Today's Tuesday TV Touchbase turns it's attention to a new series on AMC called Interview with the Vampire.
The "interview" takes place in the present day between vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac and reporter Daniel Molloy. The story Louis sets out to tell goes back to the start of the 20th century of how he was brought across into the undead life of a vampire by vampire Lestat de Lioncourt.
Lestat is all slick and polished with European refinement. Louis is a young black man in New Orleans, hustling hard to be a successful business man in a country that has no interest in seeing a young black man becoming a successful anything.
In addition to the obvious issues with race, Louis also wrestles with being gay and even in the rough and tumble world of New Orleans in 1910, that's something that needs to be managed very carefully.
Lestat and Louis become lovers and Lestat turns Louis into a vampire.
From there, Louis learns of the gifts and burdens of being a nigh immortal being who thrives on the blood of the living. And being a vampire doesn't make the racist and homophobic shit go away.
For example, Lestat and Louis can only go to the opera together if Louis pretends to be his butler.
Louis struggles with the need to kill to maintain the supply of blood he needs to survive as a vampire. He tries to take a moral high road by only consuming blood from wild animals but it's a poor substitute for human blood. And there are some humans who deserve killing.
Like the alderman whose enacts blatantly racist laws to drive Louis' whorehouse out of business.
Louis doesn't want to lose contact with his human family. But as time passes and they age and he doesn't, Louis' separation from his humanity becomes more certain.
Louis seeks to restore some sense of family with Claudia, a 14 year old girl who becomes a daughter to Louis and Lestat.
Making a 14 year old girl a vampire comes with its own unique problems, leaving her caught in puberty for eternity. For example, while Louis or Lestat can drain an adult person dry and be satisfied for awhile before they need to feed again, Claudia is perpetually hungry.
And that is not the worst of it. Even as she "ages" into her early 20's and feels longings for love and sex, her smooth body betrays her as forever a child. This is very frustrating for Claudia.
In the present, Daniel prickly pokes holes in Louis' narrative, taking issue with Louis' flowery poetic language to describe even that darkest, most disturbing parts of his life as a vampire. At one point, Daniel snipes at Louis, “You talk about him like he was your soulmate, like you were locked in some fucked-up gothic romance."
Daniel does have a point. Whatever romance novel gloss Louis wants to give to his story, he and Lestat are most definitely in a dysfunctional relationship.
I have not read the Anne Rice novel or seen the 1994 film on which Interview with the Vampire is based but I know enough of the source material to understand some fundamental changes from that material.
In the book and the movie, Louis de Pointe du Lac was a plantation owner from the 1800's. Changing him to a young black businessman of the early 1900's is an inspired touch that opens up lots the story in interesting ways. For all the power that Louis de Pointe du Lac gains by becoming a vampire (which includes enhances strength and telepathy) that make him more than human, Louis is still constrained by societal constructs designed to treat him as less than human.
Another change from the source material is the relationship between Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt. In the book, their homosexual relationship is subtext. In the movie, it is completely scrubbed out of the narrative.
In this new TV series, subtext moves to text. Louis and Lestat do share a coffin for booty calls. Their gay relationship is another obstacle Louis must navigate around in an oppressive America. More the libertine, Lestat is frequently puzzled by what all the fuss is about.
Louis has his own sexual limitations to contend with. While he is completely all in for sexing dudes and nobody but dudes, Lestat is more than willing to cross the street to sample the ladies on occasion.
Interview with the Vampire is a fascinating study into the logistical issues that come with being a vampire, of avoiding daylight, navigating interactions with a very mortal humanity, of knowing when to feed and how. And for all the power that comes with being an immortal vampire, the limits of that power because humanity has other ideas regarding race and sex.
Interview with the Vampire hinges on some great performances at it's core.
As Louis de Pointe du Lac, Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones, Doctor Who) plays a wide range of emotional beats, from cocky confidence to agonized sadness to different levels of rage, from barely repressed to blazing white hot. Louis has a lot on his plate over the course of a century, at war with a society working against him for being black and gay and at war with his own dark impulses as a vampire underneath the civilize veneer of a businessman.
Sam Reid has to thread a tricky needle as Lestat de Lioncourt, at once a genuinely charming man but also a deeply disturbing and manipulative killer.
Bailey Bass as Claudia is extraordinary in her portrayal of the 14 year old vampire, ecstatic over the power and freedom being a vampire gives her but depressed and lost with being frozen in form that does not keep pace with her intellectual and emotional development, a passionate woman trapped in a child's body for eternity.
Eric Bogosian is wry and acerbic as Daniel Molloy, not allowing Louis' unique status as a century old vampire to rattle him in his quest for honest answers to hard questions.
Interview with the Vampire is a powerful drama that demands the attention of the viewer in a compelling way, much as Lestat compels Louis down a dark and dangerous path.
And that is that for the Tuesday TV Touchbase this week.
There is another television post coming up tomorrow as I post about the PBS documentary series The U.S. and the Holocaust.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
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