I’ve been thinking more about Lestat’s wedding ring, which we see him wearing publicly during the trial, and later on tour—but not elsewhere, including alone in his vampire hovel. It seems that he’s not wearing the ring for himself. My sense is that Lestat thinks of marriage as a human construct (along with his general disdain for many human institutions like religion), and that he considers his and Louis’ companionship (their “transcendent love between two vampires of the same sex”) to be far above the limitations of human definitions, and so doesn’t feel the need to tokenize it accordingly. But we do see him mobilize marriage and the wedding ring strategically for two audiences: humans and Louis.
As the trial makes clear, Lestat is very conscious of the implications of his ‘wedding’ to Louis on the night of Louis’ turning when he speaks of offering himself, “in the church, on the altar.” But never does he use the term ‘marriage’ to describe what they have - it’s always ‘companionship’ or ‘union.’
At the moment of Louis’ turning, I think the marriage parallels are about making clear to the then-human Louis that what he is offering is akin to (better than) human marriage, and also that he takes not-so-secret delight in profaning the rites of Christianity through their bloody same-sex union (just like he gleefully destroys the wooden figure of crucified Jesus).
During the trial, besides the marriage analogy being a tool to win over the human audience to his and Louis’ relationship (who he needs onside as much as possible to ease the way for his little mind-bending trick), I think the wedding ring functions as a signal to LOUIS, who he has always chided for his stubborn attachment to his humanity. He can’t do much within the trial’s carefully-controlled confines, but he can signal to Louis through the ring that he still loves him, that he still believes in their union, that he’s here to save him.
So then what about the tour wedding ring? I would argue it’s both 1) A signal to his fans – “Back off! I’m taken.” – and, more importantly 2) A signal to Louis: “It’s you; it’s always you. I’ll wait forever.” (And also probably, mascara streaming down his face, "I never agreed to our breakup so it never happened!!")
I don't know what happened with tumblr but I got the notification for your ask but then it never made it into my mailbox - it just sort of...disappeared??? Anyway, THANK YOU, YOU ARE SO SO SWEET!!! I appreciate this so much and I'm so happy to share the X-Men fandom with you and so many other amazing folks :D :D :D
I’m currently occupying my dad’s flat instead of staying at my flatshare, so I’m not as stir crazy as I could be, I guess. Probably a 4? I know, I know #privilege but I’ve only recently remembered how much shit he’s put me through and I stopped feeling guilty about it.
4. read anything yet?
I’ve read Rose by Martin Cruz Smith. I loved the Arkardy Renko cases as a teen, still love Polar Star to death, but this has been disappointingly straight-male-writer-ly with so much dumb, unecessary female objectification. Still finished it because when it’s good, it’s good.
6. learned anything about yourself?
Yeah, I did, but it’s been a slow process. I recently re-watched Daniel Sloss’ shows on Netflix and his bit about how our lives are like jigsaw puzzles really made the pieces click (see what I did there, oh I’m HILARIOUS, I’ll shut up now). The root to my unhappiness is that I’ve been trying to solve an area where the parts are broken or missing for way too long, instead of building around it or starting new areas. It’s coming back to haunt me now, big time and is paralysing me.
19. what do you not miss?
My mother barging in on me whenever she’s unhappy/bored (yep, that’s very much related to the jigsaw above). That part is actually nice, but she does find other ways, so eh. Not having my boss literally breathe down my neck because he’s been lazy and expects me to fix everything in two days now is also nice.
It's so telling that the Théâtre des Vampires trial skips over the real reason that Claudia and Louis want to kill Lestat. The coven frames Lestat dropping Louis as the motive, but while brutal and the reason for the break up in 1.5, it’s not the trigger for the murder plot, which only emerges at the end of 1.6.
Lestat has to die because of the evil shit he pulls with Claudia—when he essentially kidnaps her and threatens to kill her if she tries to leave again (out of a deranged but not wholly illogical attempt to look after Louis and preserve their relationship). This act is the unforgivable crime, or, depending on how you look at it, the action that cements the pattern by which the only way out is to kill Lestat. Louis would never have agreed to kill Lestat for himself, he only is willing to do it for Claudia’s sake.
And this fact is especially why Lestat's apology during the trial really doesn't cut it. He's ready to apologize to Louis (for something that he likely already apologized for—albeit probably not satisfactorily—during his six years of groveling), but refuses to address or apologize to Claudia, when his negation of Claudia’s needs/autonomy/existence in service of his and Louis’ relationship is exactly what launched the murder plot in the first place. Similarly, it’s devastating that for whatever reason while Claudia is Louis’ staunch defender at the trial, Louis can’t pull it together to stand up for her in the moment. Perhaps he thinks their only chance for survival lies in silence, or is simply too stunned by Armand's betrayal and Lestat, but for Claudia it just marks a familiar pattern of parental/brotherly neglect. The scene fully exemplifies why Claudia feels like the shingle that flew off the roof in the stormy romance of Louis and Lestat.
While it makes sense that the coven wouldn’t want to feature the actual motivation for the murder attempt at the trial, I really hope that the writers don’t forget this as-yet-unaddressed point in future seasons.
Cherik folks - i revived myself from the dead and wrote two pieces for this year's X-Men Remix Madness, based on amazing works by @ikeracity and @gerec!
On Louis and Armand and photography and portraiture
I want to take a moment to reflect on Louis and Armand’s chosen art forms and how they relate to their crises of self and inform their relationship. (There’s a much longer post about art and representation as forms of meaning-making in the show, but that’s for later.)
When they meet in Paris, Louis is a photographer and Armand a theatre director. The show uses these occupations figuratively, signifying slippage between each character’s artistic medium and role and their personality/self. For Armand, being a director is a somewhat ill-fitting role. It calls on him to oversee the play, standing outside of it and shouldering sole responsibility for staging decisions without ever taking the stage himself.
The problem with this is that he’s still, at heart, an artist’s model, needing to become the scene and not make decisions about its construction. This is signalled in an early exchange of theirs in 2.2 when Louis tells Armand, “You carry yourself well” (i.e. you’re a good model), and is later confirmed by Armand himself. Despite all the trauma of his past (or more likely because of it), he’s still fixated on the artist-model relationship (and the parallels he sees between it and his worship of his maker Marius). In the museum scene in 2.4 Armand asks:
Armand: Who am I, Louis? Am I my history I have endured? Am I the job I do not want? I do not know anymore. No one has painted me in 400 years.
This line highlights Armand’s deep crisis of self, related to his trauma, and connects it back to modelling/portraiture. Armand only knows who he is and how to define himself when someone paints him—i.e. through the eyes of another. This makes Louis appealing as a photographer, a contemporary portrait-taker. (And that pic he snaps of Armand so symbolically crucial). It also sets the stage for their kink dynamic, where they respectively adopt the roles of the taker and the taken.
However, as the show reveals, Louis is not a good photographer—following the metaphor, because he’s using photography as a tool to remove himself from the frame, i.e. as a distancing strategy in reaction to what being ‘in the picture’ emotionally and personally cost him in his entanglement with Lestat. After losing himself in Lestat, he seeks to withdraw entirely, hiding behind the camera lens, as defence mechanism and distraction both (“I liked taking photographs. It took my mind off things.”)
In 2.2 when Claudia asks Louis who he is outside of her and Lestat, he dodges the question by framing himself through photography, at one point literally using the camera lens as a shield to avoid her question. (Louis’ photography habit also relates to the notion that he’s ‘mad in love with humanity’: they are both a distraction to avoid engaging fully with his vampiric self.)
Louis doesn’t know his own answer to Armand’s question, ‘Who am I?,’ but it resonates with his own crisis of self. He finds comfort in helping Armand to define himself, but also in having his withholding nature characterized as an alluring trait, as opposed to what it is: a tactical retreat masking his broken sense of self.
Similarly, Armand fashions himself to please Louis, defining himself through their relationship. In choosing to answer his own question ‘who am I?’ with ‘Louis’,’ he avoids thinking or reflecting on his trauma or coming to terms with himself—leading to concerning statements like, “If I'm not with him, I'm nothing,” and shedding light on why the notion that Louis finds him boring is so devastating.
There’s a line exchange that highlights this dynamic in 2.3:
Armand: You are drawn to portraiture.
Louis: It hides the cracks in the walls.
The literal action here is Armand inspecting Louis and Claudia’s apartment and observing the many portraits lining the walls. However, this scene also functions on a deeper, metaphorical level. Armand sees Louis as a passionate portrait-taker, someone eager to capture him. However, Louis’ motivation to cover the cracks might be better understood as him fixating on others to obscure the cracks within himself. While he says “I’m out here finding myself,” he’s really hiding from himself.
We might lastly consider the difference between photography and painting. As a medium, photography engenders less intimacy between photographer and subject than between a painter and theirs. It’s done in a literal flash, compared the hours of sustained contact needed to complete a painted portrait, perhaps signalling Louis’ relative unavailability and the incompatibility of their chosen forms.
As the show’s framing of photography and painting helps to make clear, Armand and Louis are in a partnership that neither are putting their full self into, hampered by their respective wounds, (and in the infamous 2.5 fight scene they choose to hurt each other by prying open these wounds, rather than addressing them). And that’s the tragedy of their relationship.
Coda: Revisiting Armand's director persona, there is one way that it suits him. Notwithstanding his aversion to leadership and his desire to form himself around his partner, directing aligns with his need for control. His favoured staging style, projecting conjured images over the bodies of live (I mean, technically, undead) actors, says a lot about him, too, signalling his penchant for manipulation of the real (or the truth) via constructed images and narratives.
(Screencaps from KissThemGoodbye's TV shows gallery)
It’s all good fun to joke about Louis and Armand’s 77-year spite-based relationship, but it’s vital to also remember that Louis isn't with Armand just as a spiteful 'fuck you' to Lestat. Along with whatever genuine feelings he may have left for Armand, it’s the only way that Louis can think to punish Lestat for the part he played in Claudia’s death.
Remember, before he arrives at the tower to confront Lestat, he’s just slaughtered the coven members in bloody vengeance—and he’s ostensibly there to kill Lestat for the same reason. Their exchange goes:
Lestat: I came here to have a think on my origins. Why I do what I do. Why I–
Louis: Burned your daughter alive? Why you rehearsed a play that would burn your daughter alive? Why you crossed an ocean to rehearse a play that would burn your daughter alive?
We find Louis in a state of profound dissociation, a shell of himself, devastated by the loss of Claudia and Lestat’s role in it. Louis describes himself as dead, piloted only by his rage, which dies out after he kills the coven: “And all my rage and madness exited my body. And nothing replaced it.” It’s really telling that he refers to Claudia in the above passage as “your” daughter, not “our” daughter. It’s not that he doesn’t think of Claudia as his daughter, but that this isn’t about Louis. He, for the moment, has ceased to exist.
Louis knows how to hurt people. In season two, for example, we see him quite effectively wounding Armand and Daniel. Even if Lestat–as he thinks–wants him dead, he knows Lestat’s defining jealousy, that he can’t abide the thought of Louis with someone else. (And perhaps he’s taking a cue from his own feelings in 1.7: “I wanted him dead. I wanted him all to himself”)
Thus his commitment to Armand stems not from a hot and petty, deeply personal spite, but is a cold, calculated decision powered by a profound well of grief. A prevailing theme of the trial is Lestat’s devastating loneliness. Louis refuses any renewal of their companionship, and while Lestat is alone and suffering, wounds him further by letting him know that Louis won’t be.
But also, beneath all this, I think the Armand relationship is in part Louis’ way of punishing himself. He ties himself to the man that betrayed them both, carrying a permanent reminder of how he’s failed Claudia. (And perhaps it’s just a little about removing temptation and making himself suffer for on some level even now wanting Lestat.)
