For the last couple episodes of True Blood, the denizens of Bon Temps have been concerned about a maenad in their midst. The maenads were the handmaidens of Dionysus or Bacchus. Dionysus is the deity in charge of boozing, ecstasy, and ritual madness. On his high holy days, his female worshipers would get wasted, engage in random carnal acts, and tear animals limb from limb with their bare hands and eat the raw flesh. Ya know, party hardy.

On season two of True Blood, the vampires and shapeshifters and telepaths and regular folk are all scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to deal with the character of Maryann Forrester wreaking havoc in their town. Maryann Forrester is apparently a maenad and she calls Dionysus or Bacchus “the god who comes” and she is hoping to sacrifice something sufficiently tasty to get the object of her worship to actually show up for the party. According to the vampire queen, maenads always expect their deity to show up and they get stood up every time. Unfortunately, the vampire queen is played by Evan Rachel Wood, who looks beautiful in her red-painted lips, but is utterly unconvincing as a ruler who has been undead since before the industrial revolution. As a disaffected teenager, Evan Rachel Wood is a believable enough actress and I think she even gets prettier as she gets older, but Bill Compton’s maker Lorena, played by Mariana Klaveno, comes across so much more elegant and queenly. And what is up with the late 40’s-ish bathing suits and Eisenhower references and the whole art deco thing from a vampire who is older than man’s mastery of the steam engine? Anyway, oddball casting and styling and not exactly this otherwise excellent show’s finest hour.

Back to the maenad Maryann Forrester. Maryann Forrester is played by Michelle Forbes, who I first came across as the morbid but fun Dr. Julianna Cox from the coroner’s office on Homicide: Life on the Street. No stranger to genre, Michelle Forbes has been in Star Trek: Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica, 24, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Lost, and more. I’ve seen some people whining about a genre show like True Blood appearing on HBO, but I hardly think True Blood pushed Sopranos or Deadwood off the air and I like seeing someone actually put effort into making a serious quality genre program for adults.

At any rate, Maryann Forrester is down with whatever keeps the party going. Every time she orders in a restaurant, it makes me crack up because I looooooove ordering multiple entrees and appetizers and waiters and waitresses often ask parties I am with if we are expecting more people. So Maryann Forrester is a sensualist. She likes to eat. She likes to throw legendary parties. She doesn’t mind the rough stuff, evangelizes it even. She cooks a delicious semi-human heart. And she wants to sacrifice Sam Merlotte (the workplace sexual harassment wereguy) to her deity. I admit that I am way past the point where I find orgies tiresome, but there is no denying that Maryann knows how to throw an exciting bash. Even if she does keep getting literally left at the altar.

I admit I like a good party as much as anyone and I might have thrown a few parties which revelers still talk about. But, more and more, I feel so sorry for the beautiful life of the party who is always waiting for a man who is never going to show up and treat her right.

Would you want to party with handmaidens of Dionysus?

PS Apparently, Michelle Forbes was in a movie called Love Bites in 1993 where Adam Ant plays a vampire. I’d be grateful if anyone could point me to where to find this vamp flick.

It seems newsworthy to mention that an online video for Marilyn Manson’s new music video is apparently going to be online for only another day or two. The new single is called “Heart Shaped Glasses” and features romantic lyrics about erotic cutting and Manson looking like he is feeling his inner rockstar. Most coverage of the video has been rather frantic speculation on whether Marilyn Manson and actress Evan Rachel Wood are actually having penetrative sex in the opening scene of the seven plus minutes long vid. It is totally irrelevent to the final product whether or not his penis was actually in her vagina, as neither is visible, but the two manage to communicate wonderful chemistry between them on screen.

When I saw the movie Seven, I kept wanting them to turn the damn lights on. It seems like it would have been much more obvious that Kevin Spacey was the killer if they hadn’t been doing investigation and forensics with flashlights, when there were perfectly good light switches nearby. I felt a little bit like this during much of the video for “Heart Shaped Glasses” when I watched it on the German video sharing site ironically enough called Sevenload. The actual Marilyn Manson site links to an IP with no real site on it and a much higher resolution version of the video. Everything is much clearer in the version on Manson’s site, although the lighting is still colored and moody. The interface on the Sevenload version is much more user-friendly though.

The video kicks off on Sevenload with the artist introducing the clip and, linked off his site, it goes straight into Manson and Wood writhing around and kissing passionately. This is pretty hot for around two and a half minutes. The initial makeout scene includes some very light choking. Somehow I think iTunes still won’t have any problem billing for the music video download down the line. The video is then interrupted with one of those talky interludes that musicians who want acting roles like and nobody else enjoys. The two of them are in a car and she tells him to drive faster and he takes altporn style polaroids of her with a kitchen knife and a schoolgirl skirt. This scene is where the heart shaped glasses referred to in the song’s title first appear. They then move to a club scene where Manson is rocking it old school and a sorta normal looking girl in the audience is watching from behind her heart shaped glasses and touching herself with hands covered in interestingly incongruous driving gloves. This I believe is Wood in a sort of fifties looking good girl dress. I don’t think she’d be good casting for the part if she weren’t Manson’s paramour, but the chemistry between them is so powerful that it more than makes up for it. I think the moody lighting, which might otherwise be a bit much, makes her come across a bit darker too.

The main concept of the video revolves around, aside from hipster sunglass, romantic cutting. So the club scene, err, cuts back and forth to a blood-drenched black bed and shots of a sort of heart shaped tattoo with a lightening bolt S on Wood’s thigh. I don’t know if the tattoo is real any more than I know if the fucking is real. Doesn’t matter because it works for the video. Oh yeah, then they drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. I loved Thelma and Louise so much that when my friend Blue Blood writer Shariann Lewitt and I saw it, Shariann told me that maybe one of us needs to learn to drive better. As Wood steers with her foot in Manson’s video and they still drive off a cliff, I think Shariann was mistaken about the requirements.

Anyway, the song is okay and I like the flow of the lines:

she’ll never cover up what we did with her dress, no
she said, “kiss me, it’ll heal but it won’t forget”

When I am elected Benevolent World Dictator, there will be a lot more videos in this vein and they will be available for more than a week.