Revisiting True Blood

I am a shameless True Blood addict. This I freely admit. Part of it is my crush on Alexander Skarsgard. Part of it is being able to say “WTF?!” without fail at the end of every episode. Part of it is my love of Charlaine Harris’ novels on which the series is based. And part of it is seeing a strong female protagonist portrayed on TV. I don’t plan to stop tuning into the weekly hour of absurdity that constitutes this show, but I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with the character development of Sookie Stackhouse.

In the show’s first season – for which actress Anna Paquin won an Emmy for her portrayal of Sookie – our heroine was more or less true to the Sookie of Harris’ imagination: feisty, brave, compassionate, complicated. I felt at times she was done a little too earnestly, but the Sookie of the early books was also a little naive and justifiably unsettled about the new world she has discovered. I expected that in the second season, we’d see her become more stoic and worldly, as she became over the course of the nine novels in the book series.

Instead, Sookie’s character development has become totally stagnant and at times completely regressive. The second season has been carried by the rest of the cast: every other major character, with the possible exception of Tara (who gets a free pass here because she has spent most of season 2 under the spell of Maryann, the psycho, orgy-loving, demonic maenad), has been complicated by the season’s major events. We learn about Bill’s illicit past with Lorena, Eric’s emotional vulnerability, Lafayette’s PTSD, Sam’s betrayal by Daphne, Hoyt’s love-hate relationship with his mother and Jessica’s love-hate relationship with vampire-dom. Even Jason, who basically screwed his way through the first season, was put under the lens through his involvement with the cultish Fellowship of the Sun.

But Sookie? She’s been having the same stale argument with Bill about his protectiveness since the season began. The first couple times it was interesting, but after that she simply seemed whiny and painfully naive. She has largely become a non-factor in the show except when she has to take some sort of physical action to move the plot further along (going to Dallas, infiltrating the Fellowship). Since the books are narrated by Sookie and told from her perspective, this comes as a bit of a shock. I’ve said before that only so much of Sookie’s inner dialogue can be effectively translated to the screen, but that doesn’t explain totally ceasing Sookie’s character development for the vast majority of the season and instead setting her up as a little girl in over her head – exactly the stereotype she successfully railed against in season one.

I got both hope and an impending sense of doom with the latest episode. In Sunday’s True Blood, Sookie acknowledged her own naivete in conversations with Bill and Jason and seemed frustrated with herself at not connecting all the dots sooner. She also was believably brave when she stood with Godric as he faced the sun. A-ha, I thought. Now they’re going to give her some layers. Took you guys long enough.

Unfortunately, some of the foreshadowing may supersede this nugget. In the episode, Sookie is tricked into consuming some of Eric’s blood. Drinking vampire blood allows the vampire to sense to feelings of the human who ingests it – a deeply invasive concept. The incident sparked a showdown between Eric and Bill over “control” over Sookie and who has literally put more of himself into her. Thus, the love triangle has been depicted as one in which Sookie lacks agency, and doubt has been cast over whether she has any control over her sexual desires. Sookie herself seemed to be confused about who was “pulling” her more (via an admittedly delicious dream sequence in which she imagines herself in bed with Eric while Lorena personifies her guilty conscience). That’s a truly unsettling way to approach this, and I’m concerned that True Blood won’t address the issue of female sexual agency, but rather – since it is, at the end of the day, a soap opera – play out the “battle” between Bill and Eric and continue to leave Sookie on the sidelines. It is worth noting that in the books, the love triangle begins because Bill cheats on Sookie with Lorena; later on, Harris’ Sookie actively fights against the control that comes with the vampire blood. When she ingests so much of Eric’s blood that she reaches a “breaking point” in the last two books of the series, she threatens to leave him if she determines that the “blood bond” is all they have. It’s unrealistic to expect that the show would adhere verbatim to the books, and the changes have been made have for the most part made the show more intriguing, but something like this fundamentally alters the character of Sookie Stackhouse. The trademark fierce independence has been largely absent from her this season, which is why I’m not getting my hopes up about the show dealing with the control issues progressively.

I don’t want to say that the show has absolutely no feminist street cred, because it still does. As depressing as the adaptation of Sookie Stackhosue may be to me, she is still no Bella Swan. Sookie’s complaints about Bill’s control may come across as whiny or selfish, but at least she voices her protest; Bella passively steps aside without question whenever Edward asks. I also stand behind my analysis of season one, where Sookie’s character went through a great deal of development and certainly seemed ready to kick some more ass in season two. And while Sookie has been benched, Jessica, Bill’s vampire progeny, has proven to be incredibly dynamic (and frankly my favorite female character), as has Tara (when she’s not having her brain warped by Maryann). I’m also not sure whether Sookie’s stagnation is a deliberate choice made by Alan Ball and his production/writing team (the little-girl dresses they often give her don’t help matters at all, nor a dialogue that includes calling someone an “a-hole”), or Paquin’s interpretation of Sookie, which at times has indeed been overly earnest. I’d like to give Paquin the benefit of the doubt, since I have yet to see her in a performance that was so totally off-base that her appropriateness for the role was called into question.

The preview for next week shows the Dallas contingent returning to Bon Temps for a showdown with Maryann the Batshit-Crazy Murdering Maenad, who seems determined to perform a ritual sacrifice of Sam Merlotte. Jason was the one wielding the chainsaw in the sneak peek, but here’s hoping Sookie has a key hand in defeating this orgy-obsessed brand of evil. (Explaining this show to people who don’t watch it, by the way, is hysterical.)

Et tu, MLP?

I had my feminist EUREKA moment when I was 17 and read Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas. Her expert detailing of how women are depicted in TV and film rendered me incapable of watching either without taking a close look at how women are portrayed. As such, I practically fainted with joy when I first say Mary-Louise Parker’s character on The West Wing, Amy Gardner. I’ve written before about why Amy kicks ass; unlike the stereotypical professional woman/ice queen in romantic comedies, Amy is successful in her job as well as in love. When her character is introduced, she’s dating a powerful Congressman before moving on to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Even after she breaks up with Josh Lyman, she is depicted going on a variety of dates (without devolving into a needy control freak). Also, how badass is this?:

Mary-Louise Parker is not only talented (she’s won several awards for her current show, Weeds, as well as her performance as Harper in Angels in America) but has also spoken out on racism and sexism. Which is why I had a bit of a *headdesk* moment when I saw her nude spread in Esquire.

Now, posing nude or partially nude is obviously not an inherently un-feminist thing to do. It’s artistic, it can be liberating for the woman involved, and really, the most important thing is that the woman in question is in control of her own image – which Parker undoubtedly is, as noted in Double X. It wasn’t the naked pictures that made me die a little inside, nor was it Esquire’s letter, which praised Parker’s acting and “smart” writing. It was the accompanying letter from Parker to Esquire in praise of gender stereotypes:

“…you can fix my front door, my sink, and open most jars; you, who lose a cuff link and have to settle for a safety pin, you have promised to slay unfortunate interlopers and dragons with your Phillips head or Montblanc; to you, because you will notice a woman with a healthy chunk of years or pounds on her and let out a wolf whistle under your breath and mean it; because you think either rug will be fine, really it will; you seem to walk down the street a little taller than me, a little more aware but with a purpose still; to you who codifies, conjugates, slams a puck, baits a hook, builds a decent cabinet or the perfect sandwich…”

(emphasis mine)

That, plus the pictures of her as a mostly-nude housewife holding a pie, was a little jarring after watching her fight drug dealers on Weeds and take on the United Nations for an end to sex trafficking in The West Wing. If watching men do things for her around the house turns her on (whatever floats her boat!), Parker nonetheless laid out her preferences in explicitly sexist terms: women are passive, men are aggressive, and this is as it should be. Even her praise of men who appreciate older or full-figured is couched in “women are objects for men to ogle” language.

The fact that Parker is, ironically, in control of her own passivity makes it hard to point at her and say “you bad feminist, you!” I can see the feminist underpinnings in her actions, though I can still be a little disappointed that she held up fixing cabinets versus being ogled as an example of what men and women should be when she’s in such a position of influence. Ah, well. Time to go watch season 3 of The West Wing again…

The Ugly Truth: Every single rom-com FOLLOWS THIS PLOT

It’s heartening that pretty much every publication under the sun has called out The Ugly Truth as the steaming pile of misogynistic crap that it is. After all, how could it not be with this plot – as summarized by Jezebel’s Margaret:

“So basically, as in most other recent romantic comedies, the icy, under-sexed professional women must compromise her ideals and let the immature, boorish male character teach her how to let loose… and love again.”

“As in most other recent romantic comedies” indeed. In fact, I can’t really think of a romantic comedy that doesn’t follow along with this basic plot line. In addition to the female lead who is professionally successful but a social retard, there’s usually at least one seductive assistant running around who is supposed to serve as a foil but instead creates the impression that professional women are either ice queens or banging their way to the top. The male lead usually has issues, too, but he remains charismatic, attractive, and professionally successful. His only Achilles heel is that he goes through women like he changes socks. “Reforming” the ice queen female lead makes him realize that relationships are A-OK. Meanwhile, the woman is such a deranged control freak that she not only has zero real relationships, she can’t even get laid. It presents men as complete creatures and women as needy to the point of being utterly incomplete without a man to “balance them out.”

Granted, unlike The Ugly Truth, some romantic comedies have redeeming qualities (clever dialogue, interesting side plots, strong supportive cast) that paper over the hackneyed plot. But it’s still obnoxious that it took such an over-the-top approach by the film’s producers (The Ugly Truth is rated R and being billed as RAUNCHRAUNCHYRAUNCHY) for media critics to realize just how bogus this whole approach to women and romance is.

why i should not watch the west wing before i go to bed

It’s a habit I got into in college. For whatever reason, watching this incredibly tense and data-heavy drama about politics helps me unwind at the end of a long day. However, I usually have enough sense to turn off The West Wing before I actually am asleep. Once I feel myself nodding off, I switch off my laptop and head off to dreamland.

But last night, “I’ll just rest my eyes for a second while CJ does her press conference” turned into me actually falling asleep while my laptop played through the last two episodes of season one and the first two episodes of season two (which I have on iTunes). I woke up at two-thirty in the morning to images of Josh Lyman in the hospital and an unsettled feeling that I’d been dreaming about polling statistics. I switched my laptop off and fell asleep for real, only to wake up four hours later feeling like I’d barely slept the night before.

On a related note: NPR, WTF? When my clock radio went off this morning, the first thing I heard was “we have some very sad news to report.” Thinking that yet another beloved news figure had died or that a major national monument had burned to the ground, I sat bolt upright in bed.

“Gidget, the chihuahua in the Taco Bell commercials, has died.”

Not cool.

vampires and feminism

Double X has a piece up on the recent vampire pop culture trend and what it means for women – specifically, how both HBO’s True Blood and the Twilight book and film series are anti-feminist. Twilight is a given in that category, but I could not disagree more with that interpretation of True Blood. (For the record, I am a huge fan of True Blood and Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire book series on which it is based. My love for this campy, absurd show and its feminist attributes also appeared in a post on Damsel.)

Double X’s Latoya Peterson makes the case that Sookie Stackhouse, the series’ protagonist, falls into the “man’s protection and a woman’s desire are intimately connected to violence” paradigm, since “Sookie frequently finds herself the subject of Bill’s wrath while he is trying to protect her.” As she unfavorably compares Sookie to Buffy Summers (the undeniably feminist protagonist of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ended its seven-season run in 2003), she notes,

“Sookie…is tender, chaste, and completely inexperienced in the ways of love. In her case, being a virgin marks her as different in the Southern town of Bontemps, where sleeping around is one of the few recreational activities available. Particularly in the first season, when women who lay with vampires are marked as loose (and quite a few end up dead at the hand of the town’s deranged serial killer), a theme emerges dividing the ‘good girls’ from the ‘bad girls’ or ‘fangbangers.’ Sookie, who sleeps with her undead suitor Bill, ends up marked as bad, although she ultimately gets the upper hand on the killer.”

I’ll readily concede that Buffy is up a few notches on the feminist scale – she’s a 9 or a 10 while Sookie is more of a 7. But just because True Blood is not as feminist as Buffy the Vampire Slayer is no reason to dismiss the show. Sookie’s story is one of her own agency, and putting her in the same category as Twilight’s Bella Swan – whose passivity is downright disturbing – is wrong. Sookie is an outcast in Bon Temps not because of her sexual inexperience, as Peterson implies, but because she can read minds. The undercurrent in much of her story arc is how she learns to harness and leverage such a formidable power; in fact, the apprehension of the townsfolk, who dismiss her as “crazy” or “retarded,” can be read as traditional patriarchal discomfort with powerful women.

Peterson also neglects to mention that while her vampire boyfriend Bill is fiercely protective of Sookie, the conflict between the two characters stems from the fact that Sookie frequently rejects his control and insists on exercising her right to take care of herself. Equally important is the fact that Sookie exhibits a great deal of sexual agency. Far from being a sweet, chaste girl overtaken by a powerful vampire – as Bella Swan ultimately is – Sookie is the one who initiates her sexual relationship with Bill and defends it when she is then shunned by Bon Temps as a result. If anything, the way she stands up to the townspeople who dismiss her as a “fangbanger” is a textbook example of how to smack down slut-shaming.

There is virtually no reference to the book series in the Double X piece, so some of the key projections made about True Blood seem off-base. Though True Blood has not followed the books to a T, Sookie’s storyline has been very consistent thus far. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that Sookie’ ass-kicking efforts begin and end with her decapitation of the town’s serial killer with a shovel. Harris’s Sookie stakes vampires, takes out a few wereanimals, and becomes a major power broker in the supernatural world. It’s also worth noting that in the book series, Sookie ultimately has three different lovers (Bill, the vampire boss Eric, and a weretiger named Quinn), in addition to several dalliances that stop short of being full-blown sexual relationships (with her boss, Sam Merlotte, and the werewolf Alcide Herveaux). I’d hesitate to assume, as Peterson seems to do, that Sookie and Bill remain exclusive throughout the television series, particularly given that Eric’s attraction to Sookie has already been foreshadowed.

In addition to Sookie, the character of Jessica Hamby – a young woman whom Bill turns into a vampire at the end of the show’s first season – is emerging as another example of female sexual agency. Sheltered and abused in her human life, Jessica uses her newfound powers to assert herself. In the second season, she initiates a relationship with Sookie’s friend Hoyt, a sweet and patient human man.

What’s striking about this scene is that female sexual awakening is not treated as something to be feared or disgusted by, even if the female in question is a vampire. Instead, Hoyt reassures Jessica that her vampire quirks are wonderfully sexy; in the next episode, when Bill throws Hoyt out to “protect” him from Jessica (not hard to read between the lines there), Hoyt responds that he “doesn’t believe that for a minute” and Jessica stands up to Bill: “It’s not my fault my fangs come out when I get turned on!” The scene’s construction posits Bill as old-fashioned and wholly unfair, while Jessica is acting on completely natural, normal and comfortable impulses with a man she really cares for. In fact, Sookie accuses Bill of projecting all over his vampire progeny rather than allowing her agency.

All of this is not to say that True Blood is entirely unproblematic. Unlike in the books, which are told from Sookie’s point of view and thus give better insight into her thoughts behind her actions, TV Sookie occasionally comes across as immature. Jessica’s agency is important, but because she is a young, untrained vampire, there is an omnipresent fear of what might happen if she were to “lose control.” And though True Blood has enormous potential to be “the next Buffy” if the plot does not deviate too greatly from the book series, right now I have no problem admitting that Buffy still reigns, and Peterson does a fantastic job of outlining the reasons why Buffy remains a gold standard. But the Double X article was far too dismissive of True Blood’s feminist streak. It might not be “there” yet, but we still have to acknowledge the seeds that have been planted. This is one of the few shows currently on the air where we can see women asserting themselves when faced with socially-imposed limitations and kicking some supernatural ass.