The Sky Is Falling by Peter Biskind

Author:Peter Biskind
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620974308
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

In True Blood, when the authorities abdicate their role in legislating what is real and what is not, the supes step into the vacuum. They play the same role that nature does in extremist shows, introducing another world with its own entities and rules antithetical to the mainstream world of reason, science, and technology. More recent shows like 2016’s Westworld, Stranger Things, Falling Water, and The OA, as well as 2017’s Legion, and 2018’s Counterpart, go well beyond True Blood in positing no end of multiverses and alternative dimensions of which ours is just one. Of his Ready Player One (2018), Spielberg said, “Even with all the popcorn in a film like ‘Ready Player One,’ it does have social meaning.” Americans escaping a future, dystopic Ohio, take refuge in the virtual reality created by a game called Oasis, to which they are addicted. When authority collapses, in other words, our heretofore shared notion of “reality” is bracketed by quotes and up for grabs, available to the center, left, and right.

In True Blood, Maryann Forrester (Michelle Forbes), first appears naked with the head of a bull standing in the middle of the road next to a pig—an eyepopper even in this Louisiana hellhole. Who, or what is Maryann? As Daphne, her acolyte, explains to Sam Merlotte, “People call her all kinds of things—Kali, Lilith, Isis, Gaia. But what she really is, is a maenad.”

“What the fuck is that?”

What the fuck indeed. Maenads were devotees of Dionysus, the god of revelry known to us from Greek mythology. Following Dionysus, a.k.a. Bacchus to the Romans, they were wont to take to the forest, where they cavorted among the leaves and fronds. What did the frenzied followers of Dionysus do in the forest? They held orgies, of course. Daphne adds that the Greeks called Dionysus “Satan.” “It’s really just a kind of energy,” she says, “wild energy, like lust, anger, excess, violence, basically, all the fun stuff.”

Maryann proceeds to dissolve the social fabric of Bon Temps. She casts a spell over the not-so-good citizens of the town. Under her influence, they go berserk, making your everyday orgy look like a Baptist picnic. Maryann is the mistress of mobs. She represents the spirit of anarchy. Someone even uses the “t” word, wondering if they’ve been “attacked by terrorists.”

In her book Dancing in the Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich calls Dionysus the “first rock star,” which would make him the god of the 1960s, with both its anything-goes counterculture and its libidinous sexual revolution. The maenads, then, are the first groupies, and this subplot feels like an explicit takedown of that decade—down to one of its favorite slogans, “Fuck Authority,” scrawled on the wall of the police station, along with a capital A inscribed in a circle, for anarchy.

Maryann and her maenads attack the center from the left. The Fellowship of the Sun, on the other hand, part fundamentalist cult, part militia, and fully dedicated to the (ethnic) cleansing of vampires in the name of God, attacks it from the right.

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