a Rex Beavers rundown

I’ve found myself obsessed with a waitress. Like a fool, I have become prey to the charms often piled on thick by waitresses in an attempt to garner more money from their tips. I come back to her every week, and I’m not the only one. Every Sunday night I, along with millions of other hopeless devotees, pay a visit to Sookie Stackhouse. The typical things a waitress might do to encourage repeat business are not at play here. She doesn’t feign the drop of a pen and bend over slowly when within our view, and she isn’t the most beautiful waitress out there. The reason we keep coming back to the gap-toothed waitress who works at a dive bar in the back country woods of Louisiana is because we like trash.

It’s in defiance of television’s best efforts to sell us the glamorous that we keep coming back to her. A flip through the channels will reveal numerous beautiful women with gapless smiles. These women will often be professionals. Lawyers and doctors and women with vast educational backgrounds who live in exotic or urban locales. These PhD having, highly trained beauties will walk the busy, much depicted streets New York City or sift sand through their toes on a beach in Miami, but we keep going back to a piece of shit hole in the wall bar to follow the adventures of a waitress. Sure, she’s telepathic, but that’s nothing new. Mediums and ghost whisperers alike have been featured on our television screens, but they weren’t trashy. They had degrees and money and qualifications and impressive contacts. They didn’t live in bum-fuck Louisiana and they weren’t resigned to wear short shorts and tight white shirts while delivering bar food to Southern folk.
Well, maybe its the vampires. Vampires are a big draw, right? Perhaps it’s despite the trash that we keep coming back to Bon Temps so that, nipples piqued, we can bask in the erotic glow of the vampire. But even the vampires of True Blood have a decidedly trashy quality. Unlike the aristocratic narcissists who pranced along the pages of Ann Rice novels, the vampires of True Blood are warriors and soldiers who often wear leather and choose their prey from a selection of bar floozies while sitting in the darkest corner of a cheap bar along a country highway. Twilight offers us a cute high school guy while Sookie Stackhouse finds herself choosing between a straight-laced confederate soldier and a sleazy nightclub owner.

And then there’s the sex. Sex is deeply embedded in pretty much everything you’ll see in prime-time, and True Blood is no exception, but the level of eroticism you’ll find here is the product a common interest in burly, barrel chested men that is shared by a middle aged gay man and a giggling Southern woman. Yes, there are lots of naked women, and Anna Paquin has my life-long respect for shamelessly baring it all, earning her place in a hall of heroes occupied by a beloved number of scream queens and final girls who had no qualms about showing us their boobs. But bosoms aside, the largest source of sex appeal in Bon Temps is found in musclebound men. Alan Ball seems to enjoy a strong upper body, and readers of the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries, on which True Blood is based, can tell you that author Charlaine Harris spends a good amount of time describing, in delighted detail, the naked male form. While most of Hollywood and television focus their depictions of sex steadily on the softer, feminine form, True Blood exposes us to a large number of often hairy men. A rougher variety of sex is also found here, with the more tender scenes often culminating in pools of blood. Sex in True Blood is different. You’re treated to several scenes of hard-bodied men pounding away at supple young women in fast-motion, like rabbits on steroids. It’s trashier, and it seems to be filling a void for us every Sunday night.

True Blood is something that would be right at home on the drive-in screen. If you’re a regular reader here at the Collective and you haven’t given it a chance yet, I don’t think you would be disappointed upon doing so. Join me and millions of others every week as we raise our hands and recite the Drive-In Oath as a new episode of True Blood approaches. But during this oath, it’s probably a good idea to keep your view at eye level, because while one hand is raised high, when it comes to True Blood I think I have a good idea what several of us will be doing with the other hand.

We’ll be masturbating.