing cultural polarization between American Christian fundamentalism and progressive liberalism are frequent. For example, in a scene in Merlotte’s Bar and Grill from an early episode of True Blood, there is a fleeting glimpse of an improbable poster, originally on the cover of the Village Voice, showing President George W Bush about to bite the neck of the Statue of Liberty.⁴

In True Blood, the image of the vampire draws upon the classic attributes found in most vampire literature and films since Dracula, since these features are fundamental to the very identity of the vampire. Indeed, in American and European vampire narrative, the vampire’s essence always seems to be defined by a minimal set of attributes that cannot be eliminated, even though they may be transformed. Thus the idea of the vampire as dead and the notion that vampires obtain sustenance from human life (blood or its analogues in psychic energy, health, corpulence, and so on) are mandatory aspects of the True Blood vampires, essential attributes without which vampires wouldn’t be vampires.

While neither of these features by itself is necessary or sufficient to define the vampire over all periods and cultures, in contemporary popular culture there is no sense talking about vampires if these two conditions aren’t present. So, unlike many recent self-conscious and often superficial transformations of the basic vampire story line, the True Blood vampires on the simplest level pose no real challenge to fundamental elements of the vampire myth. In fact some of the other more recent (post-Dracula) attributes of vampires—such as fangs, hypnotic power or “glamouring,” superhuman strength, and the inability to tolerate sunlight and silver—are left alone as well. Some things are missing from the inventory of classical vampire traits, though, such as fear of Christian religious symbols (crucifixes, holy water) and shapeshifting. Nonvampires Sam Merlotte and Daphne Landry do the shapeshifting, while werewolves as a distinct class are present in the third season.⁵

A New Twist on an Old Narrative

True Blood does not redefine the vampire’s habits or needs, but instead refocuses the vampire community and the politics of its interaction with the human community. The human community is largely represented by the residents of a small Louisiana bayou town facetiously named Bon Temps (French for “good times,” a term commonly associated with Mardi Gras). The broader world beyond the bayou is seen in background television broadcasts and later in the second season’s shift in backdrop to an amusingly named vampire-friendly hotel in Dallas, the Hotel Carmilla.⁶

The notion that vampires form communities is neither new nor surprising. To solve the problem of communities being able to thrive outside the mechanism of procreation, the contagious aspect (for example, the idea that you can become a vampire by, among other things, sharing blood with a vampire) that was attributed to the vampire only in the eighteenth century gradually became the means by which new vampires were created, allowing the population of the underground community of the undead to expand. A kind of miscegenation occurs as the result of the penetration of human flesh by a vampire’s fangs, symbolizing genital contact.⁷ There is an unmistakable eroticism in the contact between vampires and human beings that’s responsible for the survival of the vampire race. It inevitably takes the form of a compulsion or need on the part of the vampire, so that the impulses of procreation and nutrition, sex and eating, are effectively merged in much contemporary vampire narrative.

Both the Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood take as a given this notion of a long-standing, near-immortal race of underground violent beings who require human blood to survive. But they put a new twist on the usual vampire narrative by investigating what would happen if the reason behind vampire violence—their need for human (and only human) blood—were eliminated. True Blood thus raises the question of what would happen to relations between human beings and vampires if a vampire’s need for blood could be met by other means.

Coming Out of the Coffin

In True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries, a new technology for synthesizing blood offers vampires the opportunity to “come out of the coffin.” Many believe that with the right set of controls, vampires can reduce their level of marginalization from the human community. In the world of True Blood, this “reacquaintance” of the two cultures—the turned vampire with the unturned human—is tentative and not completely worked out. The longer threads of the first two seasons wrap around the complexities of adapting to this new situation and politically accommodating newly “out” vampires.

The vampires of True Blood are fictionalized stand-ins for actual oppressed or marginalized subcultures in the United States. While most of the obvious gags on the show refer to analogous travails of the gay community, any group seeking greater assimilation into the mainstream might also be represented by the vampires.⁸ Importantly, the Western image of the vampire seems to be reverting from the purely evil to something more ambiguous. In Balkan folklore, where the vampire legend begins, the vampire served as a scapegoat, a creature whom the community could blame for whatever misfortunes it suffered, much like the witch in Western European countries.⁹ The main difference is that while witches were living when they were tortured or immolated, vampires were corpses and therefore didn’t feel a thing.¹⁰ In any case, vampire folklore arose out of the community’s need for someone—or some thing—to blame. But the possibility of recognizing the vampire as a victim has been effectively obscured since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) used the symbol of the purely demonic vampire to characterize the economic rape of the proletariat by the capitalist elites. Now, perhaps in part because of research that corrects some of the inaccurate histories of the vampire, a more complex and nuanced vampire can appear in fiction and even become a protagonist, as Bill Compton does in True Blood.¹¹

True Blood may demonstrate a tolerance for vampire status that’s meant to remind us of the manufactured and half-hearted increase in tolerance for various marginalized groups in the United States. But in the show, as in real life, there’s an iron fist of an agenda hidden in the velvet glove. The commercial availability of a nutritional and palliative substance, TruBlood (TrueBlood in the novels), which quells the animalistic hunger for human blood sufficiently to allow vampires to enter human social situations without issue, is at base also a means of obtaining social control through technology. Although vampires are in the first stages of demanding and being granted certain rights, there are still residual animosities both between human beings and vampires, and among contentious factions within each of these groups. Within the vampire community, the fierce resistance to assimilation on the part of Eric Northman and the magister is a striking contrast to the final acquiescence to mortality—and hence humanness—exhibited by Godric (Godfrey in the novels). Their resistance may in fact be driven by concerns that the logical consequence of cultural assimilation could be the gradual disappearance of those cultural features that provide the vampire community (or any community, for that matter) with a sense of identity and cohesiveness. Although accomplished without violence, the end result is tantamount to genocide, which has the same goal of eliminating an entire community.

The Blood Is the Life

The communal substance that reveals the true nature of both human beings and vampires is the one that exposes their baser desires, namely blood, which comes in three flavors: human (with its various blood groups), vampire (V), and synthetic (TruBlood).¹² If, as we’re told in both Deuteronomy 12:23 and Dracula, “the blood is the life,” life itself has different existential features depending on blood type, and each type has symbolic importance for the relationship between human beings and vampires in True Blood.

Human blood symbolizes all that vampires lack in their empty narcissism. The actual behavior of human beings aside, inasmuch as the series shows it over and over again to be for the most part morally indistinguishable from vampire behavior, human blood is the common bond that is supposed to elevate living human beings above the dead. (Of course, no thought is given in the series to how this hierarchy implicitly privileges living human beings over every other form of life.)¹³ Despite True Blood’s feigned irreligiosity, this notion of the supremacy of human blood as the essence of the human community is also an early Christian idea, implicit in Holy Communion.

At the other end of the spectrum is actual vampire blood, known colloquially as V-juice or justVVhas been designated an illicit substance, a drug that is verboten even in the relative Big Easiness of Bon Temps, because of its extreme and unpredictable effects on human physiology and psychology. A significant subplot of the first season of True Blood is built around the consequences of addiction to a substance so powerful that it has produced a class of criminal “vampire drainers” who deal in the stuff—and that takes the notion of aphrodisiac well beyond the four-hour priapisms promised by Cialis and Viagra. Jason Stackhouse, himself addicted to casual sex, is lured by Amy Burley into overdosing on V We see the effects of ingesting this substance in scenes that are intentionally reminiscent of sixties ideas about the mind-altering benents—and the horrific side effects of bad trips and flashbacks—of LSD and similar drugs.

Between these two extremes—the blood of human beings, with their naivete, clumsiness, stupidity, and love, and the blood of vampires, with their heightened senses, wisdom, and vicious coldness—lies a third hemoderivative variant, TruBlood. TruBlood is an offering—a bribe, actually—by the human community to the vampires. It effectively asserts that (some of) the benefits of the human community can be granted to the inhuman as long as the latter accept and consume an inauthentic blood substitute and stop destroying human life to get the real thing. (It is not really explained why anyone with V running through their vessels would need or want human corpuscles, but such are the lapses of today’s vampire narratives. Alan Ball has even acknowledged that he “embraces ... the series’ sloppiness” at tying up mythological and narrative details.)¹⁴

TruBlood is indeed a poor substitute for human blood. Like grape juice instead of wine at Holy Communion, it misses the point. Neither human beings nor vampires like the stuff. Human beings find it nauseating, and vampires (other than Bill, who, like many southerners, is nostalgic for pre—Civil War society and thus willing to acquire the taste) seem to think of it as a kind of why-bother near-beer. Given that neither human beings nor vampires care for it, what function does it serve in the narrative of True Blood?

Vampires as Ideal Consumers

Let’s look more closely at what bottled TruBlood signifies in the drama surrounding the unlikely integration of these two groups, human and vampire, with a deep and perennial mistrust of each other. The existence of this substance—which not unintentionally rhymes with “true love”—is a sign that human medical technology is pursuing the goal of extending human life almost into the world of the dead. The quasi-immortality of vampires, attractive to human narcissists with few values beyond seeking eternal pleasure and stimulation, is dreadful to an older and presumably wiser vampire like Godric, who is tired of the damnation of playing out the same power struggles century after century. Even the vampire queen Sophie-Anne, who’s only as old as the Industrial Revolution, reveals that despite her royal status, she suffers the unavoidable boredom of living a life with no foreseeable end. The unquestioned arrogance of the drive to extend life indefinitely, which produced the biomedical technology responsible for TruBlood, is able simultaneously to extend the “life” of the dead back into the world of the living, reducing the distance between the living and the dead (the vampires in True Blood always being referred to as dead rather than undead).¹⁵

So what might be the purpose of effectively bringing the dead back to life or allowing the nocturnally mobile community of ambulatory dead to engage politically with human beings? The primary motive is, of course, to diminish the vampires’ hostility toward and power over the human community. Vampires are more powerful than human beings and therefore pose a threat. Even apart from their need for human blood, there seems to be something vaguely menacing about the typical conduct of vampires. Vampire society, persisting since ancient times, is organized hierarchically, along feudal lines of authority that stand in stark contrast to the undisciplined near-anarchy of legal and civil order in Bon Temps. Even the retributive violence that vampires carry out seems to follow a mafia-esque code of behavior.

It’s no accident that True Blood and the Southern Vampire Mysteries are popular at a time when the American strategy of a global war on terror has begun to come under serious reconsideration. The implicit power of the vampires’ alternative, dark society is analogous to the imagined, if not exactly imaginary, power ascribed to so-called terrorists, who work insidiously by infiltrating, converting, or destroying the innocent. The strategy for meeting this threat in the post-Bush world of True Blood ceases to be a fundamentalist crusade of the sort envisioned by the Fellowship of the Sun. Instead, the strategy is to curry favor with these ancient enemies, de-fang them, and bring them into the system. This approach seems to be a reasonable alternative to aggression, but it nevertheless also aims ultimately at eliminating the enemy. Synthetic blood is a trap. It draws the vampire out from his place of opposition, shifting a natural need away from its original object and toward dependency on the illusory benefit of consumption-based communion with human beings. As in the process of globalization, the need for the vampire to enter human society is based on the need to expand the marketplace to reach the ideal consumer, namely, one who’s eternal. The strategy for pacifying the vampire community is to promote the benefit of assimilation by asserting the inherent superiority of the mainstream human world and the attractiveness of interaction with the living.

The Politics of Artificiality

Vampires hold a fascination for many residents of Bon Temps. For some, this fascination is due to the appeal of a society in which the will to violence, including sexual violence, does not need to be restrained, because there’s no effective form of punishment. The freedom of the vampire, like the freedom of all dead monsters, derives from the absence of negative incentive with which to coerce them. Other residents of Bon Temps, including Sookie Stackhouse herself, can find no joy or acceptance with members of their own community and seem to be affected by a sympathetic deadness.

Deadening susceptibility to the trap of technological production naturally affects the high-tech commercial urban-media world of Dallas, where vampires have already been totally absorbed into a kind of glitzy hell. But it also creeps into the rural town of Bon Temps, especially in the second season of True Blood, when the residents fall under the spell of the maenad Maryann Forresters’s alluring Dionysian hedonism, a disease brought into town when Maryann dangles the illusion of opulence and wealth before the miserable and impoverished Tara Thornton. Tara and other local residents abandon their ordinary lives and, presumably, their principles when they are mesmerized into participating in an extended orgy that is actually a preparation for human sacrifice. Maryann’s disingenuous promise of personal transformation is so alluring that no one bothers to consider the possibility that she doesn’t have their true interests at heart.

One lesson we might draw from the Maryann story is that the human community can easily be bought off, tossing aside its principles in exchange for the promise of a glamorous existence filled with unbridled pleasure. It’s precisely because of its moral weakness that the human community reveals its insecurity in the face of the more disciplined vampire society. Aware of its own susceptibility to self-absorbed abandonment and consumption, human society regards the vampire community as hostile, since its essential nature and organization, not to mention power and capacity for violence, threaten to expose the human community’s moral lassitude.¹⁶ We have to wonder whether the attempt to bring the vampires into the human world by encouraging them to consume TruBlood represents a drive to ensnare them in the same dependencies and lack of freedom that characterize our society, one that many would characterize as lacking belief, trust, or a deep link to nature.

In the world of True Blood, human beings are time and again shown to be the inferior race, despite their capacity for warm devotion and family bonding. The rescue of human beings from vampires or other supernatural forces, such as Maryann’s pseudo-Dionysian minions, is always orchestrated by inhuman or more-than-human beings: Bill, Eric, Sam, or Sookie. The special powers wielded by these supernatural individuals, at least some of whom are unaccountably sympathetic toward ordinary human beings, are both appealing and threatening to the residents of Bon Temps. At the same time that human beings covet these extra-human characteristics, they display a self-righteous refusal or inability to participate in the world of the dangerous supernatural by engaging the vampire community on its own terms. They have given up the possibility—and the risk—of such participation in exchange for “the comforts of life.”

TruBlood, the synthetic substance that, at least metaphorically, brings vampires down to the dulled sensory level of human beings as much as V brings human senses toward the primal and feral, provides an artificial communion that brings vampires closer, so that we can look at them unafraid. But in doing that, it only reaffirms our own self-satisfaction with the politics of artificiality.

NOTES

1 See Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997).

2 Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).

3 People in the United States became acquainted with the vampire mostly through the movies rather than through Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, and hundreds of vampire movies have been made in the United States since 1931, when the Universal Studios version of Dracula was first released. In the novel, there is no incontrovertible evidence that Count Dracula is either dead or supernatural, since all of the evidence against him is circumstantial (the structure of the novel is epistolary). Films, however, with their linear structure, have caused us to lose any sense of ambiguity about the nature of the vampire, and it took several decades before the vampire could be seen as a strongly sympathetic (alienated) or at least not totally evil being. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see chapter 9 of my book Slayers and Their Vampires, “From Vienna to London” (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2006).

4 Episode 104, “Escape from the Dragon House.” You can also see this image of Bush at www.observer.com/2008/media/2004-village-voice-cover-makes-cameo-hbo-vampire-series.

5 Public statement by Alan Ball, Virginia Film Festival, Culbreth Theater, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, November 7, 2009.

6 These episodes were in fact filmed at the Sofitel in Los Angeles. Carmilla is the name of a famous vampire novella published in 1872 by the Irish writer Sheridan LeFanu.

7 In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, it is never clear whether Lucy becomes a vampire because Dracula has drunk her blood, or because he has made her drink his.

8 See Robert Arp and Patricia Brace’s chapter in this volume, “Coming Out of the Coffin and Coming Out of the Closet.”

9 For more on scapegoating, see Kevin J. Corn and George A. Dunn’s chapter in this volume, “Let the Bon Temps Roll: Sacrifice, Scapegoats, and Good Times.”

10 The scapegoat aspect of the vampire is discussed at length in my doctoral dissertation, “Sacrifice, Scapegoat, Vampire: The Social and Religious Origins of the Bulgarian Folkloric Vampire” (Univ. of Virginia, 1999). There, and in subsequent writings, I demonstrate that the vampire is marked as a scapegoat by having special ritual features and physical characteristics.

11 See, for example, my book Slayers and Their Vampires, and Jan Perkowski, Vampire Lore (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2006).

12 It is interesting that the synthetic blood is supposedly developed by the Japanese. In Japanese culture, partially as a consequence of the publication in 1927 of a famous paper by Takeji Furukawa, there is a common belief that a person’s blood group indicates his or her personality, temperament, and compatibility with others. (Furukawa’s paper, “A Study of Temperament in Blood Types,” was reprinted in the Journal of Social Psychology, 1 (1930): 499-509.) TruBlood is available in an assortment of blood groups, but nothing further is made of a supposed connection with the typology of personality or disposition.

13 For more on how human beings have privileged themselves above every other form of life, see Ariadne Blayde and George A. Dunn’s chapter in this volume, “Pets, Cattle, and Higher Life Forms on True Blood.”

14 Remarks at the Virginia Film Festival, Culbreth Theater, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, November 8, 2009.

15 The notion of mechanically recreating or imitating life by technologically invigorating the dead is also present in Frankenstein, a movie about the creation of a monster by a scientist, Dr. Henry Frankenstein. The movie premiered in 1931, the same year as Dracula.

16 This sort of projection is present in various forms of imperialism, where the colonialists see the colonized as savage and primitive; yet it is often the colonialists who act in a more savage manner, committing genocide or various forms of barbarism. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).