Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [19]
Ball is also the master of death, jockeying effortlessly between images of horrific loss and graceful exits. In the first two seasons of True Blood alone, he crafted a series of departures that are fused forever in the imaginations of most viewers as if they witnessed them first-hand. And in the case of Lafayette, he performed a miracle . . . but you’ll have to wait and see. If it’s true that you write what you know, or, at the very least, write to respond to your surroundings, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that Ball does have a memory to draw from when musing about death, immortality, and what it means to be left behind. He explains, “When I was thirteen years old, I was in a car accident with my sister . . . It was her twenty-second birthday and she died. She died in front of me. She died all over me. [Death] stuck its big old ugly face in my face and my life changed . . . One of my ways of dealing with depressing matters is to make fun of them . . . [I]t has helped me survive a lot.”
Perhaps what is most remarkable about Alan Ball is his ability to interweave contemporary politics into these personal narratives in a way that doesn’t feel like posturing or grandstanding. He doesn’t sugarcoat the issues, allowing bigotry and hypocrisy to fuel the storylines, as they do our lives, creating an allegory that operates successfully under the genre banner. “It seems fun and sexy on the top,” says Michelle Forbes who plays Maryann Forrester. “[Yet] it makes us question ideas of compassion and judgment, of ourselves and others . . . how we are terrified of our own thinking, so we’ll latch onto group thinking.”
A closer peek behind Merlotte’s Bar reveals this smiley, happy photo of Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball. (Jodi Ross, courtesy of The Vault www.trueblood-online.com)
Never one for mob mentality, Alan Ball grew up knowing he was gay in a family in which positive body image and sexuality were not discussed openly. That’s in part why he responded to Harris’s books. “It’s certainly not a huge step for LGBT people to identify with any group of characters that are, as a group, outsiders, that mainstream society feels threatened by; that are fabulous and powerful and sexy.” He continues, “[And] I know what it’s like to be struggling with these feelings and to have these desires for sexual contact, and at the same time to be feeling I shouldn’t be having these desires . . .” He best describes the metaphor as “fluid,” something that demonstrates the difficulties of co-existing with people who are different and those who can’t accept that difference.
It’s that respect that keeps Ball’s characters from falling into one-dimensional manifestations. And by creating such complex personalities, he asks a lot of his viewers; when you raise the bar that high, it opens up more room for anything to crawl under: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ultimately, it results in the most interesting, if troubled, characters on television. Jason Stackhouse, for instance, is not a conventional bigot, his self-entitled nature stemming less from a place of hatred than fear that his loved ones’ security is at risk. Similarly, while we’re never left to forget that Bill is a vampire, Ball has revealed Bill’s self-loathing. He’s an immortal who, when human, was proud to fight for the rights of African Americans as he now tries to fight for the rights of his own people even as he struggles with what he’s done and is capable of doing again. Tara, cast as a surly, foul-mouthed, self-taught African American woman, is perhaps the furthest from her original depiction in Harris’s books, yet Ball manages to rescue her from the stereotype of the proud black woman with a chip on her shoulder. She is all these things, to be certain, but we trust the writing team to show us her story, rather than fall back on the convenience of a cause-and-effect