Notes on True Blood

I'm really getting into Season 1 of HBO's television drama True Blood. It's a type of hybrid vampire fiction based off the remnants of various vampire legends of popular culture. These vampires are VERY sexual (well, so are the humans) ala Anne Rice; they can not enter homes uninvited, stand the sunlight, silver or stakes through the heart in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fashion. Like the Twilight series, there seems to be a mysterious dog that could potentially be the mortal enemy of vamps (though I am not far enough in the series to make what's what of this emerging story line).

Susan Sontag in Notes on Camp writes, "I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it." I feel the same with True Blood. It's intertextul genius aside, the thing that makes True Blood unique, in my opinion, is its over the top self-conscious and unapologetic smuttiness, which is totally repulsive and yet enticing at the same time.

"Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is too much," and I am reminded of Jason Stackhouse's pasty white body banging away at the backside of another female conquest. Are we to take every Stackhouse (and if you think that name is camp, what about his sister Sookie!?) scene where he wakes up with another set of bouncing breasts as good ole' boy humor, or is there something serious in HBO's attempts to portray all the humans' dirty little past times? I am inclined to believe the later.

In my heart of hearts I am convinced that True Blood truly believes it is making an important political statement about human rights, race, sexual freedoms. "Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary."

Sontag writes, "among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling." From the commitment phobic Southern accents of the young actors, to its hillbilly representations of Louisiana natives, its dappling in voodoo mysticism, to its ludicrous B-movie sex scenes, to the old fashion Dandy-boy character Bill, to it's weird Chris Isaac-sounding music set to a Nine Inch Nail's-like opening credits, everything about this show seriously fails at its attempts at serious vampire drama.

With its dilapidated set designs, gran's pecan pie (or the fact that she's called gran), an overly saturated film grain, HBO's inflated attempts to ride the shirt tails of post-Katrina New Orleans, Stephanie Myer and Harry Potter, and maybe even Sex and the City (only with vampires), is laughable, obvious, and brilliant.

As Sontag concludes, "The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . ." is exactly why I can not drag myself from True Blood this weekend.