True Blood Exorcises Environmentalism's Dark Side
Fans of True Blood have come a long way with the characters of Bon Temps, Louisiana.
What started out as a simple love story of girl meets vampire, girl dates vampire, girl uses annoying psychic powers to foil serial killer, has veered toward melodramatic epic.
But this season is different. Writer/director Alan Ball is creating a show with actual thematic depth. Other writers on this site have touched on themes of domestic violence and animal abuse, and the episodes have also as well dipped into familial loyalty, drug abuse, mental illness, and the arch-theme of them all: the moral character of love itself.
So I shouldn't have been surprised when one of the pivotal characters this season started a monologue about environmental degradation, but I did in fact rewind my DVR three times to make sure. There it was: Russell Edgington, the suave and sophisticated 3,000-year-old gay vampire, getting all hot and bothered about pollution.
For a moment my loyalty shifted away from the psychic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse to this urbane tyrant. Then my heart sank. Oh. Yeah. He's a Nazi. I asked myself: What is Alan Ball trying to say about environmentalism, and what does that say about me?
First, the scene: Russell Edgington is sitting in a car next to Eric the Hot, and apropos of almost nothing Russell says, "Throughout history I have aligned myself with or destroyed those humans in power, hoping to make a dent in mankind's race to oblivion. What other creature actively destroys his own habitat?"
He had me at "actively destoys." What wisdom. Then, his followup is what lost me: "Preening little fool that he was, Adolf was right about one thing. There is a master race-- it's just not the human race." It's a stiff rule I have, not agreeing with Hitler.
This reminded me of an earlier episode also featuring a scene from Nazi Germany, and then it clicked: Alan Ball was really talking about Nietzsche.
In his most controversial work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the Ubermensch. This word has been mistranslated as "superman" by everyone from George Bernard Shaw to DC Comics, but it actually means "overman," which is something like the next evolutionary stage in human development. Nietzsche writes, "What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, when Hitler read about the Ubermensch he thought Nietzsche was talking about him, a delusional megalomaniac. But Nietzsche's words were never intended to discriminate against any one group of humans (the Jews, for instance). His standards were high enough to discriminate against all humans.
In the end, I am tempted to agree with Russell Edgington's tyrannical tendencies for the same reasons anyone might be tempted, however briefly, into agreeing with a dictator: because he promises order. As an environmentalist, to think about the chaos of activity going on all over the planet all the time can be, frankly, frightening. But it would be the gravest of errors, Hitler's and Edgington's, to imagine that supreme control is the answer.
Russell Edgington said in last Sunday's episode: "There is only one law: the law of nature, the survival of the fittest. And we need to take this world back from the humans, not placate them with billboards and PR campaigns while they destroy it. That is not authority; that is abdicating authority." He then lopped off the head of "the Magister," a religious figure he despised.
The moral of my musings? Question authority to help the planet; become what Nietzsche really meant by Ubermensch if you will. But the world does not need anymore tyrants, even -- yes, even -- in the name of environmentalism.
Photo credit: carlosjtj
Ben Proffer
is an environment writer and has written for Sherman’s Travel and New York magazines.
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