Sunday, February 20, 2011
True Blood Opening Sequence Segmentation/Analysis
So partly because of different schedules for everyone, partly just because I have too much time on my hands, I thought I'd open this forum for discussion of class-related issues, examples, etc. that extend and clarify the things we're talking about in class.
To that end, I've included below my segmentation and shot breakdown of the True Blood intro (you can see how extensive semioptic analysis gets) along with my analysis below the table. See what you think, feel free to disagree with me.
As Seiter said in the semiotics readings, perhaps the main point of the method is to fource us to slow down and take the content seriouskly: it's easy to make generalizations aobut TV content, but often when we look more closely, those generalizations are belied by the texts themselves!
| Shot # | Video | Audio |
| 1 | Catfish in swamp |
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| 2 | tilt-up; MS water, weeds in bayou |
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| 3 | Dissolve to CU of crocodile head (alive?); tilt-up |
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| 4 | Truck forward through reeds, bight sun |
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| 5 | Truck R-L past shack on stilts in swamp |
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| 6 | LS, dusk, rural highway | When you came in |
| 7 | Low-angle LS of gothic house | the air |
| 8 | Quick flash: naked white bodies, black background |
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| 9 | Truck L-R past squalid homes | went out. |
| 10 | Low-angle MCU black female gospel singers clapping |
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| 11 | Truck L-R past dilapidated “Lucky Liquor” store | And every |
| 12 | Found footage, B&W, protestor dragged off by police | shadow |
| 13 | Found footage, bystanders looking at camera; all white men in white dress shirts | filled up |
| 14 | Truck L-R past cemetery (out of focus) | with doubt. |
| 15 | White woman from back on bed wearing black lingerie |
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| 16 | CU coiled rattle snake uncoils and strikes, R-L on screen | I don't know who you |
| 17 | MS green sedan mired in swamp; jump cut | think you are, |
| 18 | LS B&W photo of klansmen; cut to CU of child in klan hood | But before the night |
| 19 | Forties white man in baseball hat rocking in chair, bayou in background | is through, |
| 20 | Two-shot, white boys, home-movie quality; jump-cut, one boy in front; jump-cut CU boy eating strawberry, red juice on lips, XCU licking lips | I wanna do bad things with you. |
| 21 | Crocodile head bone dangling from string on porch |
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| 22 | DFX; tissue-paper-like, crimson, crinkled |
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| 23 | Sunset |
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| 24 | Quick cut, naked white body, black background |
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| 25 | Boy in shadows exists house door, crosses to the right | I'm the kind to |
| 26 | White woman’s bare torso with green glowstick bracelet, dancing | sit up |
| 27 | CU dead opossum on road at night, camera pulls back (handheld) | in his room. |
| 28 | Trucking shot, L-R, marquis at night “God Hates Fangs,” reveal car, driver |
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| 29 | XLS warehouse (business? Home? Diner?) at night, truck R-L | Heart sick an' eyes filled |
| 30 | MLS, woman in bar, red, backless shirt & jean shirts jumps on man, man caresses buttocks | up with blue. |
| 31 | Quick cut, naked white body, black background |
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| 32 | MLS, man’s back, woman’s leg wrapped around, lying on pool table |
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| 33 | Two-shot, men in bar, one with backward baseball cap leans arms against wall near other, camera pans/trucks L-R |
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| 34 | Quick cut, naked white body on black background |
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| 35 | LS moon coming out from behind the clouds. |
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| 36 | MLS woman in white shirt, jeans, standing backwards in front of man with baseball cap, grinding against him | I don't know what you've done |
| 37 | Low angle close-up, same couple in two shot, red lighting | to me, |
| 38 | Quick cut, green neon, naked white body against black background, blue neon on black |
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| 39 | EST shot, small church congregation, all black, minister jumping in air, turning | But I know this much is true: |
| 40 | Jump-cut, medium 3-shot of parishioners shouting, cross in background | |
| 41 | CU church steeple at night, cross in center | |
| 42 | Naked white bodies, black background (several fast cuts) | |
| 43 | CU Same steeple, upside down | |
| 44 | CU woman’s face in red light, low angle (same woman as in #36?) | |
| 45 | Naked white bodies, black background (several fast cuts); clear shots of breasts, torsos | |
| 46 | Two-shot, two white women praying fervently, wearing name tags (Church of Jesus), wind blowing their hair | I |
| 47 | Woman from #44 on floor of bar, grinding | wanna do bad |
| 48 | Venus fly trap eating frog | things with you. |
| 49 | Quick cut, burning cross at night | |
| 50 | CU dead dog, decomposing in time-lapse with maggot |
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| 51 | INT Bar: man from #36 in MLS pushes another man backwards |
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| 52 | Fast collage: crosses, naked bodies, neon lights |
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| 53 | MCU, white male preacher “laying hands” on black female parishioner, falls backward |
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| 54 | CU: something (animal? bat?) being born/emerging from cocoon. |
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| 55 | INT Church: black woman shaking, black man and woman holding her |
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| 56 | LS dancing woman in bar, from behind |
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| 57 | XCU red lips, white skin woman’s mouth inhaling smoke |
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| 58 | DFX: crimson tissue paper-like with “True Blood” on it wrinkles, disappears, reveals white background, reappears seemingly filled with red fluid. |
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| 59 | INT Bar: two shot, woman pushes another woman back, seemingly erotically |
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| 60 | EXT water at night, three people in LS, two white men, one woman, men baptize woman; intercut briefly by True Blood DFX |
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| 61 | Woman emerges ecstatic, falls forward | I wanna do real bad things with you. |
| 62 | Quick cut of naked white bodies on black background |
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| 63 | EXT shot of coffin, graveyard in daytime, out of focus |
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| 64 | Low-angle MCU of woman from #44 dancing in bar with red lighting. |
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We certainly get the idea of something lurking, stalking; first it emerges from the bayou, then comes into the city, passed dilapidated homes and buildings. All of the location shots throughout the open suggest collapse, decay. Quite early in the sequence, we get the quick cut of naked white bodies, almost subliminal, which recurs throughout the sequence. Together with this opening sequence, this subliminal shot suggest repression, and repression that in some way is linked to social decay. The link between all of the images throughout the sequence and social collapse or decay is signaled by the fact that most sequences end with such location shots; these are also the shots where the music tends to be calmest, giving these images a sense of stasis in a cacophony of images.
Throughout the remainder of the opening sequence, we get a clearer idea of what forms this repression takes: not only sexual, but also political and social. Found footage of civil rights protests and the marquis sign “God Hates Fangs” all give us this sense. In addition to signaling one of the main plot developments of the series—the struggle for vampire civil right—these images work to expand the notion of repression to one of simple sexual repression—as suggested by the “subliminal” sex intercuts—to a much broader sense of repression.
What are the causes and consequences of repression? Much of the logic of the sequence progresses through contrasting images, in fairly straightforward ways, with the soundtrack occasionally underscoring the contrast. In segment 10, for instance, sex scenes and religious scenes are consistently juxtaposed, with fast set of edits featuring a silhouette of a church steeple, a series of naked bodies, and the same steeple unpside-down in reverse. Pretty unmistakable imagery. It seems, then, primarily to be institutions—first, the church, but also the police—that cause repression, not so much other people. This is most obvious in shot 61, where the imagery is one of baptism, but the words on the audio are the sexually suggestive refrain, “I wanna do bad things to you.”
In fact, the sequence seems to set up a pretty clear dichotomy between natural urges or processes (shots 48, 50, 54) and their unnatural repression. This goes back to the initial segment, where the repressed rises from the swamp, and extend to shots 18-20, which seem to tell the story of a young boy who grew to be a messed up man because of racism ( racialized political repression). So this, I would argue, will be one of the main themes of the series as a whole: the attempt to repress natural urges and their irrepressibility. This is also the larger argument of the sequence as a whole: that one’s natural proclivities cannot (or should not) be repressed, or they lead to a whole range of individual and social ills; moreover, it is social institutions that repress our natures, and so those institutions cause the very problems they are designed to prevent.
I am writing my Thesis on the True Blood Title...
This helps a lot!!!
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