[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by Vesperae
on August 21, 2009, 4:39 am
I am TOTALLY addicted to "True Blood". It's like a funny, sexy, surreal, delicious marriage of "Twin Peaks" and "The Chronicles of the Vampires" by Anne Rice. Based on the "Sookie Stackhouse" novels by Charlaine Harris, the show is a penetrating look into our collective prejudices, notions of good and evil, faith, fear, and our most primitive and animalistic needs, desires, and longings.
If you haven't seen the show, the premise is that vampires the world over have "come out of the coffin" thanks to the invention of synthetic blood, originally intended for medical use, but quickly discovered to function as sustenance for the undead, and therefore an alternative to feeding on humans. The synthetic blood was soon after branded and marketed as "True Blood", for which the series is named.
During the second season, Hoyt Fortenberry (Jim Parrack), one of the large ensemble cast of residents of the northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps, becomes infatuated with fledgling vampire Jessica Hamby (the lovely Deborah Ann Woll) the first time he sees her entering Merlotte's, the local watering hole. But after introducing himself and joining her, he becomes completely smitten once she orders a bottle of True Blood and he realizes that she is a vampire.
What really struck me about the scene was how much it reminded me of someone with a Smoking Fetish discovering that someone that she or he already finds attractive is a smoker.
Human-vampire relationships are obviously a thematic device that has been explored before, but there is an odd plausibility to the whole mythos here, combined with a very adult take that is very engaging and erotic.
This week's forum header image, like so many, is all about comparisons, and was inspired by this week's episode of True Blood ("I Will Rise Up" / Season 2, Episode 9), in which Hoyt introduces Jessica to his mother for the first time. Hoyt's mother is a bigoted and deeply hateful woman, for whom no one will ever be good enough to date her precious "baby boy"...least of all a vampire.
But the situation presented got me thinking about how some people view smokers, and the stigma and resulting power of smoking...which really isn't that unlike the stigma and resulting power of having fangs...and being seen as something other than human...
Unfortunately, apart from one very sexy and brief smoking element in the title sequence, presumably as a visual representation of "badness", none of the vampires smoke, and smoking is rarely shown in the series, at least thus far...
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