True Blood and Philosophy

With only a few exceptions, the participants in this mayhem had no memories of what happened or the parts they played in it. A convenient collective amnesia gripped Bon Temps. Of course, that doesn’t prevent some of the more fertile local imaginations from filling in those memory gaps with wild speculations. Rumor has it that Maryann Forrester—whom everyone seems eager to blame for reasons that may be unrelated to her actual guilt—was really an alien (“Maryann Forrester rhymes with Martian foreigner”) or possibly “an agent of the pharmaceutical companies and the liberal media,” who “poisoned our water supply with LSD as a mind control experiment.”² Sam Merlotte is one of a small number of Bon Temps residents who know the truth, but he’s not telling. Instead, he has concocted a cover story, every bit as fictional as those other accounts, even if a bit more prosaic and plausible. He confides in the local busybodies (“just between you and me”) that the whole town was the victim of a bad batch of vodka (“pure ethanol”) from a distillery over in Breaux Bridge.

Space aliens, pharmaceutical companies, the liberal media, Maryann, and Breaux Bridge distillers are all candidates for what the contemporary scholar René Girard (about whom we’ll be hearing more shortly) calls a scapegoat, an outsider who bears the blame for our troubles, so that we don’t have to blame ourselves or one another. The scapegoat, as we’ll see shortly, is the bringer of peace and harmony to communities and individuals, a peace that comes from deflecting painful feelings of guilt, resentment, and hostility onto someone other than ourselves and our neighbors.

Sam clearly appreciates the wisdom of keeping the truth hidden. But even more important, he recognizes the need to explain the collapse of Bon Temps’ social order and shift the blame from its permanent residents. Indeed, his lie was a gift that allowed them to go on seeing themselves as fine upstanding citizens. Needless to say, they can’t move forward without some explanation of this traumatic interruption of the normal course of events. But the naked truth—that it was their own libidinous and aggressive urges run amok—would be a little too painful for them to seriously consider. Andy Bellefleur discovers this problem with the truth when he confronts Jane Bodehouse with certain facts concerning her severed finger and gets repaid for his trouble with derisive laughter. Of course, Andy’s motive isn’t a dispassionate pursuit of truth, either, but rather a desire to be vindicated and lauded as a hero. His interest in truth is compromised by vanity in the same way his neighbors’ vanity permits them to swallow falsehoods. And Andy’s enthusiasm for full disclosure would probably diminish considerably if he were to recall how he also joined the ranks of the “zombie-eyed freaks” and participated in the aborted sacrifice of Sam Merlotte. As Lafayette Reynolds tells Sookie Stackhouse, “I don’t think it’s healthy for a motherfucker to know everything he done done. It’s like knowing what’s in the sausage. Just eat it. Enjoy it.”³

Lafayette’s suspicion that knowing the truth may not always have salutary repercussions was shared by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900). Nietzsche believed that the “basic will of the [mind or] spirit” wasn’t necessarily the will to truth, but rather the drive to interpret the world and our experiences in a way that renders them coherent and manageable. The mind “wants to be master in and around its own house and wants to feel that it is master.”⁴ In other words, we’re driven to interpret the world in ways that enhance our sense of control over our lives and bolster our self-esteem. Sometimes this “basic will” favors discovery of the truth, but not always. In a brief aphorism, Nietzsche sums up how the truth often becomes a casualty of more pressing psychological needs: “‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that says my pride,’ and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”⁵

Of course, the amnesia suffered by the residents of Bon Temps seems to be involuntary to a much greater extent than the pride-induced forgetfulness described in Nietzsche’s scenario. At least, that’s the impression produced by a suggestive special effect employed by the producers of True Blood throughout the second season. To show which characters were under Maryann’s supernatural spell, their eyes were entirely blacked out, implying that the spell had made them blind to what they were doing. But regardless of whether the cause of their blindness and resulting amnesia was internal or external, the psychological well-being and self-esteem of most residents of Bon Temps seem to have been well served by their ignorance of “what’s in the sausage”—or the hunter’s soufflé.

The exception who proves the rule is “Eggs” Benedict Talley. After Maryann’s demise, he’s the only person alive who had been in her entourage before she came to Bon Temps. It was Eggs who actually wielded the knife on Miss Jeanette, Daphne Landry, and Sam. But he differs from others in Bon Temps in a more significant way: after a misspent youth that earned him some time in prison, Eggs made a conscious decision to accept the consequences of his past mistakes and take his life in a new direction. As he tells Sookie, “I did a lot of terrible things in my past, but I paid for them.” Assuming responsibility for his actions sets him apart from most residents of Bon Temps. So when he discovers blood on his hands after waking up from his most recent “blackout,” he doesn’t automatically look for someone else to blame, even after Sookie pleads with him not to blame himself. Eggs implores her to help him recover his lost memories, however horrible they may be. Sobbing, he exclaims, “I can’t live with myself not knowing what I did.” Contrary to Nietzsche, Eggs’s pride doesn’t push him to bury his traumatic memories but rather to try to exhume them, with devastating psychological consequences.

Why didn’t the usual mechanisms of repression work for Eggs? Why was he unable to put the past behind him, forget it, and move forward with his life? It could be that the others had a community life to which they could return and that allowed them to reinforce one another in the whole project of forgetting. Or it could just be that this ex-con was actually a man of much greater honesty and integrity than the others. Either way, the guilt he experienced was so intense that it destroyed him. Eggs’s tragic end illustrates why the option of seeking a scapegoat is so attractive. His shattered psychological wholeness presents in miniature what can happen to an entire community when blame and acrimony can’t be channeled outside.

When Nietzsche spoke of the madness that seizes human beings in “parties,” he wasn’t referring to the wild soirees hosted by Maryann, but he easily could have been. In a 2009 interview, Michelle Forbes, the actress who played Maryann, stated that the producers of True Blood used the show’s second season to create a “landscape” for “allegorically” exploring, among other themes, “pack mentality thinking”—a form of madness that leaves us prone to commit certain evils in groups that we might never consider committing as individuals.⁷ Clearly, the producer Alan Ball is pushing into some very serious territory. Ever since World War II, with concerns raised by the Holocaust, a broad cultural discussion of pack mentality, mob psychology, and group-think has attempted to illuminate such phenomena as genocide and the roots of racism, hatred, war, and even religion. But, as Nietzsche shows us, philosophers had already been reflecting on this phenomenon for a long time.

One of the first philosophers to describe the pack mentality was Plato (427—347 B.C.E.), who used a striking image to depict the power that any large assembly tends to exercise over its members. Plato observed that as any assembled group begins loudly and vehemently praising or blaming anything, “the rocks and the very place surrounding them echo and redouble the uproar of blame and praise.”⁸ Through this image of an emotional contagion so irresistible that even inanimate objects are swept up in its sway, Plato highlights our own all-too-human susceptibility to the influence of the crowd, which he suggests can reduce us to mindless objects that reflexively absorb and echo the feelings of those who surround us. Carried on the tide of some powerful group emotion, who would “not be swept away by such blame and praise and go, borne by the flood, wherever it tends so that he’ll say the same things are noble and base as they do, practice what they practice, and be such as they are?”⁹

Plato was thinking primarily of people gathered in political assemblies or at public theatrical performances, but he could just as well be describing what happens at Maryann’s parties, as everyone seems to leave their capacity for independent judgment at the door, along with most of their clothing. Of course, the series depicts those revelers as having succumbed to a spell cast by a maenad with supernatural powers. But when we recall what Forbes said about True Blood’s “allegorical” exploration of the “pack mentality” theme, it’s hard not to recognize that Maryann’s maenadic spell works as a metaphor for the very real way people become possessed by whatever powerful mood or intention has gripped the rest of the crowd. Leaving aside Maryann’s supernatural powers, the entirely natural. tendency of people to surrender the reins of their conscience to the group goes a long way toward explaining how she was able to get the good people of Bon Temps to throw restraint to the wind and indulge their most outrageous passions.

It’s no accident that this avatar of the pack mentality is also a devotee of the god Dionysus. The Greek god Dionysus, known to the Romans as Bacchus, was a popular deity throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. When Queen Sophie-Anne of Louisiana described the ancient cult of Dionysus as one “that encourages you to get hammered, run naked through the woods, have sex with whoever, whatever, and it’s all part of getting closer to God,” she wasn’t far off the mark.¹⁰ We could describe Dionysus as the patron deity of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. (Wherever two or three thousand are gathered together in a mosh pit, he will be present among them.) He was a rock star among Greece’s classical divinities, frequently portrayed with a retinue of frenzied groupies known as maenads—wild, god-intoxicated women, whose worship services typically involved dancing, uninhibited sexual antics, dismembering live animals (and sometimes even men), and devouring their victims’ flesh. Festivals held in honor of Dionysus, known in Rome as Bacchanalia, may not have always gone quite that far, but drunken debauchery seems to have been the order of the day. Traces of these ancient festivals survive into modern times in wild carnivals like Mardi Gras held each year in New Orleans. (Just watch Girls Gone Wild: New Orleans to get a sense.) As we witness the descent of Bon Temps into the darkest depths of wild whoop-de-doo, we’re struck with how fitting it is that a town that is so susceptible to Maryann’s Dionysian spell should take its name from the cry that thunders through the streets each year during Mardi Gras: “Laissez les bons temps router!”—“Let the good times roll!”¹¹

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche wrote about the cult of Dionysus, contrasting this god of intoxication and revelry with Apollo, the god of reason, daylight, and decorum. Nietzsche associated Apollo with the principium individuationis, or principle of individuation. This principle, which has a long history in philosophy, boils down to the fairly simple idea that our world consists of distinct individuals with more or less definite boundaries marking them off from one another. You are you, a unique and unrepeatable individual, distinct from me and everyone else, however much we may outwardly resemble one another. Or at least that’s how the Greeks experienced reality in the sober daylight of the god Apollo. But, according to Nietzsche, the nocturnal revelries of Dionysus told a different story. In the course of the god’s orgiastic rites, his devotees would lose all sense of existing as separate and distinct individuals, as they were filled with “the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis.” As the revelers surrender to what they experience as the undifferentiated ground of their being, blissful “Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness.”¹²

Daphne Landry, the shapeshifting waitress who doubles as a covert agent for Maryann, supplies a nice description of how the devotees of Dionysus experience this ground of being: “It’s really just a kind of energy. Wild energy, like lust, anger, excess, violence. Basically all the fun stuff.”¹³ As Daphne’s description indicates, this encounter with the primal energy of life occurs in a purely emotional register, not on the level of well-defined ideas that can be contemplated in the state of calm detachment that Nietzsche associated with Apollo. The “I” that would engage in this contemplation is dissolved into the “wild energy” that flows all around and through it, an energy that is conducted through the group by that same power of emotional contagion that Plato had described. One moves to the currents of that wild energy, released from the burden of reflection that normally interposes itself between our impulses and our actions. After watching season 2 of True Blood, we have no trouble recognizing the attractions of this loss of self, as well as its dangers.

Zigmunt Bauman, a contemporary social theorist whose insightful description of how people act in crowds could be a firsthand account of one of Maryann’s parties, writes, “In the crowd we are all alike. We go about together, we dance together, we punch together, we burn together, we kill together.”¹⁴ As we’ll soon see, there’s a very good reason this list of things that people do together concludes with homicide. In the meantime, Bauman identifies precisely what makes this sort of “togetherness” so appealing: “‘What to do’ is no more a problem. The target is immediately obvious—crystal—clear, readable in the eyes, gestures and movements of everybody around. Just do what others do. Not because what they do is sensible, useful, beautiful or right, or because they say so, or because you think so—but because they do it.”¹⁵

The two phenomena we’ve been discussing—scapegoating and the pack mentality—are united in a powerful way in the writings of René Girard, whose work over the past thirty years has made the term scapegoat an essential feature in contemporary discussions of ethics, theology, ethnology, and literature. Girard has also given us a way to understand the pack mentality through his theory of how mimesis, or imitation, shapes relationships with others, both generating conflicts and helping us to resolve them. As we’ll see, these ideas illuminate much of what occurs in True Blood, as well as in our own society.

When Girard states that human beings are mimetic, or imitative, creatures, he doesn’t just mean that we tend to fall in line with the opinions of the crowd, praising and blaming in unison, as Plato described. He also means we are prone to another—and paradoxically more divisive—form of imitation called mimetic desire, the desire to obtain for ourselves what other people have, which could be some concrete item, another person’s affection, or a certain status in the community. Desire is as contagious as any other emotion. But while other shared emotions tend to unite us, mimetic desire turns us into rivals when the desired object is something that can’t be easily shared. Since the chief obstacle to obtaining what we desire is that someone else already has it, our relationships often become poisoned with feelings of envy and resentment that fester until something happens to cause them to erupt in open conflict.

The extent to which envy and resentment twist and torment the human soul—sometimes curdling inside as self-loathing, sometimes threatening to spew outward as violence—is no secret to Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic waitress at Merlotte’s Bar and Grill. The underside of Bon Temps society is on display for her every night, as she becomes our guide to the unspoken desires and resentments of the townspeople. Bombarded constantly with the thoughts of those around her, she frequently perceives them as a mass of dark resentments directed against anyone who is different, including herself. And this way of doling out animosity illustrates another of Girard’s insights: the immediate target of our acrimony is often unrelated to the actual cause of our discontent or unhappiness.

We’re all familiar with “kick the dog syndrome.” Someone who has been dumped on all day at work carries his resentment home and kicks the dog or yells at the kids. Anger demands an outlet and will invent reasons to justify unloading itself on whoever happens to be available. As Girard explains, “When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close to hand.”¹⁷ Consider Drew Marshall. Enraged by his sister Cindy’s relationship with a vampire—perhaps because he felt it was some kind of personal insult or humiliation—he murders her. But as his anger remained unabated after just one murder, he assumed a new identity as Rene Lenier, seemingly a gentle Cajun man but actually a raging serial killer who was slaying fang-bangers as an outlet for his unappeased wrath.

We witness a similar transference of resentment during and after the group session led by Sarah Newlin at the Fellowship of the Sun compound. Missy, a young girl whose neck and chest (dotted with puncture wounds) identify her as a recovering fang-banger, tearfully reports to the group how her vampire lover had treated her as “nothing but his living, breathing snack machine.” Jason Stackhouse initially dismisses Sarah’s suggestion that all vampires are like that and struts out of the session. But she follows him outside and, by playing on his still-raw grief and guilt over the murders of his grandmother and his girlfriend, brings him around to her point of view. Sarah turns out to be an adroit manipulator of Jason’s emotions, drawing his rage away from himself and Drew Marshall and redirecting it at the vampire population with her contention that if their “kind never existed, the people you love would still be alive.” As an argument for blaming every single vampire for the deaths of Gran and Amy Burley, this is a terrible piece of reasoning. But we can be fairly certain that it’s not Sarah’s logic that wins Jason over. She confides that she also lost a loved one, her sister, in what she is certain was vampiric foul play. Inviting Jason into a fellowship based on a sense of shared grievance against a perceived common enemy, Sarah tells him in a voice choked with emotion, “They stole my sister, Jason, the same way they stole your girlfriend and your grandmother.”¹⁸ By identifying with his grief, she encourages him to identify with her in blaming.

The basic recruitment strategy of the Fellowship of the Sun is on full display in this scene. The trick is to persuade people like Jason that whatever their grievances might be, their real enemy is the same as the Fellowship’s—the vampire community. Girard’s theory helps explain why that’s not difficult to do. It’s our nature, he argues, not only to imitate our neighbors’ acquisitive gestures by reaching out to grab what they grab, but also to imitate their accusative gestures by pointing the finger of blame in the same direction as all the fingers around us. Moreover, the gravitational pull of mimesis ensures that in a crisis it won’t be long before all or most of those fingers will be pointing in the same direction, at some individual or group that Girard calls the scapegoat.

This scapegoat mechanism is the most tried and true method that communities have for dealing with the crises that arise when ongoing conflicts and mounting resentments reach a tipping point that threatens to tear the community apart in a free-for-all of reciprocal blame and recrimination. We saw how Eggs self-destructed when he was unable to purge himself of guilt and project the blame outside himself. Similarly, whole communities may come to ruin if they are unable to staunch internal conflicts by redirecting everyone’s hostility away from one another—and outward toward a scapegoat. But if we can all agree to blame someone either outside the community or only marginally associated with it, rather than venting our rage on one another, we can experience the exhilarating togetherness that Bauman describes: punching together, burning together, and even killing together. The pack mentality comes to our rescue, dissolving our differences in a powerful bond of solidarity that unfortunately turns us into cruel persecutors, often of some entirely innocent person. Of course, as Girard points out, it’s vital to the success of the scapegoat mechanism that we not realize what we’re doing, that we really believe in the guilt of the scapegoat and remain blind to our own injustice. As Lafayette might put it, the scapegoat mechanism works only if we don’t know what’s in the sausage.

Because our scapegoats are blamed for problems created by all of us, they must in some way resemble us, the majority population. But they also need to bear some conspicuous difference that can act as a lightning rod to draw all of the community’s accusations their way. The best scapegoats are peripheral members of the community who lack the sort of status or connections that would protect them from persecution. Our history provides us with a shameful roster of examples—Jews, gypsies, African Americans, homosexuals, immigrants, “witches,” and the mentally ill (“demonically possessed”) have all at various times been scapegoated for an assortment of social ills.¹⁹ But in the world of True Blood, the vampire community offers the ideal scapegoat, one that the community’s accumulated resentment and hostility can (to quote the epigraph from Girard that opens this section) “sink its teeth into” with gusto.²⁰ Vampires were once human and retain much of their original human appearance. But then there are all of those little differences that set them apart. Their skin is a bit pale. They have fangs. They burst into flame when exposed to sunlight. And, of course, let’s not forget that they’ve spent the past several thousand years as serial killers victimizing human beings. Finally, as we’re reminded by the “God hates fangs” sign that appears in the opening credit sequence, if you really want to scapegoat someone with passion and commitment, nothing can embolden your hatred quite as well as the belief that God hates them too.

True Blood depicts a world in which scapegoating is the norm. Because we often sympathize with its victims on the show, it’s easy for us to recognize the operation of the scapegoat mechanism in the world that Alan Ball and his team has crafted for our entertainment. But it’s more difficult—even downright disheartening—to accept the idea that this enchanted, fascinating, and grotesque world might actually reflect our own and that this same scapegoat mechanism, with all the self-deception it entails, is what cements our own bonds of solidarity and safeguards our self-esteem. If we do become convinced, however, that this insidious mechanism is at work in our own communities, then the pressing question becomes whether there’s an alternative. Given how conflict-prone and resentful we tend to be, can our societies survive without the scapegoat mechanism and the pack mentality to hold them together?

Many people would pin their hopes on religion, but True Blood shows us how religions can sometimes be the worst perpetrators of scapegoating violence, especially when they teach that such violence is commanded by God. Girard even goes so far as to suggest that religion itself originally grew out of the scapegoating process. His theory is highly controversial among religious scholars, maybe even more so than the Vampire Rights Amendment is among human beings in the world of True Blood, but it’s worth considering for its potential to shed light on the two religious cults that have figured most prominently in True Blood so far—Steve and Sarah Newlin’s Fellowship of the Sun and Maryann Forrester’s religion of the God Who Comes (or, as it so happens, not).

Girard imagines that at some point in the remote past human beings began to notice that escalating conflicts in the community would be quelled whenever people united to kill or expel a scapegoat. Afterward, everyone is relieved, having set aside their differences and channeled all of their hostility and resentment outside the community. Over time, the community learns to ritualize this process to gain the same result, first with ritual human sacrifice but later with an animal victim or even some inanimate object that bears symbolic significance. Girard believes that religion was born from such sacrificial rituals, which attempt to restore the peace and harmony originally experienced when the community came together in the fellowship of those who spill the scapegoat’s blood or consign their victim’s body to flames. In time, they may come to believe that their god demands these sacrifices as a way of dealing with sin or as a condition of receiving divine favor.²²

Bound to Maryann’s meat-upholstered tree as “zombie-eyed” Eggs approaches with a knife, Sam hears the crowd’s bloodthirsty screams of “Sacrifice him!” But thanks to Bill Compton’s clever scheme, the only person sacrificed that day is Maryann herself. Although it was certainly not Maryann’s intention, her death seems to have accomplished the very purpose for which Girard believes ritual sacrifice was instituted—it puts an end to the escalating mayhem and allows everyone to return to some semblance of normal life (or at least as normal as life ever gets in Bon Temps). No doubt, similar cries of “Sacrifice him!” would have filled Godric’s ears if the Newlins had been able to carry out their ritual of Meeting the Sun. From a Girardian perspective, this barbaric sacrament represents a return to the generative roots of all religion. Through it, the Newlins hoped to galvanize and solidify their congregation’s commitment to their cause—which just happened to be launching an apocalyptic war between humans and vampires in which the latter would be annihilated. Thankfully, however, the sacrifice never occurs, with the result that the Newlins end up openly quarreling during a television interview, the debacle apparently having unleashed a bevy of bottled-up resentments of the sort that scapegoating is supposed to quash.

The most curious aspect of this whole affair is the disclosure that Godric had actually handed himself over the Newlins to be sacrificed as a kind of suicidal performance, much as Christians believe Jesus, whom Godric wishes he had met, allowed himself to be arrested and executed by his enemies. Godric’s motivation seems to have been a combination of guilt for his past crimes, a desire to spare some other vampire who might be sacrificed in his place (“They would have taken one of us sooner or later. I offered myself”), and, intriguingly, a belief that his sacrifice “might fix everything somehow.”²³ Since Godric doesn’t elaborate on this last motive, we can only speculate that he thought that his Christlike gesture of offering himself as a sacrifice might in some way atone not only for his own sins, but also for the murder of Steve’s father and perhaps even help to reconcile the vampire and human communities. But however good Godric’s intentions may have been, the expectation that any permanent peace can be brought about by sacrificial violence seems at best dangerously naive.

In the end, Godric stages his own ritual of meeting the sun atop the roof of the Dallas vampire nest, witnessed only by a tearful Sookie. Dressed in white, the traditional color of martyrdom, he queries this lone chaperone of his suicide about her religious beliefs. “Do you believe in God?” he asks. “Yes,” she replies from the heart. But when Godric wants to know what sort of punishment she imagines awaits him for his centuries of crime, she answers with a few short syllables that underscore the immense distance that separates her God from the violent deity worshipped by those like the Newlins and Maryann. “God doesn’t punish,” she says, “God forgives.” Implicit in that simple theological formula is a wager that forgiveness, rather than scapegoating violence, might be the best way to repair the damage done to our communities and our souls by the bad things that happen and the bad things we do.

19 We can get a good sense of this whole process with a quick image search on the Web for “lynching photos.” These were once hot-selling items of the American pop culture. Typically they show African American corpses swinging from a tree or burning on a fire while a huge crowd of smiling white faces gathers around, proudly pointing to the “strange fruit.” When True Blood’s theme song mentions doing “bad things with you,” we should bear in mind that bad things like these are no more than a few decades in the past.

20 It’s not only in fiction that vampires are scapegoats. In his Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2006), Bruce McClelland, who also wrote the chapter “Un-True Blood: The Politics of Artificiality” in this volume, describes how vampire folklore was first developed in the Balkans out of the need of communities for a scapegoat.

22 Girard presents his theory of religion in Violence and the Sacred. See also “The Victimage Mechanism as the Basis of Religion,” chapter 1 in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 3—30. Girard, who is a Christian, notes that there are many passages in the Bible that appear to repudiate scapegoating and sacrificial religion, but he also acknowledges that historically Christianity has had a rather spotty record when it comes to living up to its professed ideals.

Of Scapegoats, Sausages, and “Eggs”

The Dionysian Pack Mentality

Scapegoats We Can Sink Our Teeth Into

The God Who Comes Forgives

NOTES