“Claudia is going to be the biggest mistake Lestat has ever made in his entire life — not the fact that she’s alive, but the fact that she died [in front of him at the show trial in episode seven],” he told THR. “The death of Claudia is going to be the thing that haunts him forever, and I wish that he did save her. I’m not sure if he knew that he could, but the fact that he saw her look at him with a pure connection at the end — and the two of them did share a connection at multiple times in their lives. I think he’ll never get that image [of Claudia dying] out of his head, and I think what it does is it also sets us up for a relationship with a haunting of Claudia and Lestat that is quite exciting.”
He continued, “I think we’ve got the potential of not letting Claudia go, because Lestat has not gotten any closure there, and he has a lot to atone for. He has done some really terrible things, and I think a wonderful motivation for a character going forward is shame.”
— Sam Reid, “‘Interview with the Vampire’” Renewed for Season 3 at AMC [link]
theres this quote running around from jacob anderson where he talks about how historically black people have been removed from period dramas and how, as suggested by the interviewer (w/ blueiight embellishment ofc), the very few times black charas would show up in these period pieces theyd be side characters delegated to a raceblind narratively incoherent plot to placate an audience ashamed with / of the nuances of blackness. i rly like how he said louis’s character represents both a ‘black and very human story about a vampire… [Black people] do not usually have the opportunity to play such complex and fluent characters’. i think that brings to heart a lot of why this show has my heart, as an armchair historian and r.n. (dont ask what that stands for). u racebent characters in a way that coheres, situate ur black characters in a specific context, and the story never deludes us into thinking the mere existence of an interracial relationship is enough to end racism. in e2 louis literally says “fledgling sounds like slave, dont call me that” and e3 starts with louis telling lestat the history of dismembering runaway enslaved ppl & placing their bodies on the gates of of jackson square.. in his initiation to vampirism, louis is moved from the historically Black creole treme area he grew up in & is placed into lestat’s townhome in the very white, french, old quarter. vampirism as hes initiated into is a loving, powerful, cruel, and isolating existence for louis. bc of vampirism he is able to kill a racist person and not be lynched for it, hes able to echo the historical dismemberment on the alderman by placing his body on the st louis cathedral, but he is unable to kill racist groups & systems that initiate race riots. his connection to claudia in s1 is not so much by the oedipal, but by both their connection as lestat’s fledglings and as Black [creole] people placed in a part of the city largely alien to them both. this connection can be broken down even further. louis saw claudia as his joychild of sorts, ‘[his] redemption’ for his 5 years of pimping but a big part of her tragedy is that a child being made into a vampire cannot redeem anyone, much less redeem an individual from what was a historical inevitability. claudia is adopted into such a stature that she wouldve otherwise never reached by virtue of being made a vampire, but even then that is conditional. claudia is rendered inert from being anyone’s ‘wife’ forever trapped in the confines of immaturity as a ‘daughter’, only hoping at best to be louis’s ‘sister’ and isnt that resonant to bw.. she’s selectively infantilized both a child ‘meddling in the affairs of her parents’ , ungrateful, arrogant, and adultified - presumed powerful enough to ‘poison louis against [lestat]’ , taking on the role of louis’s ‘knight in vengeful white black’ .. the response lestat has to claudia is characterized by him continuing the cycle of abuse he once faced toward her and with a black claudia who was once a poor girl now adopted into this immortal luxury it takes on a racialized element. “bach is beyond you” and claudia bites back with “yes this french music is hmm. not made for these mongrel ears”. the absence of metaphor is striking!! literally the fact that this show does not shy away from the era its set in is why its so good.
Louis thanks Lestat for bestowing the gift of vampirism on him, even though he has spent much of the last century believing that it was a curse. “I think the culmination of this story is that Louis has found his vampiric self, and I don’t think he could really get there without reconciling with Claudia’s death and [his brother] Paul’s death, and without acknowledging to Lestat that [becoming a vampire] was a gift,” explains Anderson. “I think it could be read as just a pure thank you or an apology, and I don’t think it’s solely either one of those things. I think it’s an acknowledgement of something [deeper].”
[ … ]
For Louis, it’s about connecting all these conflicting ideas about himself,” Anderson responds. “He has always been this creature of rage, of resentment, of hurt and trauma. But he is also this very tender, thoughtful, depressive, insular character — and all of those things are true, and there are a hundred other things about him that are true. I think it’s probably true of most people, really. “The change that Louis finds at the end is like, ‘I don’t just have to endure [this life] anymore. I can live. I can live as myself. I can be here as myself,’” he continues. “But then, there are thousands of vampires around the world that are like, ‘You did this, and you did that. We’re going to get you!’ I think he’s just shrouded within that acceptance of himself. He’s just like, ‘Cool, you know where I am. I feel very comfortable in my own skin, so come and test that skin if you really must. But I’m not scared.’”
“Louis de Pointe du Lac” vs. “I am the vampire Louis du Lac”. The jumbled up recollection Crispin gives the tourists of 1132 Rue Royale thats emblematic of the tale Lestat spun at the ball in season 1, the classic Southern gothic invoked when discussing “the [unnamed] local Creole hustler and his child bride running a Voodoo court in the back-yard”, vs Louis meeting with Lestat to grieve Claudia he saved from a burning house only for her to be executed by fire 40 years after the fact. “I am the vampire Louis du Lac”. Now geneaologically unmoored from plantation Pointe du Lac, allowed to live past the JCS that would’ve killed him as a mortal, “I didn’t know it was a gift.” he embraces a modern sort of predation in Dubai. “I own the night.” “I may learn to live honestly.”
In a week's time, in a setting of my choosing, we revisit the project boyish youth prevented us from finishing. Years and thousands of miles removed from the room we shared in San Francisco, I offer, for your journalistic pleasures, my full attention and my life story.
vs.
Props in a play. A play that's been fully designed and rehearsed. And every actor onstage has scripted lines except for us. … Set dressing nailed to the floor.
On one hand, the sham-trial of Louis, Claudia, and Madeleine, is absolutely a mockery of the worst examples of this show’s real-world audience. But in the wider narrative, the trial enriches Louis’s own motivations in 1973 and 2022. Louis wanting to tell the story of his life has an added layer to it simply by the fact that, chronologically, Louis and Claudia, especially Claudia’s, entire lives were made mockeries of on stage first in 1949-1950. The sham-trial is a near-original product of the show, in that what was a straightforward execution in the source material is turned into a public spectacle, where vampires are food to a human audience, and Louis and Claudia are violently silenced as their lives are framed into caricatures of who they were. The rhetoric of two interviews too, are entirely original to the series, but share a common starting point.
Why does Louis, both in 1973 and 2022, choose to begin his life in the year 1910, and not when Louis was a child? Armand opens up his life story with Arun, Lestat tells Paul how he was stolen from the monastery& beaten as a child, Claudia writes in her diaries how her mother died and her father abandoned her to an abusive relative.
It is as much, because Louis truly understands his (and Claudia’s) lives to have restarted with his (their) vampiric turning, as it is the fact that this show-trial takes advantage of Louis’s self-image (and how he relates Claudia in relation to himself) by beginning the story of Louis’s life in 1910, and Claudia’s life in 1917.
Looking at the trial script, and comparing it to the interview in season 1, we see how “the vulnerability within the object” [Louis] is perused. Something to remind is that the sequences I will fixate on are on-script, and therefore, blatantly untrue. The only times we truly go off-script are transparently obvious, even twice-aided with flashbacks, and the only time Louis cedes the narrative to an off-script Lestat only enhance the existing framework of how Louis relates to Claudia.
[SANTIAGO] The accused was a troubled man. A failed sugar farmer, a brothel-keeper.
[LESTAT] Forced into corners by his race, alienated from his own desires. American puritanism mangling his very soul.
[SANTIAGO] Disreputable, cold, violent.
[LESTAT] Louis first accosted me in a pleasure house, and then everywhere I went, as if by happy accident, there was Louis, offering to be my chaperone, his eyes sliding down me. I… a vampire, was being hunted. With every breath, every heartbeat, every sidelong glance, Louis was saying, "Come to me".
In contrast to the scripted debate over Louis’s life, how does Louis relate this aspect of himself to Daniel? Almost as if he’s defending himself, but from who? Daniel who is already familiar with this? The audience of a book in its infancy? Or…The man in the room who pinpointed at the “vulnerability within the object?”.
I was, admittedly, a rougher thing then. You had to be if you wanted to survive. You couldn't look weak on Liberty Street. [ … ] Did I want to pull a knife on my brother? No. But as I alluded to before, you couldn't look weak on Liberty. You never knew who was watching.
I couldn't move. My body was seized with weakness. His gaze tied a string around my lungs, and I found myself immobilized. […] Let the tale seduce you. Just as I was seduced. […] It was a cold winter that year, and Lestat was my coal fire. And I found myself, for the very first time, to anyone other than Paul, confiding my struggles to another man. I was being hunted. And I was completely unaware it was happening.
Here’s Louis on his own race here, Lestat is the one who accosted Louis at the Fair Play Salloon.
Segwaying: This trial is not “Lestat’s point of view”, this is Lestat playing a marionette on stage to revenge himself. His revenge evolves live-on-stage into an attempt to go off-script to save Louis, and only Louis. Lestat breaks script in almost S1 fashion to berate Louis for his reticience to admit his desire, where he admits to making Claudia for Louis, and admits where he broke Louis. [Lestat says the singular “pup”, not “pups”, and this is when Claudia realizes that Lestat did not come for her.] Even bragging about Claudia being the pinnacle of his vampiric self is on-script.
This is Armand, aware of the optics of the kind of men Louis had to wrestle his own legacy from in two lifetimes, creating this script to break & re-shape Louis. “I felt like we were the only two vampires left in the world.” Armand orchestrates this so Claudia & Louis can forever be severed when trying to break Claudia into mad suicide through “My Baby Loves Windows” failed, and Louis still thinks of her even after he turned Madeleine, and Louis can channel his vengeance over his own torture & Claudia’s wrongful death to the coven. What did Armand say in E12… “Don’t you/we have enough to fear from Paris?” Anyways…
If Louis is framed as both the desperate predator and the frigid reticient lover, how does this sham-trial mock Claudia?
Through her words. We are narratively introduced to Claudia’s diaries in Dubai during Episode 4 with Louis out of the room, Armand, docent still as ‘Rashid’, introducing “an alternative perspective on the years of [this interview]’s interest”. Armand in Episode 13 in an attempt to re-gain control over the interview admits to what he and Louis did and did not cut, but to what end? Louis in Dubai has to ask Armand for the missing pages, pages we have yet to see. And chronologically speaking, through the showman Santiago, Armand was the first and last one to use Claudia’s private words to pilfer her narrative and try to break her.
The framing of Claudia as a mad, permanently infantile defect, but also the artfully manipulative entity able to assess Louis & Lestat’s fragile union pinpoints the assumption Armand makes to Louis & Madeleine both: the near inevitability Armand disregards her and treats her end with, throwing her in an infant’s dress to be a character constantly suiciding itself, and Armand calling her a manipulator in the prior episode.
Claudia’s defect caught up to her.
She harmed herself in the sun for attention and followed that up with a killing spree, corpses clogging the bayou, a penchant for human souvenirs.
And what does Louis offer us, in Dubai?
Louis can easily revenge and reclaim his own legacy through the interview, but how can Louis hope to re-pay the smearing and murder of Claudia? Through re-contextualizing the same words she wanted no one but Madeleine to read? “You can put the diaries in their proper context,” he once said. He can never be the one to truly salvage Claudia’s self, which is why the diaries cut out when Claudia finally felt fulfilled, and her last words are kept from our ears. An explanation, to who Claudia once was as a vampire, from Claudia’s own pen, without her will, just as she was turned.
It is through her diaries and Louis’s recollection of her that we realize her trophy-seeking was an evolving project. The boys she killed in New Orleans were her attempt at creating her own vampire companion, only to realize that she cannot create companions of her own bc of the same body she was trapped in, through no will of her own. There is something fascinating about “who” & “when” can make vampires, but that’s another post.
The “artful predator assessing the cracks in [Louis& Lestat’s] union” is in fact, Claudia returning to familiar captivity after being kidnapped and raped repeatedly. What’s interesting is that TdV does not have or launder the pages of the immediate aftermath of her rape, which suggests that Claudia herself tore those pages out [& certainly matches the damage], as ripe predators would see fit to find fault in Claudia for being assaulted.
The showboaters of TdV will die next episode, but what of the architect/s of the trial vs. Louis the architect of this interview? What will be done with Claudia’s diaries after this? The end of this interview poses very interesting questions.
