sex & death

MOVIES
Alan Ball Re-Emerges With Vampires, 'Towelhead'

Day to Day, September 5, 2008 · It's a big week for Alan Ball, the creator of the critically acclaimed death-obsessed series Six Feet Under. After several years out of the spotlight, his two major projects — the film Towelhead and HBO series True Blood — are emerging within a week of each other.
Like all Ball creations, both are dominated by the theme of sex.
Towelhead focuses on the story of 13-year-old Jasira, who goes to live with her strict Lebanese father in Houston during the Gulf War. There, she encounters racism, as well as a neighbor, played by Aaron Eckhart, who is eager to take advantage of her innocence.
"Between being on the receiving end of racism and totally inappropriate attention from an older man, it's the story of a young girl who does not have proper role models in her life," Ball tells Madeleine Brand. "She gets in situations that are pretty traumatic and abusive."
Ball sees his film as more of a tale of empowerment than victimization, unlike other tales of abuse.
What happens to Jasira resonates with him personally, he says, because he was abused when he was young. He also watched as his sister was killed in a car crash when he was just a teen.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has has urged Ball to change the title of the movie, which is the same as the title of the novel by Alicia Erian that inspired it. Using "towelhead" — a racial and religious slur against Muslims and Arab-Americans — in this way, the organization maintains, will only serve to increase its use.
Ball says he searched for a better title but couldn't come up with one.
"Ultimately, I feel like if you ban the use of such words — it's an unintended consequence, but those words are imbued with that much more power," he says.
Similarly, his new show, True Blood, is about discrimination … against vampires. He sets up a world in which vampires are outcasts fighting to have the same rights as humans.
"There's an anti-vampire church. They show up holding up a sign that says, 'God Hates Fangs,' " Balls says, laughing.
Vampires are often a metaphor for sex, and in Ball's show it's no different. Sex and death — the themes that dominated Six Feet Under — emerge yet again, but this time with fangs.

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On Television
by David Bianculli
 
'True Blood,' Tasty New TV From Alan Ball And HBO
 
Fresh Air from WHYY, September 5, 2008 · Ever since The Sopranos cut to black, HBO has been searching for the next big thing.
The show that replaced it, John from Cincinnati, sure wasn't it. Not only was that David Milch series a big disappointment, but its appearance meant the disappearance of Milch's Deadwood — the HBO series that, at the time, was the best drama on television.
Showtime, meanwhile, captured lots of attention — and deserved every drop of it — with Dexter, its creepy, funny, bloody drama about a serial killer who kills other serial killers.
So it makes sense that HBO, which was in need of a creative transfusion anyway, went with its own creepy, funny, bloody drama series — and went back to one of its successful producers, Alan Ball, who spent years on Six Feet Under surrounded by death and the dead.
In True Blood, which premieres Sept. 7, he's surrounded by death and the un-dead. Adapted from a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is set in a small Louisiana town — small enough to be near both bayous and run-down plantation mansions. It's based on the premise that vampires, two years earlier, finally admitted they were real, not myth, and started to mainstream into regular society. They "came out of the coffin," as one character describes it, because of the invention of a synthetic blood that could sustain vampires, so they no longer had to drink human or animal blood.
They can even go into bars and diners and order some — which is just what one vampire does in the opening episode of True Blood. His name is Bill, he's played by Stephen Moyer, and he's served by Sookie, a charming young waitress played by Anna Paquin.
Sookie has her own secrets and hidden strengths; she's telepathic, for one thing. But Sookie can't hear Bill's thoughts at all — so when he enters Sam's Diner, she knows he's different. And she's not scared. She's fascinated, and as excited as a preteen girl meeting a Jonas Brother.
If you were a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I hope you were, you're already familiar with the idea of mixing terror and humor in a vampire story. Buffy was better, and actually a lot more subtle, but True Blood approaches things differently.
Buffy, like a David Lynch drama, was about finding darkness hidden in the sunniest of places — it was set, after all, in Sunnydale. And more than anything else, Buffy was about the epic, endless struggle between good and evil.
True Blood has other things on its mind. It's big on allegory, and the tension about accepting vampires into society is an obvious play on civil rights in general, and gay rights in particular. (Sometimes too obvious, but it's interesting anyway.)
Even better is the idea that just as vampires can feed on humans, certain humans in True Blood like to feed on vampires: They either seek them out as exciting, dangerous sexual partners or synthesize vampire blood as a potent new black-market drug.
So while some outlaw vampires continue to hunt humans, there are some outlaw humans hunting vampires. Others, like Sookie and Bill, just want to get along.
But what chance do you have to love one another "till death do you part," when loving a vampire means it's death at the start?
True Blood explores that question, and others, in a show that builds slowly but surely. Stay with it for a few episodes, and you'll be craving your weekly dose of True Blood.
It's not going to replace The Sopranos — but as a synthetic substitute, it'll do for now.
David Bianculli is TV critic for Broadcasting & Cable magazine and TVWorthWatching.com.