True Blood Season 3—Charlaine Harris interview
by Adam Baidawi
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This story first appeared in The Age, Green Guide and across the Fairfax online network.
The residents of the deep, dirty South are back for a third season of bloody deviance.
“All anyone’s thinking about here is sex, sex, sex!” bemoans mind reader Sookie Stackhouse, the hyper-sexualized protagonist of True Blood. “Well you don’t need to be telepathic to pick up on that,” quips her 170-year-old vampire lover, Bill.
A glorious marriage of New York Times Bestselling fantasy writer Charlaine Harris and screen genius Alan Ball (see: Six Feet Under, American Beauty), the series is the much-lauded crown jewel of HBO’s post-Sex-and-Sopranos era.
Though Twilight taught us the virtue, danger and angst of a wistful human-vampire affair—“DOES he love me? WILL he bite me? GOSH he sparkles!”—what is remarkably clever about True Blood is its cocktail of old world romance, lustful deviance and wickedly dry humour. In the claustrophobic Southern township of Bon Temps, danger, desire and the macabre are all intertwined.
It’s violent, it’s sexy, it’s unabashed—every urge we’re dutifully taught to ignore, wrapped in HBO-vetted screenwriting.
58-year-old Harris began penning the Southern Vampire Mysteries in 2001, the series proving so rabidly popular by the time book seven was published that the author gave Ball license to create and screen a television pilot in 2008. Opening to modest ratings, the show’s audience would grow to over 4 million—more than doubling within a year.
Along with the series’ teen-skewed peers, Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, Harris says the sudden omnipresence of vampires in pop culture is a reflection of the gloomy zeitgeist surrounding it.
“Traditionally, people turn to fantasy literature during depressed economic times, and I think that is at least part of the reason why vampires have become so popular,” she tells. “Then, of course, there’s the whole sexual proficiency thing—people are always thinking that, with the prospect of eternal life, vampires have learnt some things.”
Famously deviant, Harris’ vampires weigh in as somewhat the anti-Cullens: because goddamn, this is immortality—not purgatory.
“I would think, especially in terms of vampires, that eventually, after hundreds of years of life, you would have explored all of your avenues and know what you enjoyed and be ready to do lots of it,” she laughs.
But the mere mortals inhabiting Bon Temps also prove sexually curiouser and curiouser: Aussie Ryan Kwanten—our beloved Vinnie from Summer Bay—found his character Jason Stackhouse in near-naked escapades in most first season episodes. (This is not to mention his character’s nasty day-long erection resulting from experimentation with narcotic-like vampire blood.)
“With people, it’s a little harder because a lot of them don’t know what they want. Life is a series of experiments for them,” muses Harris.
Both the books and the TV series have been lauded for their artfully articulated parallels between the fictional struggle for vampire-human equality and the gay rights movement. Thankfully, this is best seeded in subtle little details, such as Southern road signage in the show’s thrilling opening credits: ‘GOD HATES FANGS’.
Series creator Ball is an openly gay LGBT-rights advocate, while Harris is an interested follower of the movement.
“It seemed like an obvious parallel to me when I started forming the world that I wanted to write about. If vampires were trying to become citizens, they would be met with obstacles. Even though they’d look like us, and act—to some extent—like us, they’d have a basic difference and that difference keeps them from the life that other people enjoy,” she explains. “It’s an important movement in our culture and it’s kind of a disgrace that there even has to be a gay rights movement.”
For the married mother of three from Arkansas, penning and shaping the decidedly progressive characters was a natural development in the narrative process.
“It just seems to me that if you had eternity to experiment in—you would!” she shrugs. “All writers are interested in stretching outside the boundaries of what they know in order to figure out the way the world would work if it had these differences.”
Each of Harris’ Southern Vampire Mystery books—she is currently finishing off number eleven—have been reworked into a complete season of the show, but adapting from page-to-screen was wholly hands-off process for the author. This left Ball and his writers with considerable creative flexibility to curate new plot arcs, side characters and deviations from her source material.
High-end fan fiction for the screen, perhaps.
“I think Alan’s a genius,” she smiles. “Of course he’s going to go in different directions in some storylines. I think that his writers are so talented that they’re naturally going to want to develop storylines of their own.”
With season three, we find heroine Sookie Stackhouse torn between that-agonizing-decision of good-guy Bill or bad-boy Eric.
And if this seems like a predictably virtuous, worn-out plot, fear not—with regard to all things chaste, both Sookie and the writers have long since given up.