Adaptation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Thoughts on AMC’s version of “Interview With the Vampire” and book adaptations in general.

I feel the need to preface this with the fact that I’m at least one week behind on episodes for this show as I’m not an AMC+ subscriber. I’m aware of spoilers for the show ending, and being that I’ve been reading these books since high school, there’s not a whole lot I’d need to worry about in the way of spoilers here.

Now that that’s out of the way, Interview with the Vampire on TV?!?! High School me (which is pretty much now me, tbh) is squeeing her pants off. I was literally known as the Anne Rice girl in high school, and I’m extremely proud of the fact that I still have my t-shirt with the movie poster on it that I ordered out of the back of a magazine in 1994. The Vampire Chronicles just hit a chord with me back then, and even though that universe has expanded greatly since I first started reading them, at times not always to my satisfaction, Lestat, and consequently Louis, will always hold a place in my heart.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie version for the first time, and not only have literary adaptations changed considerably since then, the culture surrounding discussion of such has really blown up. You didn’t really have access to the internet back then so you could express your displeasure over all the things that were wrong with like-minded individuals, hence Anne taking out a full page newspaper (!) ad over how wrong Tom Cruise was as Lestat.

Consequently, by the time the (very bad) “sequel”, Queen of the Damned, rolled around a few years later, a lot had changed and I fondly recall getting into many an argument with both strangers and producers on the movie as to why that particular movie was fucking awful. Turns out I was right about that one, but I thought 1994 IwtV was the bees fucking knees, and I still think it holds up to this day as an amazing example of a literary adaptation that strikes the perfect balance between book and movie….something QotD really dropped the ball on, which was a shame because I still think that one is probably my favorite Vampire Chronicle of all.

Getting back to it though – it’s funny how proprietary us book nerds get over the books we love when we here they’re being adapted to the visual medium – TV or movie. I get it, I do, but the perspective I’ve gained over the years has made it more apparent to me than ever that ultimately they don’t really matter all that much – the books are still going to be there no matter how many crappy adaptations are produced, so why do we bother so much with the caring about it?

That’s a multi-layered answer, I think. First, and foremost in my mind, is a movie/tv adaptation of a beloved book is probably the easiest way to experience said book for the first time again. It’s probably the only way, honestly, unless you aren’t like me with the constant re-reads and are somehow able to forget entire novels. Second, when you love a book, it’s only natural to want to consume anything and everything you can that’s related to it. Third, if you’re a lazy American, it’s not always easy to find the time to go through a book hundreds of pages long to get your fix – a two hour movie is a lot more palatable. I feel like adaptations tend to help me with visualization on subsequent re-reads, since I sometimes have a hard time picturing things in my head when reading. That’s a personal shortcoming I think, both because I’m pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADD, and I sacrifice the forest for the trees when reading something, at least on my first go ’round.

I’m getting way off track though – the AMC adaptation of IwtV is largely stellar, despite all of the changes made. I might not have thought this had it changed this much back in the day and it was high school me watching this show – these books were kind of a beacon of my adolescence and I was so possessive of them – it very much felt like if they disappeared, I might too. I identified with them so wholly that if anything was changed, it was like a personal affront to my own identity – almost like I wouldn’t be who I thought I was if these books (or any book I latched on to at that time) were always there in a form I recognized them in. They were mine, they weren’t for everyone.

Thankfully I’m more well adjusted now than I was at 16, else I’d probably have freaked over the fact that Louis and Claudia are now Black and that the story now takes place in modern Dubai instead of 1970s San Francisco, so this is essentially a second interview with the vampire.

I think Louis being Black actually brings a really interesting new dynamic to the story, one that’s especially relevant to the world as it is today, and it doesn’t change a whole lot of what’s important to the core of his story, as well as his relationship with Lestat – same with Claudia. Unfortunately it’s the less obvious changes that have me more confused here. That’s not to say that I don’t love this show, I do, it’s great, but it does make me wonder why certain things were updated. Oddly enough, it’s the same question I asked in my endless early-internet ramblings on the Queen of the Damned movie, i.e., it’s not that things were changed per se, it’s just why they changed what they changed.

The most obvious change is the move to modern day Dubai – that’s not the issue so much as it is Louis’ apparent change in personality. He’s a lot colder than I remember him being, and more callous. I know Louis changes quite a bit over the course of the series, especially after his failed suicide attempt, but I can’t rightly recall if he ever became as callous as he appears in this show – flaunting feeding on humans in front of Daniel, and being quite in your face about the way he feeds on animals. Part of that is for television/visual sensationalism, I’m sure (and the more I think on it I think that change applies to other updates as well, but I’ll get to that in a bit), but it’s still jarring, since the Louis I knew wasn’t like that. It’s not a massive deal though and it makes for interesting television, I guess, but those behaviors seem more Lestat than anything else.

I think aging Claudia up the way the show did is probably it’s largest mistake though. I understand why it was done, much the way I understand why it was done in the ’94 movie – it’s hard to find a five year old actor that can convey the complexity of Claudia’s experience, and it would be twice as hard to have to watch a five year old go through some of the things she went through. She’s 14 in the show, 12 in the movie, and I believe the actress is 19 in real life. It’s no fault of her own but she’s obviously a 19 year old woman portraying a 14 year old, and it unfortunately detracts from the most important aspect of Claudia’s character – the body frozen in time with a mind that keeps developing. It’s horrifying to think about, was brilliantly portrayed in Anne’s book, and you just don’t get the gravitas this story deserves when you utilize an actress that is obviously playing far outside her age range. If you’re going to keep the storyline, which they did, then you need to make sure it hits with the same impact it did in the book, and this doesn’t. She expresses concern over the fact that the only men that would want to fuck her are perverts (true), but she doesn’t look 14, so I had a hard time getting past her being upset over something that I couldn’t reconcile with the visuals I was receiving.

This sort of carries in to perhaps my biggest gripe over the show, and that’s the overt inclusion of explicit sex. I’m not a prude, I watched Game of Thrones and True Blood and I read tons of smut and I love it, but one of the biggest “pitfalls”, as it were, about Ricean vampires were that they could no longer have physical sex. No boners, no orgasms, etc. I’m pretty sure that Pandora mentions at one point that it’s easier for women to essentially fake the physicality of the act by various methods, but that sex and physical sexual desire as humans know it just doesn’t happen as a vampire. The trade-off is that the act of consuming blood and vampirism in general is an inherently sexual experience that far exceeds physical intercourse in terms of pleasure (carnal or otherwise). So Anne Rice wrote some of the sexiest no-sex out there. This also helps contribute to the sense that relationships as vampires experience them, and romantic love, goes far beyond physical attraction and desire. It’s kind of ironic if you think that creatures culturally assumed to be without souls are able, by virtue of their enhanced senses and vampire nature, can truly experience another person’s soul in a way that humans can only guess at.

There’s so much sex in this show though! All Louis and Lestat seem to do is have sex. Now, to be honest, I think the one thing that bothered me the most about Rice’s re-imagining of vampire mythos was her explicitly stating that vampires can no longer participate in sex in the human sense. What a bummer, right? You live forever, are hot forever, can probably get whoever you want but can’t have sex with them. It must really suck if you’re a young enough vampire and had a prolific enough body count pre-vampirism to remember/know what you’re missing. Again though, it’s very explicitly eclipsed as a pleasurable experience in Rice’s text by the act of drinking blood, so even if a vampire knows what they’re missing, they don’t fucking care because it still doesn’t feel as good as blood sucking does.

This was executed fairly well in the 1994 movie, though I do have a chuckle every now and then over all the pearl-clutching at that time re: the homoerotic overtones of Lestat and Louis’s relationship and vampirism in general. My point is it’s been done before and the success of the movie didn’t suffer as a result, so I’m not sure why the producers of this show felt the need to show the characters making out and fucking constantly. Let me be clear – I don’t care about it, I’m in no way offended by it, I just question the need for it given that the transcendent experience of blood drinking as a more-than-adequate replacement for actual sex is such an integral aspect of what made Rice’s books so revolutionary. I can only assume that it’s because of a desire to pander to television sensationalism and cater to the part of the audience that is not familiar with Rice’s books – that right there is always a tradeoff that we as primarily book fans need to acknowledge and come to terms with when literature we love is adapted to the visual format. The books belong to those who read them, the shows to those who watch them, and as someone who partakes of both, we fortunately get to have the best of both worlds, in my opinion. I had many a teenage fantasy of Tom Cruise-as-Lestat, and tbh it never ended at blood drinking, even knowing as a book stan that Ricean vampires are essentially impotent. I had my own perverted teenage head-canon where I got all the benefits of Rice vampires without the (imo, worst) drawback. So long story short, I get why the sex is there, and I fully support it, and I too would be screwing Lestat senseless if I had the good fortune to spend eternity with him.

I do wish they had focused more on the sexiness of non-sex acts, since it’s such a huge aspect of what made Anne Rice’s work so unique and so fresh, and new. Previous to her, vampires were kind of gross, maybe only a step above an actual rotting corpse, so to turn them into something so sexual without the benefit of actual sex is kind of mind-blowing, if you ask me. It’s a huge tour-de-force and sort of what she’s known for, and seeing as how you kind of wouldn’t have the opportunity to make the show without her work already being appreciated for exactly this reason, it would be nice if it was included. True Blood would not have been the almost-porn it was without Anne Rice, is what I’m saying. It’s easy enough to get past though, because hey, Sam Reid half-naked, right? So it’s an issue that’s a non-issue, a caveat of the adaptation process, and not one that has so huge an effect on the essence of the story.

I’m more concerned about the nature of Louis and Lestat’s relationship, the reduction of what they had together as dumbed down version of a gay sitcom that’s most offensive. While I think it’s important and necessary to show gay sexuality in the way this show shows it, I wish it had been treated with more respect and not played for comic effect as much as it was. Don’t get me wrong, I LOLed on more than one occasion, but I worry about the message it sends sometimes, that it’s okay to laugh at two men playing daddy and family with a little girl and the issues that arise out of a living situation like that when the book went so far beyond it. Is it disrespectful? On some level I think it is, especially when you look at how Lestat cheats on Louis with a woman. Is it the fact that he’s with a woman? Not really, book Lestat is as pansexual as they come (though I didn’t know that was even a preference you could have back when I originally read this), it’s the fact that he cheats at all, and for something as trivial as sex, because he obviously doesn’t feel for Antoinette in any kind of emotional sense.

Lestat is many things, but outside of Interview (which was from Louis’ perspective) he never treated Louis the way the show has him doing. Lestat is cruel, and capricious, and selfish and narcissistic, but he loves Louis and I can’t imagine a world in which he beats him the way he did in the show and that event is essentially treated as some weird PSA for domestic violence. It’s a curious choice for show runners to make, an even more curious one to make when you consider the power dynamic between the two not only as Maker and fledgling, but also as White Man and Black Man, and I’m still trying to puzzle out why they thought this was a good choice for the show. Lestat is a villain, to be sure, but I’m having a hard time recalling an instance where he ever treated Louis of all characters this way. Please, if you’re reading this and I’m wrong, let me know. It’s been a while since I’ve read these with any detail and I’m only now finally getting a chance to revisit them via unabridged audiobook.

All this being said, the show is still insanely good – Sam Reid is fucking perfect as Lestat (the French accent is sublime) and despite the issues so many others have taken with the show (Claudia’s sexual assault, for one) it largely gets it right.

On that last note, I haven’t actually seen Claudia’s sexual assault, though I have watched that episode. It was either edited out of the version I saw (as a non-subscriber to AMC+) or it was edited out of the episode entirely after the outcry. To that I say, rape is never an easy thing to see portrayed in front of your eyes, much as we’re aware that it unfortunately happens everywhere, every day. I’m still haunted by that scene in “The Accused.” I think it was something that was almost necessitated by the nature of the changes made to Claudia’s character and the dissatisfaction she experienced as a result of her becoming a vampire, but I think it’s something that needed to be shown (or at least implied?) in order to give her the necessary motivation to hate Lestat for doing what he did to her enough to want to kill him over it. We needed to see what a true disadvantage she was at at having been turned at the age she was, and while I think you could have achieved that end without being as graphic as it apparently was (again, I have not been able to watch that), I sort of understand why it was done? I know it sounds so wishy washy to word it this way, but you kind of have to question the need to display any kind of rape or sexual assault of any kind in such a visual manner, without warnings, which as I understand it, was the major reason viewers were so upset over it. That right there is 100% warranted – I know people think we’re too sensitive these days, but fact is it doesn’t take a lot of effort in 2022 to anticipate needing a trigger warning on something like rape even in a show that has shown insane amounts of gore of violence already. Rape is real, vampires killing their way through New Orleans in increasingly violent ways are not.

So literary adaptations are funny things, aren’t they? They’re a boon and a curse, and as much as we as book readers want to see things play out exactly as they are on the page, that rarely happens, even in the best of adaptations (LotR, in particular). That doesn’t mean the adaptation is shit, but it does make us a little gate-keepy as readers in the end. Sure, the egg wouldn’t exist without the chicken, but this omelet isn’t just being made for our benefit. The real benchmark of a good book to movie/tv adaptation shouldn’t be how much of the original material is left it, it should be how much of the essence of the thing that made this entity worthy of being interpreted over a new medium remains. It was there in 1994, and it’s here now, and I’m glad, because I missed Lestat a lot.