Rough draft of True Blood essay.

      By no means a new innovation, HBO often sets the bar for home entertainment. Since their inception in 1972, they have grown  to be one of the world’s foremost and highly acclaimed sources in areas including original movies, series,  world class sporting events, and documentaries. In their television series, HBO is never shy about their willingness to push the limits of expectation and use shock to bring about a specific reaction from the viewer. Rather than perpetuate the drab mass produced television that seems to fill the airwaves, their shows and their direction strive to shed light on important real-life issues through intrigue and sometimes fantastic circumstances.  The HBO original series True Blood exemplifies this in its depiction of sexuality and politics in every day (or night) life;  it uses these to speak to the need for tolerance in society among different groups such as sexual orientation, race, and political viewpoints.
            The very premise of True Blood allows for political connotations to seep into the mind of the educated or even semi-thinking viewers. The show is a set in the fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, in an alternate present where vampires have just  made their existence known to humans. This becomes known as “Great Revelation”  and was made possible by the invention of a synthetic blood developed by a Japanese scientist. With this synthetic blood in production, no longer do vampires have to hide what they are while cowering in shadows and secretly feeding off  humans, rather they are able to “live” alongside them. They are met, however, with no small amount of resistance from both religious zealots who believe that vampires are damned by God as well as small-minded individuals who protest them on sheer principle.  Without mentioning any of the characters or specific plot threads, one can already see from the basis of the show that it mirrors the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) rights movement that is a current political hot-button in our own society.
            Further evidence backing the comparison between True Blood and the LGBT movement can be seen when analyzing the show not just as fantasy, but by looking slightly deeper at some of the allegories presented and regarding the intent of the its creator. The show was created and is produced by the openly-gay writer, director, actor, and producer Alan Ball. And though Ball doesn’t come right out and say “this is what the show is about” one can draw conclusions of his/her own about what the political agenda behind some of the statements the show might make.  In the very title sequence of the show we are presented with all sorts of imagery e.g. sex, blood, Klan activity, baptism, and protests. At one point in the sequence a sign is seen that reads “God Hates Fangs.” This may be viewed as a direct allusion to the profession “God Hates Fags,” a grotesquely intolerant statement used as a catch phrase by the radical organization Westboro Baptist Church and propagated by other such hate-mongering groups.
            The show does more than commentate on small minded prejudice regarding the LGBT movement; it also calls the politics of the situation into question and addresses the issues every minority fighting for equality faces at one point or another. A major element in the society of the show is whether or not vampires should be granted the legal rights that humans have. In a kind of “vampires are people too” situation, the battle  being fought is one for rights such as the vote, marriage, and an overall declaration of  equality that can be paralleled not only to the LGBT community but also to the women’s suffrage and civil rights  movements of the early to mid-twentieth century.
            There is strong political support and opposition on both sides. The face for the opposition is the church group known as the Fellowship of the Sun, while the pro-vampire movement is led by the American Vampire League. As with every movement, the lines are not all black and white. There are many religious, God-fearing Americans who are vehemently fighting for vampire equality, just as there are vampires who abhor the movement to seek equality, seeing themselves as creatures of the night who’s very nature goes against functioning on level with humans. It does not take an extreme stretch of the imagination to find the similarities here that can be compared to the the un-united fronts in both the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. These can be found within strong influencers Martin Luther King, Jr. / Malcolm X spreading opposing views, as well as the woman during the women’s suffrage movement who refused to look ahead to a future with women on equal ground with men because they believed “it wasn’t their place.”  Though in both of these cases what we see today to be what is “right” panned out and the cultural attitude eventually shifted, the commentary here is that in every movement for change there is opposition and there are neither clear cut boundaries nor easy choices for either side.
            Although the characters themselves and the inner-politics of the show have not even been touched upon, one can gather from the assessment of the basic premise of True Blood that its depiction of a society struggling with the act of progression and what is deemed normal by the set ethics and mores central to their societal beliefs. In this, our society is presented with a mirror image of what it are currently facing. Easy fix answers are not doled out at the end of every episode, nor does there seem to be any specific solutions in sight. The show, like life, is an on-going battle between factions extremely different, yet fundamentally the same in that they are fighting for what they believe.  It is a show of fantastic happenings in a non-existent town in Louisiana, but when viewed as an allegorical account of our own society, it can offer insight into our own actions and perhaps the drive that causes us to act as we do.