AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire” needs to fast forward to the Legacy of Magnus section in The Vampire Lestat…like stat.
Trigger Warning: Some discussion of rape as it relates to events in “The Tale of the Body Thief”
Mon Dieu, I’d forgotten how absolutely brilliant Lestat’s transformation sequence was. It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything that makes Lestat such an engaging character, and is even more interesting compared to Louis’ experience.
Lestat is my first true book boyfriend, my one vampire love, and for all that I love the AMC show and Sam Reid’s portrayal of Lestat, they do him dirty in a lot of ways. That’s not to say that he’s not the smug dickhole, cruel more often than not, that we see in the show, but I’ll never stop wondering why they had to turn him into a wifebeater. Say what you will of Lestat, say what you will of the changes that a lot of book adaptations make, but the whole domestic violence sequence between Lestat and Louis make no sense given the well of cruelty they have to draw from as far as Lestat’s treatment of others in the first book.
The way he acts with Claudia is pretty consistent, and it’s pretty on-point with book 1 Lestat and 1994 movie Lestat – that alone is enough to justify Claudia’s actions, really, but add to the fact that he was purposely hiding critical info from them that he could have easily revealed just highlights his selfishness. So really, no need to make him a domestic abuser on top of it. I don’t understand it in the least. It’s going to be hard to bring a character back from that, even as charming and endearing as Lestat becomes in TVL.
That’s not really why I brought up the proposed fast forward to Lestat’s making though, it was just forefront in my mind as I made my way through that section in my recent re-read/list to TVL.
I was an extraordinary fiend! If I’d been sitting on the steps of hell with my elbows on my knees and the devil had said, “Lestat, come, choose the form of the fiend you wish to be to roam the earth,” how could I have chosen a better fiend than what I was? And it seemed suddenly that suffering was an idea I’d known in another existence and would never know again.
The Vampire Lestat
How glorious is it going to be to see this attitude portrayed on the screen? You see little flashes of this attitude in season 1, and I know the showrunners tried to make a conscious effort to bring a little of post-Interview Lestat (or pre, technically speaking) into what we’ve seen thus far. You saw little bits of in the 1994 movie as well, particularly when Lestat talks to Louis about his maker and not knowing anything. You see it more in the “made just for the movie” ending with Lestat in the car, which might be my favorite part of the whole damned thing.
Getting back to the dichotomy of season 1 show Lestat and TVL Lestat, I think they’re going to have a really hard fucking time bringing those two characters back together. I know that IwtV, and consequently seasons 1 and 2 of the show, are from Louis’ perspective, but in the book he never veered as far off course from what Lestat was like that you’d be 100% shocked at what kind of a guy he was by the time you get to TVL. Essentially Louis thought Lestat was a cruel, manipulative pyscho that was playing at being more important than he was, and that’s very true to a big extent, but the clarity you get from TVL is that his upbringing, the trauma of his turning and subsequent events, offered a reason of sorts for the secrecy, and certainly Louis’ perceived cruelty towards his father. As for the impulsiveness that results in the making of Claudia, well Lestat was pretty much always an impulsive little imp, so no explanation needed there.
Really, the biggest difference between book 1 Lestat and book 2 Lestat is that he appears ignorant and whiny when we see him later in Paris at the Theatre des Vampires….I’m not used to seeing the Lestat we come to know in the rest of the series as a simpering bitch who runs to mommy when brother does something wrong, and perhaps that’s because Lestat was not a fully fleshed out entity in Anne’s mind when she wrote that; it’s what I’ve always assumed, in any case. Most of his other behavior was excused away by Louis’ perspective, being colored as such by his moodiness, his depression, his general dissatisfaction with pretty much everything. Point is, it’s all stuff that can kind of be explained away relatively easily and still fit within the text as it exists now. How do you excuse Lestat beating Louis within an inch of his life, dropping him from the fucking sky, and then trying to make up for by writing Louis a song that he had his mistress sing? Lestat is brash, sure, and mean, of course, but he was never sadistically cruel in that way, especially to someone like Louis.
Don’t get me wrong, later on in the series you see Lestat doing things that are awful by modern human moral standards (the rape of the nun in “Tale of the Body Thief” really stands out). That’s something I can’t really excuse, but I don’t feel comfortable passing judgment on it until I actually get to that point in my reread. If it’s how I remember it, it’s most definitely rape, and I can’t offer any sort of explanation as to how I could continue to love him as I do after that. In any real situation, you’d never want to excuse that away, and I have a hard time trying to explain that it’s only fiction, and there’s a certain disregard for reality that come with that, but as I’ve said many times elsewhere, even fantasy fiction is at its most effective when it’s portraying real things through a lens of non-reality, as it were. In that sense there is no excuse for it, but then again Lestat straight up murders innocent people and trapped Claudia in a five-year old’s body for eternity, so that’s at least on the same level of rape on the spectrum of evil. Ultimately what I’m trying to get at here is that even readers have some experience with having to look around some of the truly awful things Lestat has done in order to keep him in our good graces. So when you look at it that way, I supposed it’s not all that different.
Still, it’s going to be a tough thing to get around and re-reading the birth of Lestat the vampire makes me so eager to see it all play out live, especially with someone like Sam Reid portraying him (he has the looks and infinite respect for the character). I just wonder if it’s going to wind up coloring the experience at all. As a reader I can kind of excuse it, but it was my experience as a reader that made that experience as a viewer twice as difficult to swallow. I can picture Lestat in fact, sitting at his TV, smug in the fact that they got a looker like Sam Reid to portray him, but screaming at the television that he never cheated on Louis, let alone beat him. He’d also be the first to admit, in the same breath, that he’s not only done lots of terrible things, but 100% enjoyed doing all of them, but that’s a line he never, and would never, cross.
Nothing to do but cross that bridge when you get to it, I guess, and in the meantime continue to enjoy rediscovering the wonder that is Lestat de Lioncourt and Sam Reid’s portrayal.
Keep It To Your Shelf 