What are we doing in the closet – Weekend – Kommersant
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A TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire is being released on the AMC channel, which in absentia is most easily suspected of being opportunistic and conniving with BLM and other current agendas, but nevertheless, upon closer examination, it turns out to be even more faithful to the literary original than the famous 1994 film with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
In post-COVID 2022, investigative journalist Daniel Molloy (Erik Bogosian) interviews vampire Louis de Pont du Lac (Jacob Anderson, who played Gray Worm in Game of Thrones), who was once shameless but has come a long way to “awareness”. This is their second meeting: the first conversation, which took place in 1973 (in fact, the year Anne Rice’s famous novel was written) in hippie-dopey San Francisco, came out rather rambling, and now Louis wants to present an edited version of the story. A former gonzo scribbler and now an authoritative author with a sharp eye, Molloy always catches the vampire on inconsistencies, so Louis here is a typical “unreliable storyteller”.
According to Louis, in the 1910s he owned several brothels in Storyville, a shabby neighborhood in New Orleans, where he met the blond bloodsucker Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), who fell in love with him and bit him. At first, as a vampire, Louis enjoyed the status of an omnipotent being with immortality, remarkable strength and the ability to read people’s minds. Although these thoughts boiled down, according to the experienced Lestat, to just three boring subjects – food, sex and how to get home from work faster. But in Louis’ case, vampirism healed a social trauma. In the racist South, white aldermen never regarded Creole Louis as an equal, had a share of the profits from his bars and brothels, debauched black girls at night, and passed segregation laws during the day.
From the story of Louis, in general, it immediately becomes clear who the real bloodsuckers are here – and that they will pay for it. But when Louis first dealt with the white villain in power, the whites rioted in the poor black neighborhoods. It was his first lesson: you can’t deal with all this rubbish just by biting everyone. But during a fire in the ghetto, he finds his “redemption” – he saves little Claudia (Bailey Bass) from the fire. Louis, who is no longer destined to have a family, treats her like his own child, but then his toxic partner Lestat comes into play. In relation to the girl, vampires behave like Parent One and Parent Two, only Louis cherishes Claudia, and Lestat, as he tends to, teaches bad things.
In the series, the differences from the baroque film of 1994 are immediately striking, where all the sex symbols of that time were en masse on the dark side: Brad Pitt as the conscientious Louis, Tom Cruise as the vicious Lestat and Antonio Banderas as the oldest vampire from Europe. But in the new show, Louis is gay black, and therefore mourns not for the loss of his wife and daughter, but for the suicide of a devout brother. Just blame showrunner Rolin Jones (Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason) for distorting Rice’s intentions: in the novel, Louis was also a Creole and looked clearly not like Brad Pitt, and the bromance between him and Lestat was replete with hints of something more. It’s just that the time for frankness has not yet come – the novel was published in 1976. But Louis didn’t have any dead wife in this book, she had to be invented for the film in order to romanticize the story: for some, Pitt’s character simply had to dry and kill like a real man.
Then other times came, and in 2008, Alan Ball rhymed vampires and werewolves with sexual minorities rejected by society in True Blood. The theme was picked up by other TV shows, and after Grimm (2011-2017) and the British Being Human (2011-2014), where fairy-tale creatures were portrayed as social outcasts because of their otherness, this theme became a commonplace – and the characters of Anne Rice too were able to get out of the closet.
The new version of “Interview with the Vampire” is only benefited. In the film, for which Rice had to churn out the entire romance into a two-hour script, the psychology of Louis and Lestat’s relationship boiled down to Louis’ languid “I’m handsome, you’re bad” pose. But the series, aiming for three seasons, is in no hurry and allows itself to immerse itself in picturesque details (after all, the background here is southern gothic) and describe in detail the conflicting relationships of the characters. They are implicated in jealousy and at the same time attraction to each other – all this is “not yours, so you are mad” and “let’s agree on the boundaries between our coffins”. Since Louis and Lestat have nothing more to hide, their actions have a motivation, and between episodes there are logical connections – the vampires in the series do not look like romantic extras, but, so to speak, multi-dimensional and full-blooded creatures. They are as if alive – and even it seems that they are warm.
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