In Which We Made Love Like Only Two Vampires Can

People Love Giving Redheads Tips

by MOLLY LAMBERT

True Blood barely conceals its softcore intentions these days. When they introduced yet another hot love interest for Sookie I realized they had given up the ghost of pretending this show was anything else besides a showcase for super hot men with muscular body types of all races. You know, like the X-Men or World Cup soccer.

If you think watching a main character with no real personality go through a bunch of different fantasy fulfillment scenarios mostly based around encountering sexual variety is just for chicks may I direct you to the ultimate male Mary Sue: Agent James Bond. Yeah yeah, he's the best spy in the world and he likes martinis or whatever but unless Sean Connery is playing him Bond's charisma is mostly implied. 

There is nothing people want more to than to get to know a group of fictional characters and then see them paired up in different romantic combinations. Audiences want sex scenes with backstories. They want to invest in characters and then see them fuck each other. This is why movie and television sex scenes are titillating in a way pornography can never be. As fantasies go, they are way more like real life.

It accounts for the enduring popularity of love triangles (keeping Archie comics in business since 1942) and explains why John Mayer said he wants to write fan fic for porn he watches. What is missing in pornography that is present in other kinds of fiction is an interior aspect to the characters. Television uses long form seriality to go deeper into characters and their connections, approximating actual relationships.  

When social boundaries are transgressed, they are often boundaries that have been carefully established and built up over time. That's why Rachel and Joey was such a big deal on Friends, because they'd managed not to fuck for eight seasons despite being the two hottest people on the show. Rachel should probably have picked Joey. She would have saved us a failed spinoff and spared Ross another failed marriage.

We don't even necessarily like to see romantic buildup paid off in fiction, because perversely enough often wanting is more pleasurable than having. Mulder and Scully sustained The X-Files through seven seasons by not fucking each other, and their sexual chemistry murks Bill and Sookie's, who we've actually seen have sex. 

In serialized television you are sometimes logging literally hundreds of hours with characters over the course of seasons. It's like getting to know people in real life, seeing their lives build and progress over time. The parasocial relationships people have with fictionalized characters are stronger than many real life relationships.

Even though the Twilight Saga is four books long and six hours of film deep, its characters are filled in with the most basic of details. Eclipse tries to remedy this by providing several backstories for its vamps and werewolves, but ultimately the dots connecting the characters from their pasts (Civil War) to the present (revenge) seem like Stephanie Meyer's rushed attempts to fill in blanks and pad out her romantic fantasy masturbation tale after exhausting ways to say that Edward is cold and sparkly.

What is with the Civil War obsession, vampire nerds? Brother against brother? Twilight fetishizes the Pacific Northwest but Stephanie Meyer also has a boner for the Confederacy. It is also probable that Stephanie Meyer was influenced by another Hollywood romantic blockbuster based off a "women's novel," Gone With The Wind. Either way, vampires and the antebellum South go together well because they are both steeped in decædance and romanticized heavily by a certain kind of nerdy girl.

Southern Gothic predates Anne Rice's vampire novels but Rice literalized the "gothic" part in her 1976 supernatural thriller Interview With The Vampire. Flannery O'Connor's depiction of the South as a place where freakishness and grotesquerie run rampant paved the pathway to Rice's supernatural New Orleans that currently leads True Blood's endless stream of magical vagrants just passing through Bon Temps.

Part of True Blood's fetishization of the South seems to have to do with a fantasy about simplicity. Jason Stackhouse is most often given this role of the idiot as truthsayer, but True Blood is prone to letting all its characters bear this out. In many ways it is exactly like Li'l Abner, a comic I was obsessed with as a kid.

In True Blood's version of the South, the racists always look like grimy rednecks, and small towns are pan-sexual rural oases. How fucking bummed is Sam Merlotte going to be when Sookie is like "it's not that I don't like shapeshifters, it's just you."

Alan Ball may be from Georgia, but True Blood is Hollywood all the way. Bon Temps is just a super-horny Mayberry. Sookie Stackhouse has to choose between her brunette vampire fiance who is literally sort of corpse-like, a way hotter blond vampire with possible repressed Nazi tendencies, and now also a jacked as fuck hot beardo werewolf dude. Including the fan service dream sequence sex, chick gets laid as much as Don Draper. Maybe it's the alliterative names?

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is on tumblr and twitter. 

"Some Journey" - Suzanne Vega (mp3)

"Harbor Song" - Suzanne Vega (mp3)

"(I'll Never Be) Your Maggie May" - Suzanne Vega (mp3)

In Which We Are The True Blood of Men

I Can't Love You Like That

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Bill Compton sits back in bed. His squirrelly little vampire features are happy for a time. He feels better in bed; when he's at work his boss is about two feet taller than him and his girlfriend spends most of her time squealing and complaining. Things are better in the contours of this dark Dallas hotel, better by far. "Let's go back to Bon Temps," he tells Sookie, as if she's listened to a single thing he's said since the second season of True Blood began.

Who could say no to a face like that? An old face, a face that's been through something he cannot fully understand, because he is not human enough to understand it. And also, because it takes mental strength for the actor playing him not to slip into his native British accent. Bill began his life sometime during the Civil War in the South, and it hasn't really been good until now. His face says, "I wanna be happy!!!" and who can say no?

It's early retirement for Bill Compton. His sideburns have grown unnecessarily long, and his temper correspondingly short. Eric's involved in flashbacks, and Sookie is meeting new friends and listening to fangbangers' thoughts. Jessica even has a cute boy to tell her about the comic he's reading. Bill's all alone. He has no drama, or had no drama, until the vampire named Lorena came to his door.

Bill hasn't spent much time explaining anything to Sookie. To be fair, she doesn't really ask. She's never had to ask what anyone's thinking her whole life until this point, and such customs are more habit than intuition. For this reason she's not the ideal partner. She can't be with a human, and she can't be with a vampire, so that leaves shifter, whose thoughts she never could make out as well as human thoughts. Sookie and Bill have about run their course, and it's time to move on.

In the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris, Bill and Sookie spend most of the series apart, with any number of other men and strange ass human women that get in the way. Now I realize the sorrow of this sweet parting isn't a moment too soon.

Looking into that dental conundrum, I wouldn't know just what to think. Sookie and Bill have the problems of most relationships: the woman makes the man less of a man, and the man makes the woman less of a woman. To wit:

I think I'm in love with Sarah Newlin (Anna Camp) for all the right reasons. (The principle reason I'm sure of that is because she doesn't have a Maxim portfolio.) Normally the walking pheromone known as Jason Stackhouse would be all over ass like that. But when her husband has shown you his shooting star collection, you tend to get a grip on your need for a hot bang. Jason, I feel for you. The father of my first girlfriend once drunkenly chased me around a Yacht Club.

Above all else this season, you do fear for Jason, because he is on the verge of realizing something about his life: relationships usually don't work, even human ones, even all-shifter ones. They are perched on a precarious balance, and all they do is change you in a way that you wouldn't normally have been changed, and usually for the worse.

As the inspirational leader of the Fellowship of the Sun's boot camp, Jason has definitely showed all that he can be, at least until Alan Ball gets desperate and/or horny and has him pull a Ray Drecker.

Why can't life be as simple as a handjob in a bathtub?

You have no idea just how many bathtubs I have lazed around in, waiting for the lady of the house to come up with a stern upper lip and the cruel intentions of roughing up my junk. I also had exactly the expression on Jason Stackhouse's face: pleasure mixed with a distinct fear that my penis was about to be pulled off. That's why this show is pushing boundaries. In real (or real-er) life, this is actually what you come home to:

Afterwards, you have no hope. Only one person in Bon Temps is waiting at home for you, reading a topical book like Heartsick, and wearing Gran's old clothing. It smells like death, a good bracing smell. Tara, you are home, girl, but something is not right in your life. Everybody's ganging up on you, and it's not your fault. Kevin Federline was watching the scene where MaryAnn made everyone in Merlotte's yell at Tara and saying, "I knew it!!!"

Although to be fair Michelle was wearing a cute outfit, this plotline is moving at the speed of molasses. Tara never trusted anybody in her life before this, and now three vagabonds are planning to move in? Why doesn't she just tell Sam? He can reliably inform her that he owes Maryann $100,000, which is plenty for a down payment on a house, and in Bon Temps should probably be able to buy Sookie's mansion outright. How much longer will Tara be haunted by this foreboding threesome?

I thought she was going to flip her grits when she saw that dude just calmly reading in her bed, but instead she curled up around his private parts. That is not the Tara I know and love. It's fine for inaction to build to action in drama, but the Tara I know would be curled up around a .45.

It's not really fun watching all the black folks in Bon Temps be tortured right now. It doesn't seem like Tara or Lafayette will be in any position to help their girl Sookie's travails in Dallas because they're too busy. In fairness, no one can really help Lafayette. Even though it seems like his ordeal in the bowels of Fangtasia wasn't too different from his day-to-day life as internet porn star and drug dealer, he has a new perspective on the world, one that reliably informs us You can tell by the expression on my face that I rlly hate the world.

This week's True Blood was so light on meaningful dialogue that you could have watched with the mute button on, and still had to weather some classic lines from Eric Northman's life before Christ died. If I wanted to watch the third Underworld movie, I would have watched it and reviewed it under a pseudonym.

Although I didn't love how they handled this whole situation in the book, it was preferable to a boring chatfest with the two Dallas-based vampires. In Living Dead in Dallas, there's a whole harem of vampires and fangbangers feeding on each other, and Sookie and Bill feel very overwhelmed, and Eric pretends to be somewhere else. The issue with translating that to the screen is it becomes an enormous set piece for no real reason — I don't think any of these people or vamps ever made it back to Dallas.

Let's hope Godric sticks around for awhile: it would be nice for Eric to have somebody to kowtow to. This episode was all set-up and set-up and set-up, but it will be fun when the show gets all the powerful elephants in a room together and watches them to try to relate non-violently.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Under the Paving Stones" — The Like (mp3)

"Too Late" — The Like (mp3)

"Bridge To Nowhere" — The Like (mp3)

In Which In A Manner of Speaking I Just Want To Bleed

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There are about seven different words that mean gratitude in Japanese, and about half of them figure the word 'resentment' into their definitions. These are the same people that brought the world that most splendid of energy drinks for the young vampire, TruBlood. Do yourself a favor and mix a little O negative in with that broth you're cooking. It's a change you won't regret.

But yes, thanking someone for real ended when the Old West did; shortly thereafter it turned itself into an insult except for a brief period during the Jimmy Carter administration when it was a pun. No good deed goes unpunished, and few creatures of this world can appreciate that.

But Marianne (the delicious Michelle Forbes) can. Her inner monologues go on and on in Latin, and she's a Dionysian one for sure. She brought ne'erdowells of color into her well-apportioned home, and she can make shapeshifters shit diarrhea when they're busted back to their canine form. Be thankful! What exactly is so bad about accepting your host's graciousness? Guest rights were common when Marianne first burst on the scene. Now if you plan ahead to stay with your relatives they wait for your after-dinner walk to sample the sherbet you so desperately crave.

To prevent his store from being looted in the wake of the Lakers' championship, a shopkeeper had an unusual idea. Put a sign up that said, "Free! Going Out of Business!" and you wouldn't even have to put a guard at the door. People hate being offered things, and they certainly can't accept kindness, whether it comes from a human, or whatever Marianne is, exactly.

The first season of True Blood was provincial, this season the show can really start to spread its wings. Gosh, we haven't met a single wolf yet, although for my money Tara's ex-con seductor looks like he might bite. Everyone is just so beautiful in this backwards town that Anna Paquin is starting to look piqued under her eyes and tits.

Last week's premiere ended in make-up sex, and it's where last night's episode picked up. Sookie and Bill are having major problems, huge problems, problems accepting that each other's problems are problems. Vampire-human love will never work, there's too much going against it. You can hit the same artery multiple times and it'll come back, but veins are tougher, and it's only a matter of time before Sookie loses the ability to create scar tissue on her neck and bleeds out for good.

why aren't you watching this show again?Yes, Bill will soon be parted from Sookie's ample bosom. In the books there was no teenage vampire Jessica that Bill had to care for to step between them - she's a fiction of the show, which needed a reason to separate the happy couple short of Bill's research. (Bill attempts to put together a vampire Who's Who in Charlaine Harris' series. As a dramatic action it's somewhat lacking.)

Meanwhile, the consumers of vampire blood are struggling through rehab. Lafayette is about to undergo a serious transformation, and it is true he would make one stellar vampire. But poor Tara! Deprived of her cousin's once-questionable humanity, is she the only non-supe in Bon Temps?

Jason Stackhouse is doing his part to help Tara out. Off at vampire hate camp, he captured the flag, along with the erotic intentions of his host. It's just good to be Jason Stackhouse. He loves everyone, whether it's Stephen Root, the chick from Cloverfield, or the wife of a preacher. Bro is just full of it. You have to wonder how far Alan Ball is prepared to push the church camp satire. As of now, he probably has some viewers thinking they accidentally stumbled on EWTN.

The new Eric Northman should come as no surprise. If he really has his eye on Sookie (and let's be honest, the only reason to dress like Sporty Spice is for ass), he's going to have to stop chowing down on her friends.

As of this very moment, however, he might have an opportunity. Sookie's a fragile creature right now. When you could always read minds, and suddenly can't because you're stepmother to a teen vamp - you can be talked into some pretty crazy things. I suggest the show's producers consider a Vampire Jessica world tour, dragging the evil ginger who plays her around the world to flash her fangs at opponent of homosexual marriage and cry red. When best utilized, fear can do us all some good.

"Don't you dare threaten me," Marianne tells Sam Merlotte. She's not going to let anyone ruin her good time, whether it's her devoted servant who stopped Tara from banging whatever it is that black drug dealer actually is, or the good rodeo-loving people of Bon Temps. Trouble at home and abroad - this is show is life.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls it all here.

"Out of the Wilderness" - God is a Whale (mp3)

"Maybe You're Right" - God is a Whale (mp3)

"Birds and Pears" - God is a Whale (mp3)