Mythologies of American violence in Alan Ball's True Blood series

Abstract

True Blood [2008-2014] stages a post-Katrina deliberately fantasized and violent world. Relationships between species, whose representation thus displaces the endemic confrontation between races, genders and reconstituted family members in America, are tense and dysfunctional. To capture their extreme violence, the showrunner uses the conventions of the horror genre. Vampire, werewolf movie codes and motifs are very often recycled in various episodes of the series to problematize current problems in American society such as the women’s liberation movement, the gay and lesbian rights, the civil rights movement etc. All of them provide starkly original variations on the central notions of trouble and evil.The show addresses some the following key issues: which aesthetic, formal and ideological strategies are adopted to represent the different layers of reality? What kind of connection does the series establish between reality and fiction? Or else, which function(s) does the serial format serve when it tackles specific social, political, economic or societal aspects of reality at a specific time and place?