OK, let’s stop talking about politics, Chinese aircraft carriers, and the war crimes of Barack “Assassinations ‘R Us” Obama for one whole day and see how that feels. Instead, let’s enjoy ourselves, totally, by wallowing in Drew Grant’s weekly recaps of HBO’s gorefest/whorefest, “True Blood,” for Salon, the latest example of which is here.
Reading Drew on “True Blood” is much better than trying to watch the damn show, which I actually did last year. If you haven’t caught up with it, “True Blood” is a shameless rehab of the Seventies classic “Dark Shadows,” which I suspect Drew’s grandmother watched when she was pregnant with Drew’s mother, causing Drew’s eyes, much later, to glow blood red in the dark and write prose like the following:
When night falls, Jessica goes home to break up with Hoyt, because she now is in vampire-love with Jason. Oh brother. You’d think having a part of you in Jason Stackhouse would make you feel pity for what it’s like to be Forrest Gump with a gun and abs. Nope. Jessica is filled instead with undead lust. Hoyt takes it like we (the audience, Jessica) expect – by sobbing hysterically, acting like a giant baby, and crying that he’s not worthy of her love. “I’ll die without you!” Hoyt whines, and Jessica decides that maybe that wouldn’t be so terrible. She smashes his head into something and he dies. R.I.P. Hoyt Fortenberry. Jessica runs outside, where Jason is waiting with his pickup truck (that’s how you know we’re dealing with “Cool Jason” and not “Deputy Jason”), to tell her how sexy she looks covered in his best friend’s brains.
That’s when she wakes up. Yes, it was all a dream, and Patrick Duffy is in the shower, waiting to hear all about this wondrous world she imagined. This conceit could have been totally clichéd, but saves itself when Jessica actually goes to confront Hoyt. Instead of seeing a burbling baby who needs her, Hoyt explodes in a rage, telling Jessica she’s not good enough for him. (See what they did there?) He also throws her out of the apartment by revoking his vampire invitation, which is something that would make breakups a billion times easier. Sadly, in this scenario Jason is not waiting in an awesome car, and when Jessica shows up at deputy Stackhouse’s apartment, he actually plays the “Bros Before Hoes” card and revokes his invitation as well. Ya burnt, Jessica! (Well, not actually, thanks to Jason. But you get what I mean.)
Can you follow what’s going on? Well, of course not. If you could, it would be boring.
Afterwords
When I first stumbled across Drew’s rotting corpse deathless prose, I was hoping that she had written recaps of the entire “True Blood” œuvre, all four seasons of LA writers’ overripe fantasies about life in the Deep South, the Devil’s playground of denim cutoffs and low impulse control, but that, of course, was too good to be true. She’s only been on the case for the past year. Of course, she could go back and write recaps of all the previous episodes, but that probably would be too good to be true as well. One must gather one’s rosebuds as one may.
Other Salon writers have taken a crack at “True Blood,” but none of them can crack the whip like Drew. They skim the surface, while Drew drives to the root of the matter. As Thomas Mann was wont to say, “In the end, only the exhaustive is truly satisfying,” and, with “True Blood,” you have to be exhaustive. In or out, but never half way.
