So.......what did you think about Louis reading Claudia's diary to Bruce?
I thought it was uhhhhhh bad 🙂↕️ but less from a character perspective and more as a writing choice. It's a slightly odd decision for Louis, but I can find a way to rationalize it as being in-character for him...the way that the writers have chosen to utilize this diary entry narratively is what infuriates me. I wanted so badly to hold out hope (and I'm always saying this, but i would LOVE nothing more than for the rest of the season to drastically reorient my feelings on this!!), but I think the way they chose to go about this plotline is incredibly revealing of how little regard they've ever had for Claudia's suffering (or Louis's for that matter).
(this gets kinda rambly but here's some stuff about Louis's relationship to the diaries)
Claudia's diaries are introduced by Louis into the interview to provide an 'alternative perspective' on the story of his life. I think there are two big reasons for this:
Louis doesn't trust himself to understand/tell his story on his own. Louis is doing the interview to find 'truth and reconciliation', some greater understanding about his experiences, but he isn't sitting down and writing a memoir the way Daniel did, or recording a series of monologues like Lestat did with his "Failures". Unlike Daniel/Lestat, who are the sole arbiters of how their story is told, Louis's chronicle of his own life is a dialogue comprised of multiple voices and perspectives. Louis does not see himself as the ultimate authority over his own story. He routinely second-guesses himself, admits to his own misrememberings throughout the interview, and frequently cedes the power to others to define his narrative: he invites Daniel to assist him (a bright young reporter who has already undergone his own 'odyssey'), in s2 Armand joins the interview, in 207 Louis is deferring to "Lestat's version" of events, and obvs most notably includes Claudia's perspective in the form of her diaries. Louis is willing to consider others' perspectives even when they conflict with his, bc his interview is not about ego, but understanding - and he sees Claudia as particularly integral to that understanding bc he values Claudia's perspective above his own. Claudia was his light, a spark in the dark - when Louis feels muddled, he looks to her for clarity.
Claudia is very intelligent and perceptive, but she's also a person, who is not omnipotent or infallible, and who, like Louis, has been inundated with trauma her entire life (and trauma is the root of Louis's memory issues/faulty recall and part of why he doesn't trust his own mind). There isn't any real reason for him to view Claudia's account as indisputable or unbiased, but he does - he trusts her more than he trusts himself. It's why it shakes Louis to his core to realize something in Claudia's diary wasn't true (that one single awful thing he believed in, Claudia's inability to dream, wasn't real, and the reality was less painful) because he had this almost biblical reverence for her words.
Claudia throughout the show has been used as a kind of illuminating light/deliverer of hard truths for Louis (and I expect that to continue with ghost Claudia if we ever get to see her.......................................amc its been four episodes come onnnnnnnn), so it makes sense for Louis to see her diaries as essential for making sense of his story (which is also so much about her and his grief over her loss).
2. Louis's identity is so entwined with Claudia that he cannot tell his story without her. Louis was dependent upon Claudia to define him, and he couldn't really conceive of himself outside of her. I had hoped that his 'I own the night' era would entail some level of growth in that respect, but it seems like this may still be true as of s3. Naturally, Louis feels the need to cling to Claudia/her diaries as a reference point for his own sense of self.
Louis's story begins when he meets Lestat (Claudia's maker) and his story ends with Claudia's death. The 80-odd years after don't really matter, except for one time in San Francisco when he thought he heard Claudia's voice calling him into the sun. Louis ceases to exist when Claudia dies, and becomes an embodiment of the Rage and Madness her death sparked in him; after he's gotten his 'revenge' his Rage and Madness fade and he's left with nothing.
Stuff like this helped me contextualize Louis reading Claudia's diary pages. Maybe Louis reading the pages and recounting them with Daniel was the closest he felt to Claudia since her death. Maybe for a moment when Louis was reading her words in front of the man they were written about, he felt some semblance of the Rage and Madness he experienced on her behalf. Maybe he tapped into something that made him feel her presence. Even if Louis didn't get any real satisfaction from more revenge, maybe in the act there was a twisted kind of closeness he felt with her, even if it was fleeting.
What spoils that for me is the way her pages were presented.
Because s3 isn't about Louis anymore. It's Lestat's story. And as I mentioned, Lestat's story is very pointedly not a chorus of perspectives the way Louis's is. It's literally just Lestat sitting somewhere monologuing.
(its one of many writing choices that baffles me; they took something so multi-faceted, with built-in nuance and complexity by virtue of its contrasting voices, and flattened it into one voice...its like working backwards...the show should evolve and become MORE complex as it goes on, not the other way around?? When they started off with something so dynamic, Lestat's telling just feels overly simplistic and stunted by comparison...just let it be first-person limited if ur so insistent on a more singular perspective....since they wanna go for a disorienting tone anyway, just slip into and out of the flashbacks/non-Lestat scenes as needed, without beating us over the head with the narration...what is this framing deviceeeeee. but i digress...)
Everything we are seeing past the auction scene is presented as the story Lestat tells on his "Failures" recordings; it's Lestat's voice narrating the events we see play out to some undisclosed listener* who acquired his records.
This framing device means that everything we see this season is something Lestat is choosing to tell us about, either explicitly or implicitly (bc there is some occasional discrepancy between how Lestat verbally presents events and how we watch them play out, notably with regard to Gabrielle, but i think u can understand this as reading between the lines of what he's saying in his recordings, rather than the viewer having some omniscient access to events; bc the narration is very set on having you understand that this is LESTAT describing events, even when it doesn't make sense)
So, in the context of the show, it is Lestat who is choosing to share the graphic details of Claudia's assault with his audience. Lestat, who abused Claudia, whom Claudia sought to kill to free herself and Louis, who learned about the assault secondhand by listening to her rapist 'think of her often', because Claudia never felt comfortable sharing that information with Lestat. Lestat is now sharing those details Claudia never wanted him to be privy to, spelling them out in gory detail for the highest bidder at an auction.
And in the context of the episode, Lestat is sharing this information in lieu of describing the details of his own sexual assault. Bc the show is flipping rapidly between Lestat remembering his own assault and the scene where Louis reads Claudia's diary pages, there is no album break between the two scenes (the guy going "Album 25 Side B" or whatever to signify different scenes are being recounted on separate records), which means Lestat is conflating them in his retelling, using Claudia's story to support his own. Lestat will get on stage and sing a cutesy song about Magnus and make flippant remarks in front of Daniel, but he's not sharing those gory details about his own experience. He co-opts Claudia's words instead. Because Lestat has the ultimate authority over his own story, bc he is the season's sole narrator, HE gets to decide what details to share and what to gloss over - unlike Claudia, whom he strips of that agency.
I don't even know what's intentional in this show anymore, but there is a throughline of Lestat being active in/flippant about violating Claudia's privacy from s1; and Claudia being upset about her diaries being shared without her consent.
And it feels like a deliberate contrast that Lestat is the one to share these diary entries with the world when Louis was so hell-bent on keeping them out of the public record, ripping them out and hiding them from Daniel. I won't say Louis is without fault here, bc he does share Claudia's diaries in the first place (albeit in an interview he attempts to delete), but I think its speaks to Louis/Lestat's different attitudes towards Claudia that Louis understood how hard it was for her to share that event and sought to omit it to avoid exploiting her, and Lestat does the complete opposite.
(also this is random but idk if I've ever seen anyone point out books as a yonic symbol - the imagery of Claudia's diaries being cut and ripped apart, her boundaries transgressed, Lestat reaching into this pink box to take her privacy from her, and the entry he reads is explicitly about sex....her sa entries being torn and bloodstained...it's like very on the nose but also all these men violating her over and over for eternity.........where is Akasha actually. and then her willingness to share her diary with Madeleine is an intimacy she chose...remember when the show did interesting things. I guess in that lens Louis burning the pages is like putting them to rest, deciding not to let her be violated/exploited anymore? but then the content makes it into the show....idk. idk!!!!!!!!)
(tw sa more graphically sorry but //////// its a kind of minor thing but I think it's worth noting, when we see the flashes of Lestat's actual assault...he and Magnus are both fully clothed. Like all the sexual violence is implied with the visuals, how its cut and Magnus pressing him down and whatnot, but it isn't terribly explicit in terms of whats on screen. I'm not saying it isn't effective as is, but the most explicit thing about that sequence is the words from Claudia's diary - her story is literally doing the heavy lifting for Lestat's. I almost wonder if they couldn't be super graphic onscreen so they felt they needed that entry to be read aloud to pack more of an emotional punch? Idk its wholly unneeded imo and pretty shit in terms of respectful sa portrayals but I'm trying to parse the logic)
In the After Dark for this episode, Jacob Anderson expressed hesitation about the storyline for fear of it falling into classic exploitative rape-revenge tropes, and sadly his fears were valid - what we got is a textbook example of a story making a woman's assault about a man - two men, in this instance. Claudia's body is reduced to a vehicle for Lestat's pain and Louis's grief. Rolin commented in the same After Dark that Lestat's assault storyline was what they had in mind when they wrote Claudia's assault into the show in s1; her pain was always going to be in service of Lestat's.
The show violated Claudia in 105 to benefit Lestat's storyline later, and in presenting her diary's gruesome details for the audience's consumption against her wishes, Lestat and the show are violating her a second time.
They could have done both storylines without this. The show has already employed this idea of "some things are too precious to be shared in the dialogue" with us not hearing Lestat's full proposal in the church in 101, us not hearing what Claudia and Madeleine say to each other in 207, and Loustat's infamous unheard words in 208. The audience gets that like. rape is bad; its not like the words themselves were needed for comprehension. We could have had Lestat reliving his memories without narration alongside the Bruce scene and had a fade out on Louis's dialogue, or Lestat could have just described it himself, or the Magnus hallucination could have given his warped description of things (or, what i thought we would get, they could have intercut Lestat's assault with the Magnus song/a performance of the song to hammer home that stark dissonance between Lestat's lyrics and the event itself). Like these are creative professionals they could have done this in a million ways and they selected the bluntest possible instrument and it was artless and it was cheap and it was exploitative and it was fucking unnecessary.
(also we literally already had Claudia speaking about her assault on her own terms, in her own voice in 203, in a scene where she is sharing that info freely with Louis bc she wanted him to know. Lestat using words she never wanted to say to him to illustrate his own pain is just something fucking else - and the writers choosing to tortuously squeeze further detail out of Claudia's assault for a THIRD scene in three seasons is.......i don't have words)
The thing that snags my brain a bit is that Louis burns the pages at the end of the scene. I could totally buy Louis, with his connection to Claudia's diary, and the way he clearly struggled with processing Claudia's assault, wanting to give voice to her pain one last time before incinerating the perpetrator and the account itself.
But we have to remember that this is Lestat's narration within the framing device. So how does Lestat know line for line what is on those pages? Either Louis recounts the whole thing to Lestat in excruciating detail (which I doubt, though I would believe he remembers it all word for word), or this isn't actually a word-perfect recounting of her pages, and it is Lestat using what he gleaned from Bruce's thoughts about Claudia's assault to surmise what the diary entry said (since Lestat was open about making up some details of the scenes he wasn't in - "Did it happen in a bar with a view? I say it did" - any of the scenes without him could be read as pure conjecture if u wanted to) - OR what I think would be most interesting (but also very poorly telegraphed), if the details are not details of Claudia's assault at all, but Lestat's own explicit experience of his sa but presented in the shape of Claudia's diary entry...it would still piss me off but it would at least be some semblance of Lestat choosing to be vulnerable in his story within the safety of a facade, instead of Lestat just outright refusing to narrate any of his own assault and only exploiting Claudia's. Atp I don't rly think the show gives enough of a fuck to be that layered but idk u can interpret it a lot of different ways...
On a slightly different note, another thing that bothered me about equating Lestat's/Claudia's assaults is that it frames Louis as this outsider to the experience of sexual violence; these two ppl have a commonality that Louis is placed outside of, unable to relate (Rolin explicitly said as much in the After Dark). This is wild to me bc BOTH s1-2 detail Louis's abusive relationships where extremely dubious sex is happening......I know the show dgaf about Louis anymore lol but like...how consensual is the sex after Lestat has broken all the bones in his body bc "a thousand nights of sulking and the first sight of her you are gonna up and leave me" and the sulking in question was not having sex with Lestat. And Louis is dissociating during the sex with Lestat. And Claudia is projecting Bruce into Louis's mind and saying "They're not all like him, or him" talking about Bruce, and Lestat as Louis's Bruce. And calling their maker "Bruce" during s2. it felt like they were drawing a pretty straightforward parallel there to make a statement about sexual dynamics in abusive relationships but that was an oopsie i guess....and then Loumand's "you can have sex with me if you don't kill me" and the bargaining for Claudia's safety as pillow talk afterwards. There are really overt coercive elements there...and coerced consent is not consent which means it was like.... dubcon at best and nonconsensual at worst...
Idk it just displays a real disinterest in Louis as a character and everything they've put him through to do this kind of revisionist history around his experiences. It's actually wild how 1-to-1 the Anne Rice/Rolin Jones trajectory has been, despite s1-2 seeming to be interested in correcting so many of her wrongs wrt racism and abuse, from creating something poignant with Louis only to perform the most merciless character assassination of him to boost up Lestat...it's starting to feel like s1-2 were sincerely good on accident and all the stuff we thought was nuance was incidental. bc what!! I just feel like that scene could have been an opportunity to have Louis reflect on his own experiences alongside Claudia's (bc Claudia had already drawn that parallel for him in s1) which would be a more nuanced twist on the boring played-out "Father gets revenge for daughter's rape" thing but no, they just did the trope beat for beat and smothered it in Lestat. It makes BOTH Louis's and Claudia's pain ancillary to Lestat's. boooooooooooo
*My opinion does change a littleeee if it is Louis listening to the records, bc obvs he was in the diary reading scene, so that would be a sneaky out for Lestat to not have actually narrated the pages contents in-universe, but to have Louis just recalling the scene as Lestat mentions it in the recording. but it doesn't change the fact that the show itself is exploiting Claudia regardless
