Gendered Judgmentalism

When Jason's Hot Shot rape arc first launched, our friend Amy (webmistress of the clever and hilarious She Liked Imaginary Men Best of All) was justifiably outraged.

She commented on Facebook that if a woman were strapped to a bed and used as a breeding mare, people would be going nuts. Rebecca responded that she felt people were supposed to be disgusted and outraged by this depiction of the repeated violation of a man by a string of (I would argue also exploited) women.

And during Sookie's (hot! hot! hot!) Bill/Eric dream this past Sunday, she admonished the two of them for buying into the double standard that she must be one of theirs, but she - as the proper lady she is -shoudn't even entertain the idea of having both of them be hers.

And forget the idea of a vampwich with Sookie in the middle; that's just too far outside the boundaries of society's standards for acceptable female sexuality (but as Sookie said, it's OK if the threesome consists of girl-boy-girl, even if the players barely know each other)!

It was her dream, so ultimately they both caved. I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that she emphasized how her desire for both of them to love her was born out of her total, complete love for the two of them. Because women are hardwired to conflate love and sex, right...and to reserve intimate relations for partners with whom she is in love, rather than in lust, with?

Now, I'm not advocating for indiscriminate, lust-driven sex outside of a caring, mutually consenting, adult relationship. I'm just interested in seeing more expansive options for women to express ourselves and our sexuality outside the constricted bounds of our society's gender-based norms, is all.

This idea of double-standard and reversal got me to thinking...

...If a woman were carrying on a purely physical affair or two while still in love with, or hung up on an ex-lover (as Bill had been doing with Katerina and Portia) how would that be viewed?

How is it viewed when he's doing it?

Does it negate his continuing love for Sookie?


She sure let him have it for "sticking his fangs and God knows what else into every girl in Bon Temps". S4E6 I Wish I Was the Moon

Is it OK because he's a man, and as such, has needs for
companionship and sexual gratification that must be satisfied?

Granted, he has been upfront with these women and has not led them on.
He even told Portia outright (albeit rather coldly) that he could never love her, and although it was she who suggested that they casually add sex to the equation of their already successful and friendly professional relationship, I'm pretty sure I saw her flinch.




Yet she accepted Bill's terms for taking their relationship to the next level.

Does this diminish her femininity?

Reduce her to a cliché with all the fixins expected of the (in her words) "smartest and most powerful" professional woman in Bon Temps, i.e. ballbuster, bitch, etc.?

She goes after what she wants. She's willing to enter into a "friends with benefits" situation. She's a self-described "terrier", as a lawyer and a lover.

Does this make her emotionally bankrupt (an undesirable trait in a woman)?

Would these pitbull qualities make others see Portia as being too much like a man to be a real woman?

Now, since Bill found out that Portia is actually his great-great-great-great granddaughter, we're not likely to be seeing her again (at least not in his bed) any time soon. But honestly, don't you think his brush-off was a little silly and condescending?

Sure, Portia was very aggressive in her rationalization of incest. And yes, he's got an awful lot on his hands, what with his kingdom facing the witch crisis, and all. To top it off, Bill was not overly invested in their brief relationship; he had promised her nothing.

Even so, no matter how busy Bill was, however eager to short circuit their dance around his desk, with him in retreat as she gave chase he may have been, didn't such an intelligent, sophisticated woman deserve a letdown that didn't involve being glamoured to scream at this sight of him?

Please weigh in below!

~ Rachel

"You Smell Like Dinner"

Your blood tastes like freedom, Sookie; like sunshine in a pretty blond bottle.
                                                                            ~Eric Northman

As I sit here nursing a ginger ale on the rocks, I wonder if maybe it isn't high time for Sookie to start wearing a different eu de toilette. I mean, after all, Eric isn't the only one who has "complimented" her on her scent, in a more-menacing-than-admiring kind of way. You haven't forgotten Liam's "Man, she smells fuckin' sweet!" (S1E3 Mine), have you? I doubt Sookie has, either.

Thing is, there's no lotion, potion, body splash, perfume, or other such fragrance-emitting product that's responsible for the way Sookie smells.

In Season 3 Sookie began to struggle with her identity and self-worth after discovering that it's her blood - and its scent and taste; the delicate bouquet (in S4E3 If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'? Eric sniffs the air, catching her perfume which he can only describe as being "Like wheat, honey and sunlight") and exquisite flavor of it that has drawn Bill, and perhaps others as well, to her. She starts to think that it's not her - not who she is, but how she tastes; how her blood can service others - that matters. She's just the [pretty] packaging. 

And everyone, meaning every supe, has noticed. Her special palate, that is - although perhaps one might be sensitive to her growing sense of self-doubt, too.

Lorena may have hated Sookie, but she sure didn't mind her taste: "No wonder Bill was drawn to you. You're delicious.” (S3E7 Hitting the Ground).

While Bill insisted to Sookie, "it is not your blood I love. I love you. Your heart, your mind, your soul... you have brought light back into my life", he did admit that hers was, "the most delicious blood I've ever tasted" (S3E10 I Smell A Rat).

Last season, upon meeting Sookie - decked out in a lacy white top and cute denim mini; looking as much the fish out of water at Lou Pines as anyone likely could - Alcide's werewolf bouncer buddy eyed her up and down and quipped, "you look like dinner". In the next scene, if you recall, she was nearly sexually assaulted.

Even good 'ol Sam's thoughts echoed this "you smell good enough to eat" theme when Sookie listened in on him during their G-rated Season 1 canoodle in his office. Is that really any wonder, though, since his go-to shift is a collie, and we all know that man's best friend's nose is a mighty powerful organ! Even still, knowing that her smell is probably a big part of what caused her sexy boss to pine over her for so long has got to be quite a blow for Sookie. 

And the list goes on. The cavalcade of vamps, weres, and shifters itching to get a taste of Sookie seems virtually never ending.

We may well be onto something here, as if the episode's title alone wasn't enough of a hint. In her essay, "The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle" Sofia Sanchez-Grant points out society's view that the (patriarchally encoded) female body is consumable.

And not just Sookie's body.

Other women are consumable commodities, too.

Now, of course, I know men are fed on as well, I do watch the show; but I think the sociocultural meaning of some of the examples I've pulled out here makes the consumption of females a little different.

Remember how Eric paid a "blood hooker" so that he could feed on her - and he seemed to prefer that she struggle and pretend that she didn't want it?

And when he consumed Hadley against her will as leverage to get her paramour the Queen to reveal  information about Sookie, he rated the other Stackhouse girl's taste like he was reviewing a take-out joint for the local paper: "Mmm-mmm. I 'd give her three stars." (S3E7 Hitting the Ground).

Speaking of take-out joints, perhaps you'll recall how Russell and Lorena deliberated before commanding Bill to procure a woman from a strip club for their dining pleasure, just like they were ordering off a Chinese food menu:

Russell: In the mood for anything in particular?
Lorena: Someone smoky. Not too fatty.
Russell: See, I was thinking... ethnic.
Lorena: Mm.
(S3E4 9 Crimes)

Once procured, they feasted on this "disposable sex worker" with relish - her blood running out of their limo and onto the ground like a perverse chocolate fountain.

Russell's appetite for "something ethnic" calls to mind the language of "gastronomic sexuality" Raquel Z. Rivera (2003, p. 129) describes as being part of the hip-hop lexicon when it comes to the "sweet, thick, pretty, round and various shades of brown...blackberry molasses to butta pecan" women that populate many rap music videos.

If you remember dancing to Big Pun's hit "Still Not A Player" in the clubs back in the late '90's like I do, you know that blackberry molasses to butta pecan reference above alludes to this song. The line's actually, "I love from butta pecan to blackberry molass' I don't discriminate, I regulate every shade of that ass".

Back in S4E1 the drunkard hanging around the back alley near the cagefighting ring tossed similar language at Tara and Naomi, labeling them for his consuming gaze as: "...some of that chocolate banana swirl...every woman's got a price".

In her essay, "Butta Pecan Mamis: Tropicalized Mamis - 'Chocolate Caliente'" Rivera points out that while the video's camerawork alternating between groups of lighter and comparatively darker-skinned women in order to punctuate the singsong chorus, "Boriqua, Morena" is meant to distinguish between these two groups of women, they come together by virtue of Pun's sexual desire.

According to Rivera, these women are eroticized and exoticized, as Pun lays claim to both Puerto Rican and African American "ghetto brunettes". Boriquas and morenas, "brown" women and "black" women may be distinct, but as he and other artists including Jay Z ("Who You Witt II") and Son Doobie ("XXX Funk") construct them, they are part of a commercialized landscape of desire. Sistas and mamis are "their" women to be consumed.  

Here we have the beginnings of the transcultural reality of the "I-want-them-all" mentality, where women are not real subjects, complex and distinct, but interchangeable; "infinitely substitutable beings" (p. 145).

Tim Ward illustrates this concept clearly. In his book Savage Breast: One Man's Search for the Goddess (2005, p. 28) he recalls a translation of old Tibetan meditations that contained his ultimate sexual fantasy:

The sutra instructed the reader to visualize a Bodhisattva sitting in meditation while he projects 200 emanations of himself, each one appearing to a dakini, a powerful and beautiful female spirit. Immediately the 200 dakinis become sexually magnetized to his 200 emanations, and they couple in passionate embrace. To each feminine spirit, the Bodhisattva appears as if he is the only one, and each of them gives herself completely to him. But the true Bodhisattva, he sits alone in his meditation in perfect detached repose. I realized that this was my fantasy, to have every beautiful woman magnetized to me so I could enjoy them all, while giving myself emotionally to none of them. That's what I wanted with the women I had affairs with. Not that I ever once said that I loved them, ever once tried to fool them. Is that evil? I don't know. I don't think so. Is it shitty? Well, I imagine the dakinis would be pretty pissed off at the Bodhisattva is they knew... 

He wanted them all - all for his consumption.

In the sphere of the commercial consumption of female sexuality, women are "indispensible as members of the collective at the core of male pleasure - females, honeys, hotties, bitches, hoes, freaks, chickenheads, pigeons, chicks - they are branded with the 'mark of the plural' that makes them expendable and easily substitutable as individuals" (Rivera, 2003, p. 147).   

Sookie deflects Eric's characterization of her as being consumable; his leering gaze as he utters the phrase, "Well, aren't you sweet" suggesting that she is, in fact, as Rivera (2003, p. 127) writes of the six chocolate-drenched young women [of color - chocolate caliente] swirling in a cup of hot cocoa on the cover of the 1998 rap album The Rude Awakening "sexily awaiting ingestion". Sookie replies, "Not really." (S1E4 Escape from Dragon House)

So she's seen as consumable alright, even though she's like not to be - but perhaps not so interchangable. There's something different about her that sets her apart, that makes her extra-special-tasty. References to Sookie's "sweetness" are constant; no doubt, they are a marker of her "alignment with the good" which makes her not unlike Dracula's Mina Harker. In the words of the character Abraham Van Helsing, the fictional Mina is:

...one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a Heaven where we can enter, and that its light [emphasis mine, sound familiar?] can be here on earth...so true, so sweet, so noble...(p. 226)

According to Susan Parlour (2009), the text of Dracula is littered with references to Mina's sweetness, who, though she transgressed the role of women in Victorian society to a certain degree, was readmitted to the patriarchal machine due, largely in part, to her sexual reticence and acceptance of the sexual mores and etiquette of the times.

Likewise, might Sookie be seen as an avatar of virtuous and virginal [white] womanhood? After all, according to prevailing stereotypes at least, women of color are more primal and sexual but in the world of True Blood the taste of virgin blood is the best of all, second only to baby's blood. When she was a virgin, Sookie's blood was covetted, to be sure...but like butta pecanness, her fairy blood's got an enticing flavor all its own that makes her a highly sought after commodity.       

She does it again, thowing off amnesia Eric's hungry advances in Season 4's 3rd episode, yelling at him, "I'm not your fucking dinner!". Later in the episode, she reminds Eric of how he tasted her against her will; that he basically "fang raped" her. He seemed genuinely taken aback and sorry.

Must we be seen as essentially edible? And if we are, does this essentialism isolate us within our conmumable bodies from other facets of ourselves, i.e. the "masculine" brain and the "feminine" body?

Atwood's character Joan rejects the multi-breasted Diana of Ephesus as a symbol of "the essence of femininity itself"(2003, p. 80).

It is, rather, a "paradigm of the patriarchally controlled female body"  (2003, p. 80):

She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though inflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with sprouts, but several of the breasts were out of order.

I stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, things for myself. 

Sanchez-Grant writes that Joan's assertion is a protest against a society that situates her as a reproductive machine, suggesting as the food imagery and the character's unromantic terms imply - to be endlessly giving, to nourish and sustain others is "simply to be edible" (2003, p. 80).

My conclusion is that woman can be drained, she is not just a font of nourishment for [male] others.

Here's some other references to the edible & the consumable in You Smell Like Dinner:

• When Sookie walked in on Jessica feeding on a man other than Hoyt in the ladies room at Fangtasia, the baby vamp spat, "I can eat who I want"
• Bill's response to Nan Flanagan when in London, 1982, she asks him why he doesn't kill his prey: "They might be dinner but they don't deserve to die"
• The conversation within Sam's new shifter entourage about the ethics of factory egg farming and the bourgeois attitudes of some animal rights activists

What do these themes mean to you? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please share them in the comments space below.

~ Rachel

References

Parlour, S. (2009). Vixens and Virgins in the 19th century Anglo-Irish Novel: Representations of the feminine in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Journal of Dracula Studies, # 11.


Rivera, R. Z. (2003). New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave.


Sanchez-Grant, S. (2008). The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Journal of International Women's Studies, Vol. 9, #2.


Ward, T. (2006). Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess. New York, NY: O Books

And is he dark enough? Enough to see your light? IMAGES OF HOLISM IN TRUE BLOOD

And is he dark enough? Enough to see your light?

~ Accidental Babies by Damien Rice

Rebecca will be so proud of me, quoting her beloved Damien. But really, I couldn't resist. I've been plotting and scheming for a way to best to use these lyrics for quite a while in relation to Sookie and Bill, and since it's last call for this idea around holism I brewed up during Season 3, I figure it's now or never!

Here's my thought process. Much ado has been made about how they are just far too different for their love to ever work; she's mortal, he's vampire; she's of this era, he's of one long bygone. And perhaps, most importantly...

SHE IS

  OF THE

                                                   LIGHT

AND HE IS

  OF THE

                         DARK

Remember when Sookie first met Claudine? How during an out of body experience Sookie's soul, or consciousness arose from the hospital bed where her body lay hooked up to life support and followed a trail of flower petals out the door and into an alternate, liminal plane where fairies romped amidst the tombstones of Bon Temps Cemetery?

Recall how, as a shadow swiftly enveloped the heretofore sunny scene, Claudine fearfully declared, "The dark approaches"? Next came her hasty retreat - remember how she paused to warn Sookie, "He (Bill) will steal your light" and, in response to her protestations that Bill is not like that, to admonish Sookie, "Don’t let him take it from you, promise me!” before slipping below the surface of her light pool escape hatch?

Can you feel Descartes' influence?

I know, I know, it's a silly reference to glamouring (you know how Bill generally says, "can you feel my influence?" when he's working his powers of persuasion) and perhaps an even sillier insinuation that a 17th century French philosopher would have anything at all to do with True Blood.



 René Descartes (1596-1650)

Or, maybe this Descartes thing isn't so silly after all; let's unpack it a little, shall we?

We are living in a time of profound disconnection and extraordinary dissonance; a time in which the vestiges of what Professor Emeritas of Rutgers University Bruce Wilshire points out as a Baroque era (particularly Cartesian) conception of reality and our place in it still holds sway. This framework highlights “self as scientific knower, self as self-sufficient individual and as ego, self as master manipulator of objects” (p. 37). It is connected to the famous mechanistic theory of nature that requires us to perform an immense abstraction from our own bodies and the world. 

Cartesian science believed that in any complex system the behavior of the whole could be analyzed in terms of the properties of the parts. Remnants of Caresian dualism remain in contemporary consciousness: self cut off from other, mind from body or matter, human from animal, present from past and future (Wilshire, 1990). Some examples of other heirarchical dualisms (the first-stated member of the pair is considered as superior, the second-stated as inferior Other) that trickle down to us today include Hegel and Rousseau's public/private, male female, eason/nature; Plato's reason/body, reason/emotion, and universal/particular.

These dualisms are seen as totalizing, meaning that they are thought to exhaust the alternatives within the parameters in question (Wilshire, 1990). What does this mean? According to theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu (p. 26, 2002), classical logic is founded on three axioms:

1. The axiom of identity: A is A
2. The axiom of noncontradiction: A is not non-A
3. The axiom of the excluded middle: There exists no third term (3rd term = "T"); T is at the same time A and non-A

In other words, something is what it is - absolutely. Classical logic renders it impossible to consider day as night, black as white, life as death...

...feminine as masculine (Nelsan Ellis told the crowd at Dragon * Con 2010 that Alan Ball's vision for Lafayette to embody both the feminine and the masculine originally threw him for a loop; even Eric's metrosexual vibe may appear suspect to some)  

    or dark as light...

No, no, no...that would be repugnant to the prescribed order! That's why Bill entering the land of fairie is seen by Claudine as such an aberation...dark simply cannot be light!

According to dualistic thinking the two obviously must cancel one another out - they cannot occupy the same space.

We've got to let old Descartes off the hook at least a little bit for this schismatic, fractious worldview; even Wilshire (1990) prudently avoids holding him wholly culpable for the pervasiviness of dualistic  influences which have given rise to the divisive and isolating trends that have dominated much of modernity: xenophobia, racism, sexism, etc. He implies that the genesis of the patriarchal period around 2500 B.C.E. set the movement towards rigid, rationalistic thought in motion and that definition as negation (if it's this it can't be that) has its roots in Aristotelian philosophy. 

Wilshire (1990) cites the great circles and mounds of Neolithic Europe as evidence of the integral thought patterns that were alive in our dim past, long before the shift to the dualistic modes that dominate today.

Stone Age Orkney Island neolithic womb-tomb earthen structure

These earthen structures were temple observatories constructed around 3000 B.C.E. They anticipate field and relativity theory in the sense that space and time were seen as interdependent. Human reality was experienced as being interdependent with space-time; the human life cycle nested within the Cosmic. Within the vast, pregnant-seeming bellies of the mounds people reawakened to their own possibilities as they observed the regenerative course of Nature through the deaths and rebirths of the seasons and the movements of astrological bodies (Wilshire, 1990). "Human birth and death were just two ritual acts in the great sprial of life" (Ward, p. 88, 2006).

Newgrange spirals

Hypogeum spirals

   

Another vision of our realty has been set forth in the last century through systems thinking; a “new” way of thinking in terms of connectedness, relationships, and context that recalls the worldviews of these indigenous and ancient goddess oriented civilizations. Quantum physics in which subatomic particles are not seen as “things” but as interconnections among things; Gestalt psychology which is characterized by its “hunger for wholeness” that sees the existence of irreducible wholes as a key component of perception (Capra, 1997), and deep ecology which seeks to expand the notion of self beyond the confines of the ego and personal history, and to extend concepts of self-interest to include the welfare of all beings (Macy, 1991) are part of the systems thinking zeitgeist. 

According to activist, systems scholar and progenitor of The Work that Reconnects Joanna Macy (1991), a dramatic shift is occurring in our time from notions of linear, unidirectional causality to perceptions of dynamic interdependence where phenomena affect each other in a reciprocal or mutual fashion. This new-old picture, or likeness of reality that is emerging in our times - which was the prevailing metaphor for the Cosmos and human’s place in it in Neolithic civilization - is the ideal that Wilshire (1990) says might be embodied in contemporary life, if we are inventive and resolute enough.  

Returning now to True Blood, might the scene below in which Sookie and Bill join forces to help Tara throw off Maryann's possession be an expression of the integral - the light and dark, female and male unified - a vision that can help synthesize the fragmentary aspects of the self and culture into a meaningful whole?

On their own, neither Sookie nor Bill were able to break Maryann's hold on Tara. Only together were they able to help her return to reality.

Scholar and midwife Arisika Razak (1990) proposes that birth is our major metaphor for life and coming into being, a universal and central aspect of human experience that can serve as the nucleus around which we can build a paradigm of positive interaction and functioning - and a model for physical, emotional, an dspiritual transcendence.


Transdisciplinary theorists' calls for a non-dual vision of reality are pregnant with allusions to birthing. Nicolescu offers, "In my view, the 'death of man' is after all a necessary stage in history, one that anticipates our second birth (p. 74, 2002). He links the evolution of humanity with the evolution of he universe, and suggests that a new type of human (remember the idea of the eco-individual in my last post?) homo sui transcendentalis is in the process of being born. Of this new type of human, Nicolescu says, "He is not some new man but man reborn (p. 74, 2002). Also on p. 74, Nicolescu states that the process of his (new man's) birth involves transgression, originally meaning "to pass to the other side, to cross" - "crossing from one level of Reality to another, or from one level of perception to another". Morin and Kern (p. 18, 1992) hypothesize, "It, starting from a paradigm of complexity, a new method can be born, can take flesh, can advance, make progress, then it would be able perhaps to start a revolution everywhere.


Let's apply this birthing imagery to the scene above.     

When I rewatched it recently I noticed how, as Sookie stared into Tara's "dark, empty" saucer eyes trying to make a connection, she said to a desperate Lafayette, "it's not her, she's gone". Unable to penetrate Maryann's control over Tara, Sookie turned to Bill for help. He counseled, "you have to go further into her mind than you ever have before". Sookie tried again, and was only able to grasp quick flashes of Tara's experiences with Maryann. Bill decided glamouring Tara may help, suggesting, "if we leave her like this who knows what harm may come to her...or to us".


Crouching in front of Tara as Sookie cradled her from behind, Bill's attempts at glamouring began as gentle cajoling but became a labored affort. At first, it seemed to me like Bill was taking the role of a priest performing an exocrism but the more I thought about it, I see this scene as a birthing. Together, Sookie and Bill - Sookie in the position of mother, Bill as midwife, bringing Tara across the "something I can't cross - an abyss" (Sookie to Bill)  - the chasm neither of them could span alone.

Duality working in concert. The spell is broken. Tara is whole again.

What do you think?

Have you noticed any other images of holism in True Blood  - anything that for you communicates the truth of the Tejo-Bindu Upanishad: To direct the mind towards the basic unity of all things and to divert it from the seizing of differences; therein lies bliss? 

Please use the comments section below to share your thoughts!

~ Rachel

References

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Macy, J. (1991). Mutual causality in Buddhism and general systems theory: The dharma of natural systems. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the new millennium.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London, UK: Routledge.

Razak, A. (1990). “Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth”. (pp. 165-172). In Reweaving the world: The emergence of ecofeminism”. Diamond, I. & Orenstein, G.F. (Eds.) San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Ward, T. (2006). Savage breast: One man’s search for the goddess. New York, NY: O Books

Wilshire, B. (1990). The moral collapse of the university: Professionalism, purity, and alienation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.       

Character Spotlight: One of my favorite "characters" in True Blood

"Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto" ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

     One of the many reasons I have fallen so passionately in love with True Blood has been because of its character development. I want to take some time to discuss a character so strong, so well developed, a character so integral to the story without her the show could not survive. No, I'm not talking about Sookie! This character has been in every episode, every scene, and almost if not every frame of True Blood.  The character I turn my spotlight on in this post is.....MUSIC!

     You may not even notice her at first, but she is there. She hangs around in the background...off camera, out of sight, but never out of mind. She lays in wait to prey upon the emotions of the characters; fueling their fears, their desires. She builds pressure, creates anxiety, she gets our hearts beating with her deep crescendo as we follow along to her pulsating rhythm.

     Music is the soul-the backbone of True Blood, and we have composer Nathan Barr and the many talented musical supervisors of the show to thank. From the romantically haunting strings that permeate throughout Bill and Sookie's love theme to the sinister rattle and hiss of Maryann's theme music in season 2, music and song been established as legitimate vehicles meant to drive the audience into the very heart of the story. Music and film have been partners from the very start. Even silent film couldn't resist the power that music possessed. According to the silent film page on Wikipedia "From the very beginning, music was recognized as essential, contributing to the atmosphere and giving the audience vital emotional cues."

     If the power of the instrumental score were not enough, the musical department takes it one step further by introducing song, that is music plus vocal performance. It's no secret that every episode title of True Blood comes from a song used within the episode, so it should also be no secret that listening to the lyrics of said song may further inform the viewer to "vital emotional cues" as well. The title song, which plays at the end of every episode may get lost if you don't pay close enough attention. That being said, I offer this challenge...go back and watch your favorite episode. Take note of the title. Watch the episode carefully, looking for themes. Allow yourself to get caught up in the sonic landscape and when the credits role sit there silently and listen. Listen to the lyrics, let the poetry get inside of you. After all is said and done let me know if your insight to a certain character, scene, or the episode as a whole hasn't changed...I bet it has!!

     We here at The Pierced Pomegranate Tavern would like you all to raise a glass for this often overlooked, but never underestimated character. Here's to you Music...for your commitment to greatness, for never settling to play a bit part, for never "phoning in" a performance and for always challenging us to look beneath the surface! In the immortal words of Russell Hammond (from the movie Almost Famous) "I dig music!!!" ~ Rebecca