I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.
i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af
i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience
say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!
'There's a little etching on your rib cage, says you're a slave': A meta on "The Vampire Lestat", Claudia, Louis, and the archives of slavery
This post will be very heavy. I am afraid to write this post, but I feel like I have to try to explain some of my thoughts around this season.
This was originally written to address the séance scene in season 1 episode 6 of The Vampire Lestat, "New York", but then the finale aired, and now I feel like I have to address the horrific violence committed against Louis, and how the writers unintentionally tapped into themes of the torture and mutilation of enslaved Black individuals, and the silence of Black voices in the archives.
This meta will discuss the summoning of Claudia's ghost, and how Claudia herself has been transformed into the figure of "Venus", discussed by the historian Saidiya Hartman in her influential essay, Venus in Two Acts. This meta will also discuss Louis' torture and branding at the hands of Armand in the finale, and what this means in the context of the historiography of the slave trade and Black history.
This post will discuss incredibly upsetting and heavy topics, such as the Transatlantic slave trade, the suffering and torture of enslaved Black individuals, and extreme racism. Please read at your own discretion.
'Bring out the chasm the spirit Claudia': Claudia's summoning
While the séance scene in "New York" ostensibly borrows its concept from the séance scene in Merrick by Anne Rice, as many others have pointed out, there is an inevitable racialised element to the scene in the show, because Claudia is a young Black girl. Others have discussed the racist language the writers put into the actor's mouths (here, here, and here are just a few examples) so that will not be the focus of this post, nor will this post compare the scene with the one in Merrick, as that has also been done by other users.
I also want to stress that while this post is analysing this scene on a meta level, I do not believe that excuses the racist language in the scene, nor do I believe the writers were necessarily intentionally engaging with scholarship of the Transatlantic slave trade. This is just how I have been pondering the scene.
I have not yet seen anyone discussing is the fact that Claudia is brought back into a mutilated form, with her tendons slashed, wearing the dress she was lynched in. While this is obviously because it was how she died, and in fiction, ghosts typically appear how they looked when they died, this actually serves a deeper symbolic purpose.
The first shot of Claudia's ghost lingers on her ankles as she shambles painfully forward. As has been discussed by many people, this was a tactic to stop enslaved people from running away from their masters:
"A female who ran away […] for a fifth offense, 'the cord of the slave's legs' would be cut above the heel, or the slave would suffer death."[1]
By having Claudia appear in the form in which she died - still mutilated in a way visually linked to slavery - the scene is making manifest how historians of the Transatlantic slave trade often encounter enslaved individuals in the archives. These men and women are often unnamed in the sources, but brutalised nonetheless. As Saidiya Hartman says:
Rather than the wasted effort of a striking a line through “meager girl” or a “refuse boy,” the ledger introduces another death through this shorthand. And it returns the dead to us “in the very form in which they were driven out of the world.”[2]
Hartman's influential essay, Venus in Two Acts (which can be read here), explores the difficulties inherent in discussing the lives and suffering of Black enslaved individuals encountered in the archives, when they are often unnamed, the sources are invariably mediated through the lens of White slave traders and masters, and the archives often describe horrific violence and degradation committed against Black enslaved individuals.
Hartman asks, how do historians discuss the lives and experiences of these individuals, and do so with dignity and empathy? Is it a historian's job to offer narrative catharsis where the archive provides none? As she says:
Yet how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features?[3]
She concludes that inventing narrative catharsis is not true to the sources. The essay revolves around questions thrown up by the enslaved Black girl (known only as Venus), who was murdered onboard the ship The Recovery in 1792 by Captain John Kimber. Hartman discusses her desire to invent a friendship and comfort between "Venus" and another enslaved Black girl who was also murdered by John Kimber aboard the ship:
Initially I thought I wanted to represent the affiliations severed and remade in the hollow of the slave ship by imagining the two girls as friends, by giving them one another. But in the end I was forced to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic.[4]
The archive does not offer evidence of even the solace of friendship between the two murdered girls. As Hartman says, "I could not have arrived at another conclusion. So it was better to leave them as I had
found them. Two girls, alone."[5]
In this way, the Hell that Claudia has been banished to in the narrative of the show mirrors the archival reality suffered by many Black enslaved girls - in this case, "Venus" of Hartman's essay, and the other girl who was murdered onboard The Recovery. Trapped by the very documents which preserve the only evidence of their existences, alone, having been brutally murdered. There are even obvious parallels between Armand's title of "Maître", and White "master" slave owners.
Like the Black enslaved girls and women that historians encounter in the archives, Claudia is frozen at the place of her subjugation, her body itself a site of racialised violence, suffering alone without the ability to be afforded comfort by a narrative.
She ends the scene screaming for Madeleine before disappearing, strongly implying that there is no hope for her being reunited with her lover.
'Can't move my body': Louis' mutilation
I will not be including screenshots of Louis' headless body and decapitated head in this section. Having to see it on screen in the finale was bad enough. I am also going off my memory of the scene for the exact dialogue, because I have not rewatched it.
Besides the fact it was horrific body horror seemingly for the sake of body horror, as many people have pointed out, it was mutilation and violence committed against a Black man. Need I say more? Probably not, but this violence can be contextualised against a backdrop of torture, violence, and experimentation on Black people, so I will say more.
I could not work out what else was so disturbing about this scene, besides the horrific racism and gratuitous violence, until I read this post, in which @heliza24 pointed out that there were real medical experiments and medical torture carried out on Black people.
I think this can be taken further, especially in the context of Hartman's essay. Hartman questions the purpose of writing about violence committed against enslaved people:
Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence?[6]
As Hartman says, questioning how one tackles this issue is vital, because it impacts on how these people's lives are retold and remembered. The importance of how this is approached cannot be overstated, because these were real people who suffered unimaginable torture and pain:
If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal, then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been? To envision a free state from this order of statements? The dangers entailed in this endeavor cannot be bracketed or avoided because of the inevitability of the reproduction of such scenes of violence, which define the state of blackness and the life of the ex-slave.[7]
Simply rehashing the violence against Black enslaved individuals is not enough. The violence was done, but how it is handled and discussed and dealt with is incredibly important. It must be discussed carefully, compassionately, delicately. Violence against a Black person in media is never just violence. It is the unwitting repetition of centuries of violence and medical experimentation and torture and violation.
That is even more true when discussing Louis de Pointe du Lac, who lived in the early 20th century and was the victim of racism and racial microaggressions throughout his mortal life. As season 1 of Interview with the Vampire tried to address, turning Louis into a vampire did not protect him from racism. It gave him the power to fight back against racists, but he was still a Black man. Likewise with Claudia, trapped in the body of a young woman. She had power, but it was shaped by her youth and the fact that she was Black.
But the violence against Louis was not just torture. It was medical torture. Throughout the entire episode, wires were attached to Louis' severed head, and Fareed was monitoring his vitals, how coherent he was, how long his head had been separated from his body. Louis struggled to speak at first, and struggled to write. His handwriting was reduced to a huge, childish, scrawl. His sentences were slurred at first, until he gained more control over his muscles while his head was separated from his body.
This was torture via experimentation. The question both Armand and Fareed wanted answered was, "How will Louis hold up in these conditions?" This experiment could have worked with Lestat, but of course, it was carried out on Louis. Ostensibly, because Armand wanted an apology from Louis, but by doing this - intentionally or not - the writers were also tapping into centuries of medical violations and experiments against Black people.
There was an added layer of horror. Louis' headless body and severed head themselves were made horrific and monstrous. When Louis slurred that he didn't know where he was, that he couldn't move his body, and Armand had Louis' head turned around and he was shown his own headless neck, blood still staining his skin, we, the audience, were supposed to be horrified and sickened by Louis' body itself. We were supposed to be repulsed by his body, by the sight of his head without a body, slurring and struggling to speak. Though Louis was our point of view character, and we were supposed to feel the horror with him, we were also horrified by him.
This was exacerbated by Regina's presence. She screamed and sobbed in fear when she saw Louis. The subject of Regina and her involvement with Armand is a separate meta, but suffice it to say here, Regina's body was brought in as part of the horror when Armand threatened to cut her head off and sew Louis' head onto her body. There was now a Black woman dragged into this experimentation. The history of medical torture against Black women is a subject all by itself, again too detailed to discuss in this meta.
There is more I could probably say about all of this, but that would require me rewatching the scene, which I will do, when it's available online in higher quality, and when I can stomach it. I think the point is made.
'Says you're a slave': Louis' branding
One final point that must be discussed is Louis' branding. Even after he and Armand share a moment of understanding and sympathy, even after Louis was able to apologise to Armand for how he treated him in light of Armand's history as a CSA victim and the victim of slavery, the script still had Armand brand Louis with the letter "A", for his own name.
Why the writers chose to include this is truly beyond me. Was Armand saying that Louis still belonged to him? That part of Louis would always be his, because of the horrific torture he had now inflicted on Louis? Was that point not made in season 2, when we learned that Louis still had rocks embedded into his feet from the coffin he had been buried alive in? Those physical reminders of the betrayal Armand committed against him at least had a narrative purpose - Armand pointed out that Louis could have had them removed, but like Claudia said in season 1, "We keep the damage so we don't forget the damage." That was why Louis chose to keep the rocks in his feet, as a reminder of the damage the coven inflicted on him.
This cannot be explained the way that was. This was Armand carving his initial into Louis' body, while Louis' head was still detached from it. As so many people have said already, this was a branding.
This also comes right after Claudia's infamous line in "New York": "There's a little etching on your rib cage, says you're a slave." I cannot read this branding as anything other than corroboration of that statement. Armand branded Louis because Armand was, and still is, Master in their relationship. Armand added the Stein's into Louis' photo collection; he manipulated and lied to Louis for over 70 years; he erased and edited his memories; he hired Regina to use her against him (it still isn't clear to me why he did that); he listened to Claudia's séance; he was pulling the strings offscreen this entire season.
By having Armand brand Louis, the show seems to be confirming that yes, Louis is a slave. He is Armand's slave. Louis is being defined completely by his Blackness, but also by his subjugation. There's also the constant reminders to the audience that Louis was a pimp. Meanwhile, Claudia's ghost referred to her "bleak, Black, life".
In seasons 1 and 2, the fact that Louis and Claudia were Black and Lestat was White felt like a pointed decision, and a doorway to discuss race and racism in the early 20th century and the present day, abuse in interracial couples, and vampirism and Blackness. This season, they have been punished for their race. That is painfully, upsettingly, obvious in these two scenes.
Bibliography
A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period, p. 177
Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, Small Acts, 26 (2008), p. 5. The final quote, “in the very form in which they were driven out of the world”, is Hartman quoting Michel Foucault, Lives of Infamous Men, p. 284.
the people posting and boosting comments on jacob's instagram posts apologizing to him for the script or talking about how they didn't like this season... what do you think you are accomplishing????? have y'all never heard of backhanded compliments??????
praise his performance and go flood someone else's comments or mentions but like??? leave this man alone???
my fave theory on twitter right now is that we will get episode 7 & a secret episode 8 on sunday and that the leak was on purpose LMAOOOO like i don't believe it but i want to buy into it the way you buy into a lottery ticket when the jackpot is like 3 billion and you KNOW you aren't winning but what the hell, a ticket only costs $3.
tvl finale light commentary / i guess spoilers? but like. vague as hell.
being a supernatural fan from 2005 until 2017-2018 really trained me in how to handle being disappointed in the quality of a new season of your fave show LOL.
i have a lot of qualms with writing choices but i also still believe that the show has an extraordinarily talented cast and very talented writers, crew, etc. but great writers aren't infallible & a host of biases, oversights, and personal preferences often limit the potential of projects. there was never going to be a PERFECT season - even if the season had been excellent. and i think there were MOMENTS of excellence in this season.
but there were also a lot of moments of jumping the damn shark, racism & misogyny, and like... moments where the writers prioritized shock value or twists in a way that seemed to take away from the narrative. and those moments really culminated in the finale in a way that was undeniable.
i'm still showing up for season 4. i still enjoyed watching the show, for the most part. i DESPERATELY hope the writer's room really thinks about how to balance their desire for a larger world and cast to play with while also prioritizing a depth of characterization. one of the things that i think makes adapting TVC (or any character-driven books) into TV is the way that it's easy to lose consistency of characterization when you're trying to create a plot-focused show.
a theme of the season was failure, right? big swings, big hits, big misses.
one thing that will be tricky for the showrunners and show fans is like... the choices some of us don't like or think were good characterizations DID happen, and now the show has to live with them. and the fans of the show who stick with it have to live with them, too. (and like? those who decide it's not for them anymore? honestly??? i respect that decision and am going to be really disappointed in folks who give them shit or say they're not interpreting things ~correctly~ like come off it.)
iwtv/tvl is a team with a lot of potential and i am deeply hoping season 4 is better executed. but 🤷🏻♀️
