Do you think the DV should have viewers re-examining Lestat and Louis’ relationship in the books as well? It’s certainly abusive in its own right so should their endgame be seen as a victim taking they’re abuser back? The way this is the only outcome that a reunion in the show would come across and why many dread it. Thanks I always appreciate your thoughts :)
hey anon! this is a very tough question, and i have a million thoughts. thank you for asking, and sorry in advance for another thesis!
so yeah, i think that a sign of a good adaptation is that it prompts the audience to go back to the source material and examine it under a new light. personally, this show has made me really eager to go back to the series —which i dropped as unreadable almost a decade ago— for several reasons, and one of them is that i want to really look at how anne characterizes them and their relationship through the books, and what —if any— cohesive whole can be constructed out of that.
something that i hope this adaptation will prompt is an interrogation of what people consider abuse. what and why. what is the line that characters have to toe in order for you to consider them abusive or not abusive. what is the line a relationship has to cross. is going through a child's diaries parental abuse? is a father threatening his own daughter with harm to control the child's other parent abusive? what about coercion? what about infidelity? what about isolating your partner from their previous relationships? what about lovebombing? what determines power in a relationship? is it physical strength? race? knowledge? wealth? a sense of ownership? age? gender? a feeling of shame? and then: does this reflect how you think about real abuse survivors? about real abusers? are you going out of your way to believe the version of events of men accused of abuse? are you minimizing violence that isn't physical?
some people argue that they can see loustat as a "good" ship despite the way in which they are portrayed in the first book because louis doesn't acknowledge their relationship as romantic —is it not abuse if they are non-sexual life partners? some people have expressed that, because lestat says he would have never followed through with his threats of violence to louis, then they don't take those threats seriously. some people think that lestat coerced louis into being turned in the original interview, others don't. as for me, i don't even acknowledge book canon past queen of the damned because lestat turning someone against his express wishes and assaulting that woman pisses me off. my opinion is that, despite some strokes of genius, the chronicles are generally pretty bad, and treating them like good books could drive a person mad. it's pointless to try and interpret the book series as if there was a single thematic thread or artistic intention or cohesive vision driving it. the books are full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and ideologically repulsive shit that makes them practically illegible.
i think it's just as valid to favor interview's portrayal of events or the vampire lestat's. but, based on interview, you can absolutely interpret loustat's relationship as abusive. and if you do, then yeah, the series is the story of someone taking their former abuser back. but you can also arrive at a million conclusions from that. so the question maybe should be, what is the story saying by having louis and lestat get a happy ending? and, to understand what a story is saying, you need to know in what language it's speaking — it comes down to genre expectations.
the original interview is without a doubt a piece of gothic horror. memnoch the devil is probably... i mean... religious allegory? several of the books are just horseshit. but in general, the rest of the series is something of a supernatural thriller-romance saga —like clive cussler but with vampires, or those books the vampire diaries are based on. in those supernatural thrillers that books like queen of the damned and the vampire lestat most resemble, the genre conventions are simple. hero goes through journey, overcomes struggle, there's some action, some romance, sometimes there's some overt moralism and sometimes there isn't, but the protagonist gets a happy ending. i never finished that godforsaken series, but as far as them getting back together at the end of queen of the damned, to me it does read like anne rice was straight up writing the climax of her grand supernatural action plot and wanted to close the story by giving her romantic action hero a happy ending. i won't lie, it worked for me —at least when i read it an age ago.
for me, the one truly, genuinely good book in the series is the interview, because i think it's the only book that knows what it's doing. it's gothic existential horror through and through, and it's great. flawed! but still a book of all time. and, while it's not a romance, you can read it against the backdrop of the rest of the series, and decode all the ways in which the relationship on the page is actually a marriage. and the interview is a tragic book! by the end, louis and lestat are orphaned of their daughter and of each other. louis is alone and back to killing humans in san francisco, lestat has laid down to become stone underground, claudia is dead. it's devastating.
the thing is, rolin jones has repeatedly said that he didn't want the show to be pure gothic horror, but gothic romance. some people seem to have taken that to mean "this is a show that will depict a healthy couple with a happy ending", as if the 'romance' part erased the 'gothic' or, for that matter, the horror. but the prototypical gothic romances, wuthering heights and jane eyre, both depict abusive relationships, and it's the horror of that abuse that the genre seeks to explore. a lot of people seem to feel like they were promised a capital r, Romance, and i fear the dread that they feel is justified!
like you said, the way the show has played the story so far, louis and lestat getting back together will always be informed by the abuse we have seen. so now the show has a few options: they can split louis and lestat forever, they can have them get back together while continuing to portray lestat as abusive, they can go the "it was a lie" or "it was mutual" route (in which case i'll mail snakes to amc studios), or they can try to give lestat a redemption arc and have them get back together in a non-abusive dynamic. and in turn, they can execute all of those in a million ways.
this is an adaptation, a re-imagining, a conversation with the source. it's making choices and deviating from canon, but canon is still there. the loustat that people fell in love with will always be in those books if they don't like the one on the show. and, if the show has made them see the relationship in the books differently... maybe that's a good thing.
i know that there will always be a group of people who won't like how the show goes. but i think a lot of those people would have a better time if they engaged the show on its own terms, instead of trying to force it into a different shape and then being disappointed when it doesn't fit.
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