Monkey see...

I've been indulging in a little relaxation lately, which might have been seen by the subjects I've been blogging about. This will be no exception. My current fascination has moved on from crappy sequels (although I have discovered that Princess Diaries 2 will be on TV next week and was tempted to mark it in my diary). Now I'm onto vampire-related television. The current fang-fest of choice for many is True Blood, based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels. I figured it was time I checked out what all the fuss was about after seeing an advertising poster on the Northern line platform at Waterloo station every morning for the past couple of weeks.



Getting past the point that the lead character is called Sookie - I'm still expecting some childish voice to call out, "Sookie, sookie, la la" (trust me, if you're Australian, you will have been called this at some point when you were being a 'fraidy cat or a whiner) when she gets scared of everything - there are good points to be observed in the show, for anyone who is a fan of B-grade slasher films especially. It has all the hallmarks. Loads of fairly explicit sex, for a mainstream television program. Plenty of blood and guts. A brooding anti-hero or two. A virginal blond. Oh, and of course, a former Home and Away actor. But something seemed familiar beyond that.



Let me see...a pretty innocent girl meets and falls for a brooding vampire who, against public perceptions of his kind, is a nice if slightly dark guy. She alone is not scared of him. A main character is telepathic, but can't read the mind of his/her romantic interest, something that they find fascinating. Her friend is also in love with her; at crucial moment friend turns out to be a shape shifter who takes the form of a dog. Girl's life is placed in danger because of her relationship with vampire. There's a fight, she just survives, and all seems happily ever after until the next rock looms on the horizon. So far so familiar. So, where have I heard these things before? Oh, that's right. The Twilight series.



Thinking that someone was cashing in on Stephenie Meyer's popular books, and a little annoyed that people could play with my expectations that way, I did a little googling about the books True Blood is based on. Thie first of Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series was first published in 2001, some 4 years before Meyer released Twilight, the first of her novels about the teenage Bella and vampire Edward. A little further investigation (yes, I typed some more words into Google) revealed that I wasn't the only one to have drawn the comparison. Sure the target audience is different - Bella is 17, Sookie 25 - but the overlap in narrative can't be written off as a mistake. Even more worrying is that Meyer has reportedly been sued by an author other than Harris over plagiarism in the fourth and final title of the series, while a third person has claimed that the initial idea for Twlight came from a short story written at university where she was Meyer's room mate.



So what constitutes plagiarism? There are no shortage of vampire tales out there, many of them borrowing from and distorting each other. Let's face it, it's not the world's most original theme. The modern take usually seems to derail many of the themes of earlier Dracula-style tales where women are often portrayed as temptresses and harlots preying upon the men folk. University study of literature did me no favours when it pointed out the many analogies used in horror fiction and the way they denigrated women. More recent incarnations show a strong woman who falls at the feet of a vampire - Buffy included in this interpretation, given that even the Slayer fell for not just one vamp, but 2.



Guessing I'm going to come across as a big fan of vampirism from this post. It's not entirely true. Sure, I watched Buffy. I could argue that it was for the post modern irony of the dialogue, the feminist themes, the cutting edge of sarcasm not often found in American television. I'd be lying. I watched it because it was great to see a tiny girl kicking the collective butt of both the establishment - who could forget the evil head master at Sunnydale High? - and of various insanely ugly looking monsters. That and the hot men who seemed to line up for a chance to be smashed to a pulp on a weekly basis. And yes, I've read the Twilight books in my own time and marvelled that something so badly written - and this from a fan of chick lit - could be so un-put-downable. But that's about the limit of my exposure. I don't count checking out Brad Pitt and Christian Slater in Interview with a Vampire, and I only saw Keanu Reeves in Dracula when I had to study it for university. So I'm not an afficionado. But even I could spot the similarities. How has Stephenie Meyer not been openly called to account yet? Well, perhaps because not enough people really give a damn that she ripped off someone else's plot line and re-fashioned it into her own multi-million dollar empire. Or perhaps they're all too busy drooling over Robert Pattinson and the various picturesque men from True Blood to really give a toss what the plot line is, let alone where it came from in the first place.