interview with a vampire made me cry

Having watched Queen of the Damned and loathing/loving it last year, I didn’t know what to expect from Interview with a Vampire. At first I was horrifyingly annoyed by the central cast of characters. The interviewer a whining, sniveling little man, the vampires telling him the story as equally pretentious. Everything about the “today” plotline was too on the nose (talking about covid.. how dated). And then came Lestat. The only exception to a truly dull adaptation of the original novels… Sam Reids performance shining brightly in contrast. I can’t remember the last time I watched someone so truly charismatic, so perfect in a role (of course, also to be truly a perfect actor one must have never seen them in anything else… you remain all your characters until your actor becomes heavy with recognition…). The second season only amplified both these feelings, terrible foreground, and the innability to draw my eyes from the screen whenenver Lestat was present. While cheesy in the modern tone (campy eyes, fangs, accents, pretention, all reminiscent of What we do in the Shadows) I think the gore was played well, and the renditon of the Theatre Des Vampires a nice wink towards the audience about the natural of reality, spectacle, and an audience suspended in disbelief. This was further pushed in the disbelief of the news reporters of Molloy (I forgot his name he was so dull), and the garish inability to make the “present day” timeless. Again, all of this only truly suspended for the audience only by Lestat… his actor without presence online, as if himself a vampire laying in wait for this role…..

But enough of him. The plot of it all (I am not sure how much aligns with the original Anne Rice novel) was deeply upsetting to me. Script aside, the first two seasons truly felt like an ongoing metaphor towards the lives of men and women. How much of the mens traumas in the show not just their own destruction of others? Magnus, throwing himself in the fire for the trauma of creation. (If every woman did this, the population would die out imminently) Armond, the trauma of forcing everyone around him to just do what he says all the time. And then people are killed (because he decided they would). And Lestat and Louis… who throughout the show wreck havoc on everyone around them…. but mostly on the life of their adopted daughter. Not only was her mortal death their fault, but her immortal one as well. Not to mention, for a long ass show about vampires as a metaphor for sex and queer love, to have the ONLY flf romance to only last ONE episode and then have a horrific death that only benefits the MALE love story?? Perhaps I am jaded by the male gender so much that I find killing off the only women who pass the bechdel test in the movie to further the gay male love story extrememly sexist? I know to be a gay man isn’t to hate women… but media sure does love to make it feel that way currently. And this definitely did not help. Claudia and Madeleines relationship shot of sliver of recognition through me… both rejected, abandoned, to be made orphan as a child, as a WOMAN… to find each other innocently through each others monstrous identities to all else around them… they saw themselves in each other, raped for the crime of wanting to be loved. How they both always chose themselves, and Madeleines speach about how she has learned to try to survive.. only to choose to die together in the end. Why did this need to happen? Surely they couldve gone off to live together, eating and killing everyone on their way out? But then there would be no reason for the male characters to grow…. oh no…

Still cried in the end over Lestat and Louis in the house in the hurricaine. Half over the despair and love and grief and vanity in Lestat (GOD what a man), and half over the arrogance of both of them to be able to carry on after the destruction they caused. Such is the ways of young men. Every vampire acted exactly the age they were when they were turned forever (except for the father and son projectionists, but this was used as a bit as it was outside the previous expectation..). To not physically grow is to not change? If Claudia was doomed from the start, does that not mean teenage girls are the most doomed of us all….