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I am a vampire, and I am not ashamed
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a feature for Scotland on Sunday about True Blood, the vampire series on Channel 4. It was written in a hurry and ended up a bit muddled (it’s here should anyone be interested), especially towards the end, where I tried to make a connection between True Blood, the fetish club Torture Garden and the Glasgay festival in a way that was intended to say something positive about changing attitudes towards sexuality, but which I’m now thinking did none of the above any favours, and said more about my sexual hang-ups than anyone else’s.
The opening line of the feature was ‘Last weekend I went to a fetish club’. The amount of grief I put myself through, as I wondered exactly how to follow this statement up, should probably have warned me that I was in tricky territory. At first I decided I should qualify that opening line. It was the first time I’d been to Torture Garden, I wrote. Not feeling like putting on lots of rubber gear or exposing too much skin, I dressed up as a kind of ghostly Victorian magician, in pin stripes, frock coat, hat and make up. Etc.
While doing this I told myself I was adding ‘colour’ to the feature - writing a ‘fun’ outsider’s view of a fetish club for readers who were likely to be fellow outsiders. Then it hit me. Why was I so keen to point out that I was not typically a Torture Garden sort of person? I was there, so I clearly am a Torture Garden sort of person. Why try and justify that, or tone down my involvement in it, or whatever it was I was doing, unless I was somehow ashamed of it? So I took all the ‘colour’ out, deciding it was irrelevant to my main argument.
What I didn’t do - and what would have been smarter than what I did do - is write about how this is exactly what we do with vampires. This is what vampires are for, in fact - to push away feelings we’d rather not deal with, to externalise them. We are drawn to vampires, while telling ourselves we are not vampires.
Vampires, both scary and seductive, have long been used to symbolise all kinds of things that we would like to do, but are also frightened of doing. The hugely successful Twilight, as has been widely observed, is really about teenage sexual anxiety (the fear that if you get too intimate with someone, you’ll get hurt). The vampire in Let The Right One In is a fantasy protector figure for a misfit schoolboy whose life is being destroyed by bullies. When the vampire kills all the bullies at the end it is really just doing what he would like to do, but letting him off the hook. The Lost Boys, with its tale of a vulnerable family threatened by a gang of young vampires, is about adults’ fear of out-of-control teenagers (and their secret desire to kill them) and children’s fear of out-of-control teenagers (and their secret desire to be one). Vampires, in other words, are us - our darkest desires, projected on to something else in a way that allows us either to deny those desires exist, or - more positively - explore them in safety.
True Blood does exactly this but, cleverly, also turns it on its head - in its version of the world, vampires are still a symbolic ‘other’, but also real people openly walking among us. The series is set in a parallel world where vampires have come out of the coffin, as it were, thanks to a synthetic drink called Tru-Blood which means they no longer need to feed on humans. After hiding from us for centuries - a little like gay people, the series suggests - they now mingle with the living (only at night, obviously) and campaign for vampire rights in the media. They face hatred and bigotry, particularly from the religious, and much of the storyline is about the uneasy co-existence between vampires and humans.
So they’re sort of us, but sort of not. True Blood constantly draws parallels between the treatment of vampires and other social groups. One of the main characters is a black, gay chef called Lafayette, who has to endure religious and redneck ignorance just as the vampires do (there is even, not too subtly, a roadsign that says ‘God hates fangs’). Another black character, Tara, makes tart remarks about slavery to every white person she meets.
True Blood’s main vampire, Bill Compton, wants to live an ordinary “mainstream” life. He dates a human called Sookie (who is amazed to discover that a vampire could have a name as boring as Bill) and even gives a history lecture at his local church at the invitation of Sookie’s grandmother (yes, he tells his astonished, ill-informed audience, vampires can look at crucifixes without bursting into flames).
Other vampires have no desire to conform and regard Bill as a sellout (these vampires hang out in a “vampire bar” which bears a passing resemblance to Torture Garden). The humans, meanwhile, fear the vampires but secretly envy them. Lafayette is a drug dealer who sells vampire blood, whose effects are a little like Viagra and LSD combined, and sex with a vampire is seen as a transgressive thrill – an image that plenty of gay people, and black people too, will find wearily familiar. Familiar, too, will be the vampires’ resentment at the hypocrisy of a “mainstream” that is reluctant to accept them as they are, but happy to gawp at and exploit them.
No-one, crucially, is immune to ignorance and hypocrisy. In one scene Tara warns Sookie that vampires can hypnotise you. “Yeah, and black people are lazy and Jews have horns,” Sookie scolds her, with a sarcastic and self-righteous tut. It later turns out vampires can hypnotise you. Other human characters constantly accuse vampires of doing vile, ‘inhuman’ things, and then have it pointed out to them that humans do a lot worse every day. The vampires, meanwhile, are often as bigoted about humans as humans are about them.
True Blood, then, is about the way we project on to others the things we don’t like about ourselves, or the things that make us afraid, and how silly that can often be. As the series progresses, sadly, it gets a lot sillier itself, and a lot of its early seriousness of purpose is lost. By the end of season two the entire town is under the spell of an evil goddess and demanding a human sacrifice, like something out of The Wicker Man. I suspect a few peace-loving pagans might have something to say about that. Season two also squanders a potentially fascinating storyline about a Jesus-like vampire called Godric. Just as it looks like Godric is about to inspire a kind of vampire version of early Christianity, the series seems to lose its nerve and abruptly kills him off. Did True Blood’s creators think that Jesus with fangs was too much for US audiences to handle? If so, maybe True Blood isn’t quite the victory for liberal thinking that it seemed to be at first.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking of going to Torture Garden again if it comes back to Edinburgh. I might even be more daring with my costume next time. I am a vampire, and I am not ashamed.
Andrew
