True Blood and Philosophy

Who is Sookie Stackhouse? Vampire Bill, an undead southern gentleman struggling to refine his tastes, wants to know. Sookie is wonderfully suited to his tastes, yet he’s puzzled after just one lick of her blood—she tastes different from other people. “What are you?” Sookie usually dismisses such questions with a self-serving response: “I’m a waitress.” But, on occasion, she reveals the truth: “What I am, is telepathic ... I can hear people’s thoughts.”²

However, in her electrifying encounter with Maryann Forrester, Sookie learns that she is much more. The maenad’s supernatural powers are no match for the shocking jolt she receives at Sookie’s hands. No wonder Maryann marvels, “What are you?” Even Sookie is clueless, but stay tuned—ideally on your plasma TV.

According to Sigmund Freud (1856-1938), the founder of psychoanalysis, we deceive ourselves if we believe we are totally in control of our lives. Our ego—the conscious self we think we are—is besieged by contradictory internal and external forces. We are not fully aware of these forces operating against our wills and behind our backs, since they’re often unconscious. Some of these forces originate in what Freud called the id, the part of our personality that contains our instinctual drives. Initially, Freud reduced the id to sexuality and the drive to self-preservation, believing that the “pleasure principle”—and the desire for sexual pleasure in particular—motivates most of what we do. But he wound up concluding that the id, the core of our being, is actually driven by both life-affirming Eros and by death-affirming Thanatos: “I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into larger units [Eros] there must be another contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primary inorganic state.”⁴

In addition to the drives that originate in the id, the ego also has to contend with internalized cultural norms. Conscience and the demands of civilization comprise what Freud called the superego, a part of our personality that is largely opposed to the cravings of the id. Freud is famous, or notorious, for his theory of the Oedipus complex, the somewhat upsetting, even icky, idea that a young boy’s id originally lusts after his mother and, as a result, secretly harbors murderous designs on his father, whom he regards as his rival. In the end, the boy realizes that pursuing a rivalry with his much more powerful Dear Old Dad isn’t likely to end well for junior, so he learns to renounce his desire—the first of many unhappy renunciations to come.

Not having known any vampires, Freud didn’t get a chance to speculate about the edible complex, the unrepressed desire that drives someone like Bill Compton to the taste of someone like Sookie. For most of us, the renunciation of desire demanded by civilization means that duty trumps pleasure, erotic needs become directed toward more suitable objects than Mom, and the genitals—not the oral cavity, as with vampires—become the primary or even exclusive organs of sexual pleasure. Not so for the vampire. He hears the call of Eros for a life aimed at sensual gratification.⁵ And vampires violate human taboos. After all, the female vampires who seduce human men are old enough to be their mothers. But Freud didn’t think such a life would ever be available to most of us. Who would do the drudgery essential for civilization if we spent all of our time and energy on sensual gratification? Thanatos, on the other hand, has its uses, such as warfare. Thanatos, in effect, seduces Eros, leading to infatuation with sexualized violence. No wonder we enjoy True Blood.

Sookie and Sigmund experience these discontents. They realize, to paraphrase Sigmund, that civilization gives us everything except happiness. They also share uncanny powers, reading minds (more in a moment on how Sigmund does that) and witnessing the strange power of posthypnotic suggestion, otherwise known as “glamouring.” Both Sookie and Sigmund know that people have little control over their lives, and they sometimes discover more than they care to know about other people. Finally, Sookie actualizes what Freud thought eluded most people, a fully developed erotic life. But she is also painfully aware of the truth behind his lamentation that “we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our love object.”⁷

A realistic portrayal of Bon Temps would bore us to death: relentless hours of mind-numbing routine punctuated by a few Saturday night guilty pleasures. How might citizens cope? Sookie’s friend Tara Thornton might read self-help books such as Norman Vincent Peale’s ever-popular Power of Positive Thinking, with its teaching that an attitude adjustment is all it takes to be happy—the glass is half-full, not half-empty.⁹

Freud wouldn’t buy it, nor ultimately would Tara. They know that their discontents aren’t merely a matter of a bad attitude. They’re realists. I can hear Tara exclaiming, “Gimme a break! Yeah right! I’ll put a happy face on my abusive, alcoholic mother. What’s wrong with me? Racism doesn’t make me happy; I’m not even wild about sexism and zero job prospects.” Freud’s prognosis resonates: “The best we can hope for is to change hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness.”¹⁰

Civilization—or a modicum of security—demands the renunciation of instinctive gratification. We can’t do what comes naturally. But we pay a terrible emotional price for the tenuous security of civilization. Long repressed passions ferment into intoxicating pathologies. But in the meantime, life goes on. Sam Merlotte slings burgers, Jason Stackhouse labors on the road crew, the chip on Tara’s shoulder grows bigger, and Sookie grows old and arthritic from waiting tables. Those who don’t die of boredom are taken by old age or by Sam’s cheeseburgers. But routine isn’t the stuff of primetime.

True Blood is a Freudian fable: a saga of our species doing what comes naturally. But when Freud talks about gratifying the id, he means something more than the cheap thrills of drinking and womanizing. These pleasures are, at best, tame surrogates for the incendiary, all-consuming gratification we crave. In season 2 the good folk of Bon Temps discover what the undead, the V junkies, and Maryann already know: feeble watered-down pleasures can’t compare with the ecstasy of full-throated instinctual gratification. There’s nothing feeble about the signature features of True Blood, convulsive sex and violence. Sigmund and Maryann agree: “The feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild, instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed.”¹¹

In the world according to Freud, vampire myths are universal because they reflect what’s universal in us—primal instincts and defense mechanisms. The vampire is the avatar of repressed erotic and destructive passions, and (as we’ll see) also an enabler of defense mechanisms such as projection and denial.

First, True Blood vampires are able to give free expression to their ids, while overcoming what Freud deemed the perennial sources of human misery:

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body which is doomed to decay and dissolution, and cannot do it without pain and anxiety ... from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men.¹³

Let’s look how vampires overcome each of these sources of suffering in turn:

• Our feeble, mortal bodies. Bill flies to Sookie’s aid to save her from imminent death. All it takes is just a few drops of his blood—and no aggravation with insurance companies. Vampires also enjoy a conditional immortality, conditional inasmuch as they can die only from external causes. Godric’s two-thousand-year life span tops our proverbial three-score-and-ten. Vampires are to die for!

• Nature and the external world. Vampires don’t age. Godric still looks peppy after two thousand years. Some even defy gravity by flying from place to place. Their magical strength overcomes nature—because it’s supernatural.

• Social relations. Before coming out of the coffin, vampires were relatively untroubled by human beings, except for rare occasions when they would perish at the hands of someone who had a stake in their destinies. Vampires seduced human beings, then drained and discarded them. No worries. Human beings were a thing to be used—as the more wicked True Blood vampires believe they should still be today. For Vampire Bill, however, this is all so fifteenth-century. But his struggle to mainstream leaves him vulnerable to the misery Freud predicted as the fate of all civilized beings. Bill is despised, unjustly accused, and tormented by the bitter-sweet vagaries of romance. Still, there’s much to envy in his existence. Even if things go awry, Bill may still be around in 2110 to find another Sookie.

But despite the way vampires fulfill our fantasy of gratifying our primal instincts in an existence that has overcome the perennial sources of human suffering—or maybe because they do—they also make ideal villains. Vampire myths reveal the workings of the commonplace defense mechanisms known as projection and denial. We deny our unacceptable passions by projecting them onto a scapegoat.¹⁴ Truth be told, there’s lots of emotional garbage to dump onto others. As Freud explains,

Men are not [simply] gentle creatures who want to be loved.... Their neighbor [whom they are commanded to love] tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him.¹⁵

These ineradicable, savage passions reflect our biological heritage. Freud points out that the Ten Commandments don’t simply reflect a higher morality. On the contrary, they reveal our authentic desires. “What no human soul desires stands in no need of prohibition; it is excluded automatically.” ¹⁶ Vampires provide screens onto which we can project our unthinkable thoughts and perverse desires. They blaspheme, disrespect parents, covet their neighbors, and kill. Freud thinks that deep down, at the core of our being, we all secretly wish we could do the same—we’re all public enemies, enemies of civilized morality, he quips. Just as we can’t vanquish these desires that constitute what we detest in ourselves, we can’t readily kill vampires since they are simply the projection of all those parts of ourselves that we wish to disown. Sookie and Sigmund know more than they care to about this savage heritage. They read minds.

Sookie reads minds—plain and simple. She taps directly into the unconscious. Freud gained access to unthinkable thoughts and passions through a journey that began with hypnosis—glamouring in vampire parlance—and ended with the laying on of hands. But Sookie and Sigmund both come to the same conclusions: their neighbors are obsessed with sexualized violence.

Working with his mentor Josef Breuer (1842-1925), Freud witnessed how posthypnotic suggestion operates. A subject under hypnosis is given a command to perform upon waking, such as dancing around the room. Freud observed that under “posthypnotic suggestion, a command given under the spell is slavishly carried out subsequently in the normal state.”¹⁸ Subjects perform as commanded but recall nothing about what happened while under hypnosis. They’re unaware of the forces governing their behavior, which are unconscious. If asked to account for their peculiar behavior of, for instance, dancing around the room, they rationalize, inventing convincing reasons for their behavior, but remaining clueless about the real reasons.

In observing posthypnotic suggestion, Freud came to recognize the awesome power of the unconscious: “If an innocuous command given in a trance results in peculiar behavior, imagine the power of childhood traumas. The fixation of mental life to pathogenic trauma is one of the most significant characteristics of neurosis.”¹⁹

Freud believed that neurotic symptoms originated from repressed memories of childhood traumas and that psychoanalysis could uncover these memories. Sigmund abandoned hypnosis for psychoanalysis because he wasn’t good at hypnosis and he believed patients needed to participate consciously in their own recovery. Freud turned instead to the laying on of hands. In the iconic Freudian vision, we see the patient lying on the couch while the Father of Psychoanalysis lays hands on the patient’s forehead and encourages free association to reveal the repressed trauma that has made the patient sick.²⁰

True Blood aims at entertainment, not therapy, but it doesn’t let us forget that we’re governed by primal instincts. Sookie and Sigmund both know their neighbors are obsessed and tormented by unexpressed impulses, fantasies, and memories they desperately struggle to repress. Reading customers’ minds doesn’t renew Sookie’s faith in humanity. Their secret thoughts, even the unrepressed ones, are seldom benign. Men think of Sookie as a sex object, and women gossip about her odd behavior and attraction to vampires. In the very first episode, Sookie saves Bill when she reads the minds of the Rattrays, evildoers bent on draining Bill and selling his blood.

Consequently, Sookie regards her gift as a disability. Dating is a disaster. She knows her dates’ secrets—they have posterior motives. Worse still, she breaks down at Gran’s wake after listening to the cacophony of neighbors casting aspersions upon her. Ordinarily she deals with her “disability” with weary resignation, but sometimes it’s too much. Bill, of course, is particularly attractive—because she can’t read his mind.

Mind reading also demoralized Freud, especially in the aftermath of World War I. He lamented that “[n]o event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligence, or so thoroughly debased what is highest.”²¹ No longer preoccupied with the notion that all suffering is rooted in repressed sexuality, he began to stress the primal instinct of Thanatos, the death drive, a pure wish for destruction that he believed originally aimed at one’s own death but could be directed outward toward others when it encountered resistance from our instinct of self-preservation.

Sookie and Sigmund realize that both the living and the undead often kill over trivialities. Vampires kill human beings for pleasure or when they outlive their usefulness. Human beings are no better, as Bill reminds Sookie. The good people of Bon Temps kill—or wish they could kill—their brethren merely for cavorting with vampires or to repay insults, real or imagined. As if commenting on scenes in True Blood, Freud wrote: “Our unconscious will murder for trifles; like the ancient, Athenian Law of Draco, it knows no other punishment ... Death.... Every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego is at bottom a crime of lese-majeste.”²²

True Blood is about a world out of control in which the center no longer holds. Not that human beings object to losing control, as the Maryann story line makes clear. Maryann provides occasion for the supreme pleasure, the chance to be out of control. “Control,” she tells Tara and Eggs Talley, Tara’s lover, “is just a cage this stupid culture uses to lock up who we really are. We need to be out of control. We crave it.”²³ And so, consumed by that pent-up “wild instinctive impulse untamed by the ego,” Bon Temps goes berserk with sexualized violence enabled by Maryann.²⁴

Speaking of enablers, Vampire Bill’s deadly embrace makes it possible for Jessica, the pious ingenue, to do what comes naturally. She put the “vamp” in vampire—what a pain in the neck for prospective mother-in-law Maxine! And, in a grand mal catharsis, Jessica lets loose long suppressed human desires: she attacks dear ol’ dad—revenge is best served hot!

Some of Freud’s later followers indicted their master’s notion of “genital tyranny,” his account of how in the course of what he took to be normal psychosexual development the child’s sexual impulses become entirely subordinated to the genitals.²⁶ The philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898—1979) argued that far from being natural or inevitable, “genital tyranny” reflected the way that a repressive society mobilizes almost the entire body for alienated labor, with only the genitals remaining as instruments of gratification.²⁷ Working-class womanizer Jason Stackhouse might be considered a prime example of the consequences of this repression. Marcuse wanted to reverse the process of “genital tyranny” so we could return to the “polymorphous perversity” of the infant, who Freud believed could derive sexual pleasure from any part of the body.

But Freud himself pointed toward a very different path to happiness: redirecting erotic energy “away from its sexual aims and transforming the instinct into an impulse with an inhibited aim.”²⁸ The rare individual Freud has in mind has not only inhibited (or sublimated) the desire for sexual gratification that is the original aim of our erotic impulses, but has also ascended from the love for particular individuals to affection for all humanity. The happiness of such individuals is a result of their sublimation of erotic energies through which they “bring about in themselves ... a state of evenly suspended, steadfast, affectionate feeling that has little external resemblance to the stormy agitations of genital love, from which it is nonetheless derived.”²⁹ Sookie doesn’t perfectly realize this ideal, since she remains a sexual being intensely fixated on Bill, but she nonetheless risks everything for friends and enemies—even loathsome Eric Northman—in a way that somewhat resembles someone else who really did sublimate his love into an affection for all human beings and, just like Sookie, even for many nonhumans as well.

Freud, no champion of Catholicism, offers a surprising choice for his exemplar of sublimated love: “Perhaps St. Francis of Assisi went furthest in thus exploiting love for the benefit of an inner feeling of happiness.”³⁰ Sickened by war, Francis (ca. 1182—1226) returned from the Crusades, renounced his patrimony, and devoted his life to expressing unconditional affection toward all humanity and nature. Francis had the solace of a belief in immortality, a comfort that eludes many in secular culture. And yet, as Freud argues, our own death is unimaginable; unconsciously, we believe in our own immortality. No wonder we identify with the death-defying, immortal characters of True Blood!

The Edible Complex

Bon Temps and Its Discontents

Nothing New under the Moon

Sookie’s and Sigmund’s Gift

Love at First Bite

NOTES