Oh, shut up, Louis!
I watched Interview with the Vampire on a big screen last night. I used to think of that movie as having no plot. Now, it strikes me that it's the tale of Louis fleeing one abusive relationship successfully, only to blunder right into another one. Truly, it takes a long time to learn how to avoid getting involved with terrible people.
Thoughts in no real order:
What a beautiful movie. Every frame, well, not exactly a painting, it's too crowded and cluttered for that, but an orgy of color. Tom Cruise as Lestat is as pretty and pastel and frilly as one of those big fancy flowered ice cream cakes from Toscanini's.
You know whose story I want now? Louis's enslaved housekeeper, who must be an exceptionally kind young woman not to have fled far away as soon as she started finding drained rats all over the floor and realized that Louis didn't care about plantation security anymore. She deserves better than to be an incidental death in the first act. RIP Kindly Slave-Housekeeper Lady.
There's a ton of room in the world for stories about slave uprisings against vampire overlords. I've never seen anyone talk about Louis being a slave-owner, but with his passive, self-loathing, self-pity, he's permitting Lestat the idle aristocrat to literally suck the blood of the workers. I think horror/spec fic tends to replace the victimized groups with monsters and supernatural beings (because so many of us are on the side of the monsters and magical beings) so we never have to examine the love of power and ease as being a monstrous thing that comes at the expense of vulnerable humans. (And has anyone written about the Romany families who serve Dracula and who get used in sub-Dracula fiction as "the Count's gypsies"?)
What with the pedophilia, how the hell did this book become a bestseller without more backlash? They soft-pedaled those elements for the film; I recall Claudia is like five in the book, as opposed to Kirsten Dunst's eleven or twelve. (And I think this is one of the best child actor performances I've ever seen. She convinces me that she's an adult in the body of a child, while still being unable to avoid the childish voice and mannerisms because she's been using them in a manipulative way as her hunting strategy for years.) Armand is a teenager in the book, but it still works to have a great big adult Antonio Banderas in the role. (Though they did keep it creepy there: Armand has a small human boy with bite marks all over his arms, and he offers little tastes of him to guests.)
In the book, I recall Louis and Lestat sharing a coffin (and how transgressive and liberating it seemed at the time), whereas in the film Louis is put in a single, separate coffin by the smirking Lestat as an initiation ritual of fear.
Thank goodness they didn't retain some of the worse elements of the transformation in the movie. When you're made a vampire you get the runs. I'm serious. Every time a character was vamped in the books, you'd get a loving description of their agony over the course of some hours, where they shook with chills and fever, poured with sweat, and then vomited and passed urine and feces until their body was empty of normal human stuff like food remnants and intestinal flora. It did give the transformation weight as a terrible, irreversible thing, where you have to suffer through the pain and physical disgust of death before you can become immortal.
That one older woman with the yappy dogs was so happy for a while. She thought she and her boy-toy were going to have group sex with the pretty young men. I do wish they could have shown her a good time before they killed her. RIP Yappy Dog Woman.
In his quiet way, Armand is the nastiest manipulator in the movie. Lestat is nothing to Armand, who uses his gang to murder his new crush's family so his new crush will have a lot of free time and need consoling, then uses his crush to kill his gang, because he's sick of them. *dust hands* Come to my arms, mon amour!
I've seen it observed by cleolinda among others that the Anne Rice vampires are like the X-Men, in that they tend to have varied secondary powers. The friends who I went to the movie with observed that Lestat's power is orgasming people to death, Louis' is brooding so hard he sinks into the ground, Claudia's is stamping her foot and getting her way, Santiago's is reading minds (mostly for the purpose of doing Harpo Marx routines), and Armand's is having long luscious hair.
Every time Louis and Armand whispered with their noses close together, I reached up and pretended to smush their heads against each other and mouthed, "NOW KISS." I guess it's true: the public will lap up sexual tension between men as long as they can pretend it's not real. Vampires are both an excuse to show same-sex eroticism and a convenient cover story in case the moral guardians show up. "No! They love blood! BLOOD!"
There is a victory of sorts for Louis, going to the filthy house in the Garden Quarter where Lestat is huddling under a shock blanket trying to ignore the modern world. I liked The Vampire Lestat as much as anyone (and I love Tom Cruise's gesture at the very end of the movie, foppishly tugging his filthy lace cuffs out of his jacket sleeves), but Lestat works better as an antagonist, by me. Most of the time Louis is such a bundle of misery that it feels great to let him have that one moment of "What the hell did I ever see in you?" No matter what Louis does with the rest of his immortality, at least he doesn't have to spend it with Lestat.
What a come-down that is from Lestat's introduction, where he literally sweeps Louis off his feet and flies above the Mississippi River as Louis swoons and cuddles him. I'd had no idea Brad Pitt could look so submissive or so aroused. Bless him and the other actors -- I get the feeling everyone who worked on this film is vaguely embarrassed by it now, but they did give it their all, and I appreciate it.
Thoughts in no real order:
What a beautiful movie. Every frame, well, not exactly a painting, it's too crowded and cluttered for that, but an orgy of color. Tom Cruise as Lestat is as pretty and pastel and frilly as one of those big fancy flowered ice cream cakes from Toscanini's.
You know whose story I want now? Louis's enslaved housekeeper, who must be an exceptionally kind young woman not to have fled far away as soon as she started finding drained rats all over the floor and realized that Louis didn't care about plantation security anymore. She deserves better than to be an incidental death in the first act. RIP Kindly Slave-Housekeeper Lady.
There's a ton of room in the world for stories about slave uprisings against vampire overlords. I've never seen anyone talk about Louis being a slave-owner, but with his passive, self-loathing, self-pity, he's permitting Lestat the idle aristocrat to literally suck the blood of the workers. I think horror/spec fic tends to replace the victimized groups with monsters and supernatural beings (because so many of us are on the side of the monsters and magical beings) so we never have to examine the love of power and ease as being a monstrous thing that comes at the expense of vulnerable humans. (And has anyone written about the Romany families who serve Dracula and who get used in sub-Dracula fiction as "the Count's gypsies"?)
What with the pedophilia, how the hell did this book become a bestseller without more backlash? They soft-pedaled those elements for the film; I recall Claudia is like five in the book, as opposed to Kirsten Dunst's eleven or twelve. (And I think this is one of the best child actor performances I've ever seen. She convinces me that she's an adult in the body of a child, while still being unable to avoid the childish voice and mannerisms because she's been using them in a manipulative way as her hunting strategy for years.) Armand is a teenager in the book, but it still works to have a great big adult Antonio Banderas in the role. (Though they did keep it creepy there: Armand has a small human boy with bite marks all over his arms, and he offers little tastes of him to guests.)
In the book, I recall Louis and Lestat sharing a coffin (and how transgressive and liberating it seemed at the time), whereas in the film Louis is put in a single, separate coffin by the smirking Lestat as an initiation ritual of fear.
Thank goodness they didn't retain some of the worse elements of the transformation in the movie. When you're made a vampire you get the runs. I'm serious. Every time a character was vamped in the books, you'd get a loving description of their agony over the course of some hours, where they shook with chills and fever, poured with sweat, and then vomited and passed urine and feces until their body was empty of normal human stuff like food remnants and intestinal flora. It did give the transformation weight as a terrible, irreversible thing, where you have to suffer through the pain and physical disgust of death before you can become immortal.
That one older woman with the yappy dogs was so happy for a while. She thought she and her boy-toy were going to have group sex with the pretty young men. I do wish they could have shown her a good time before they killed her. RIP Yappy Dog Woman.
In his quiet way, Armand is the nastiest manipulator in the movie. Lestat is nothing to Armand, who uses his gang to murder his new crush's family so his new crush will have a lot of free time and need consoling, then uses his crush to kill his gang, because he's sick of them. *dust hands* Come to my arms, mon amour!
I've seen it observed by cleolinda among others that the Anne Rice vampires are like the X-Men, in that they tend to have varied secondary powers. The friends who I went to the movie with observed that Lestat's power is orgasming people to death, Louis' is brooding so hard he sinks into the ground, Claudia's is stamping her foot and getting her way, Santiago's is reading minds (mostly for the purpose of doing Harpo Marx routines), and Armand's is having long luscious hair.
Every time Louis and Armand whispered with their noses close together, I reached up and pretended to smush their heads against each other and mouthed, "NOW KISS." I guess it's true: the public will lap up sexual tension between men as long as they can pretend it's not real. Vampires are both an excuse to show same-sex eroticism and a convenient cover story in case the moral guardians show up. "No! They love blood! BLOOD!"
There is a victory of sorts for Louis, going to the filthy house in the Garden Quarter where Lestat is huddling under a shock blanket trying to ignore the modern world. I liked The Vampire Lestat as much as anyone (and I love Tom Cruise's gesture at the very end of the movie, foppishly tugging his filthy lace cuffs out of his jacket sleeves), but Lestat works better as an antagonist, by me. Most of the time Louis is such a bundle of misery that it feels great to let him have that one moment of "What the hell did I ever see in you?" No matter what Louis does with the rest of his immortality, at least he doesn't have to spend it with Lestat.
What a come-down that is from Lestat's introduction, where he literally sweeps Louis off his feet and flies above the Mississippi River as Louis swoons and cuddles him. I'd had no idea Brad Pitt could look so submissive or so aroused. Bless him and the other actors -- I get the feeling everyone who worked on this film is vaguely embarrassed by it now, but they did give it their all, and I appreciate it.