ABSTRACT

It is a warm Louisiana night. The air is thick with humidity. The time is the very near future. A comely young waitress from a local bar and grill walks through an old cemetery located between residential properties. The woman is not alone. She is speaking to an attractive, even handsome, figure of a male. She seems strangely drawn to him, even though-while open to new experiences, and especially those individuals she perceives as marginalized members of society-she does feel some trepidation. She is distinctly aware that this person, who communicates in a courtly manner and is obviously physically present, standing and talking with her, is, in fact, not mortal. He is a member of a unique category of legendary creature: the living dead, better known as a vampire. Instead of desiring to drink this female’s blood, the vampire is himself actually drawn to and quite fascinated with this woman as an individual, and they engage in spirited conversation. In the course of their time together over the past three days, he has sensed something unique about her humanity-supernatural gifts-which is an intrinsic aspect of her being, an important part of her everyday life. He has directly inquired several times during their initial meetings, sincerely and with great curiosity: “What are you?” What will eventually prove to be not only a personal but an intimate relationship has begun. The evocative interrogatories described above concerning one’s personal

sense of spiritual self, as well as unexpected role reversals-a vampire being moved to ask questions about the surprising nature of a human, for example-can be found in the opening episodes of the HBO network’s vampire romance and drama True Blood. While it is impossible to know over the course of a multi-year television series the direction that creators will take during an entire production-even one emanating from popular novels-it is my contention that the state of personal spirituality, as well as organized religion in America, is central to the serial’s first two seasons (2008-09). In the audio commentary accompanying the release on DVD of the first year of the series, creator and executive producer Alan Ball recalls a rather cryptic

summary of the series that he once hastily offered a studio executive at HBO: “It is about the terrors of intimacy” (Ball 2009). The intimacy to which Ball refers could be understood exclusively as interpersonal, but a more generous consideration opens up this sense of intimacy to include relationships that individuals feel with their deity, with their organized religious tradition, or with their personal spiritual selves, what I have described elsewhere as their “religious idioculture” (Primiano 1995, 48-51). Stanley Cavell distinguishes masterpieces of film and television with the

assessment that “what is memorable, treasureable, criticizable is primarily [not] the individual work [of television], but the program, the format, not this or that day of I Love Lucy, but the program as such” (Cavell 1984, 239). This analysis extends beyond Cavell’s point to engage both episodic examples and the entire program, True Blood. I propose that True Blood, as evidenced from the past two years of its broadcasts, presents a rich, disturbing, ironical, critical, depressing fantasia on American religion in general-both in its institutional expressions and also in its lived, hybrid, vernacular expressions. More specifically, the program can be seen as serving an array of interlocking functions. As a reflection of multidimensional religious life in contemporary America, the evocative program communicates a multitude of conflicted and conflicting perspectives. It acknowledges religion’s power socially and individually; it recognizes the viability of vernacular religion (“religion as it is lived, as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it”, Primiano 1995, 44) as a consistently negotiated reality; it opens up a consideration of religion not as emanating from cultural sources, but as an experience-centered phenomenon; and finally it perceives and portrays faithful believers as bound for disappointment by an apparently detached God, unmoved by human pleas for assistance, transcendence, or immanence. This article explores the link between True Blood’s re-telling of the

legend of the vampire and the state of normative religious traditions and vernacular spirituality in contemporary America. This constellation of concerns invites closer scrutiny. As provocative as the actual dialogue and action of the drama is, my essay centers its focus on the clues provided by the show’s weekly introductory credits, arguing that their visual style speaks not only to a “new iconography” (Hoover 2001), but quite possibly to something much larger: what I see as a “new iconoclasm” of American religion being mediated by this television fantasia in the post-9/11 era.2