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labingiI fell off the radar in writing about the IWTV (TV) around episode 4 for a couple of related reasons: 1) the show was making me unhappy and (2) I was/am grappling with a lot of chronic pain, exacerbated by computer use. Both sapped me of energy and capacity to say anything. I'm still pretty sapped but will try.
The most galling thing about this show is that in many ways it's very good, and it seems to have been very well received. The latter may be because (unlike LotR, Star Wars, Star Trek), there isn't a huge fandom around the book waiting to spot every change from canon. (Just me!) If I had come to this show cold, knowing nothing about Rice's books, I probably would have liked it a lot and now consider myself a fan.
The problem is it has almost nothing to do with the book. And, yes, that is a problem for an adaption. It's not for a fan fic (which is what this is, a very AU fan fic), and it's not for the 700th iteration of a classic story like King Arthur or the Trojan War. But for the one legally allowable adaption of a copyrighted work, for which AMC paid millions of dollars to forestall anyone else from adapting it—yes, having nothing to do with the thing it's adapting is a problem. Whatever the showrunners may say, whatever they may believe, it is disrespectful to the book. It essentially says, "The book is worthless; it's not even worth engaging with except for some vague name recognition."
And it's not worthless. It's not a work of genius, but it's a good book. It's an unusual book and an important book in the history of vampire lore, and it deserved an adaption, not a radically AU knock-off. And, no, the 1994 movie was not the adaption it needed. It was 1000 times more an adaptation than this, but it was poorly cast and did not capture much of the spirit.
But before I complain more, let me offer some things I liked:
(SPOILERS for season 1 follow...)
The Good
Lestat—perhaps because he's the most iconic character, they didn't mess with him too much, and overall (with some exceptions), he pretty much is an adaption of Rice's character. You can recognize him, and he's well written, cast, and acted.
Armand—We only got a bit of him, and I'm not sanguine they'll pull him off ultimately, but what we've seen so far, though in a made-up plotline, felt very "Armand" to me. His manner and lines seemed appropriate if Armand were in that situation: 100% better than the 1994 movie at characterizing him.
Daniel—A bit like Armand, he's in a situation that never happened in the books, but if Daniel had lived to be an elderly mortal, I could see him ending up this guy. In fact, I think this guy is more interesting than book Daniel, and I appreciate that he calls out Louis (and by extension angsty vampires) on a lot of his bullshit. That's sorely needed.
Racial commentary in about the first three episodes—While it's radically different from the book, as an original story, I think they handled race in the 1910s-20s quite thoughtfully. (After that, they seem to have mostly forgotten that Black people were/are treated differently, not totally, but mostly.)
There are other good bits, but those are the highlights for me. Now for the complaining. Here are some good things about the book that they threw away:
The Bad
Louis—He's gone. It's incredibly disingenuous for the showrunners to claim they didn't fundamentally change him by turning a White, 18th-century slave holder into a Black, 20th-century brothel owner. If their native personalities were identical, those would be two entirely different people. But their native personalities are not identical. They have a few wisps in common, like being kinder and gentler than Lestat and loving Claudia, but it's thin at best. This shows most in the interview timeline, where Louis behaves nothing like modern book Louis. Modern Louis in the book is a pretty understated, self-effacing soul, not a billionaire in Dubai engaging in some weird performance art (though there is some performance art in the original interview, yes). Armand might do the Dubai thing, but giving Louis 65% of Armand's personality is just weird. Louis is gone—and he's a character I really love in TVC, so I miss him, particularly in the one book in which he is actually the protagonist. Bye, Louis.
Regarding race, yes, the white slave holder thing needed handling, but it would have been less craven, I think, to actually handle it, to look it in the face and do racial commentary about it, instead of taking the easy path of having us sympathize with the oppressed Black man. As to Black representation, Lestat could have been mixed race with little change to his underlying story or character. Or Daniel could have been Black—also opportunities for great tension and commentary without massive change to the protagonist.
Claudia—Claudia's whole deal (in the book) is that she's a child vampire, an adult trapped in a child's body and largely divorced from human experience, having died at five. The show aged her up to physically 14, introduced her behaving like a seven year old, which made her seem psychotic, then grew her up to just an ordinary adult-looking person behaving like an adult—a vampire adult, yes, but no odder in her conduct and ideals (vs. a human norm) than Lestat, arguably a lot less odd. In essence, everything that made her matter as a character archetype is gone.
As to her relationship with Louis and somewhat Lestat, the main point is that they are the parents of a monster, a freak who can never fit into human or vampire society and never display genuinely human feeling. Yet they made her this way, and they are responsible for her. They are her Frankensteins. Well, since Claudia's basic identity as the monster is gone, the theme of being the parent of the monster is also gone and with it most of the guilt and tension that made Claudia the center of Louis's life up to his interview. (What's left I'll discuss in the next section.)
All the book's main themes are gone—As I see it, the book principally has two: the monstrous child (see above) and religious angst.
(Note on the monstrous child: Rice wrote Claudia as part of her own grieving process over her daughter's death; that's partly why it feels so real and lands so hard. Eliminating that, to me, feels disrespectful to her own pain and journey. I'm sure the showrunners didn't mean it that way, but that's how it feels to me.)
The main theme of Interview, the thing that defines it as a different kind of vampire story from Dracula, is its religious questing: Louis's attempts to understand if he is damned or not, if he is a creature of Satan or not. This is gone too. There's one (good!) scene in which TV-Louis tries to confess to a priest, and he never feels more Louis-like. But then it ends, and that's that. Religion doesn't matter. God doesn't matter. Damnation doesn't matter. It's just not talked about. Louis's attempts to be "good" by only killing animals are still there but pretty understated.
Logically also eliminated, at least mostly, is Louis's entire religious dialectic with Armand. Next season might attempt some version of it, but since TV-Louis is not interested in religious questions and didn't meet Armand till the 1940s or later, they most certainly aren't going to have the same kind of 19th-century-inflected discussion about God and Satan that they have in the book. This means, perforce, that one of the best pieces of character construction for Armand (the scene discussing the painting) will also be eliminated or radically changed, along with the loss of massive intertextuality with his backstory The Vampire Armand. Oh well.
So with both of the book's main themes gone, what did the show put in their place? What is it actually about? As far as I can see, it's about two things: oppression of the less privileged and domestic violence. These are both fine as themes; they just have little-to-nothing to do with the book. In the former case, as I've said, race could have been more courageously addressed in other ways, though the show, taken as an original story, does a pretty good job with it.
As to domestic violence, as an original story, the show doesn't do a bad job here either. It gets one of the thorniest things about domestic abuse, which is that it often involves real love, which makes everything harder. But it makes Lestat really dark. This is an interesting choice, the opposite of what I'd expect, which would be to make him more sympathetic than he is in the book, in keeping with his presentation in later books. Overall, he works for me in the show as a standalone character, but they'll have some interesting work ahead to make him sympathetic if they get to TVL and beyond. However, maybe he gets more sympathy than he otherwise would because all these folks are vampires, so violence, etc. is somewhat to be expected—and somewhat lower stakes, given their healing powers. This, though, raises a problem: the show somewhat applies human standards to a vampire household, and it feels... like it misses the point a bit. But perhaps that's because I thought the point was about vampire guilt and God and damnation and monstrosity. Oh well.
One final thing that's gone—much of what makes Rice's vampires different from humans, which brings us to...
The Ugly
It dawned on me pretty late that this version of Rice's vampires actually have sex in the human way (unlike in Rice's universe). When this finally came through to me, I went on a mental screed that went something like this:
By just having vampires retain (unaltered) all their human sexuality, the showrunners eliminated one of the most interesting, refreshing, and empowering things about Rice's vampires—parity between the sexes. In Rice's books, there is no real, substantial physical difference between male and female. Both sexes reproduce vampires in exactly the same way. Physical strength is based on (1) age and (2) the power of the blood that turned one into a vampire, so even if, all things being equal, a male vampire might be stronger than a female, all things will never be equal. Factors (1) and (2) will always vastly outweigh muscle mass. Sex, thus, has no bearing on physical power. Finally, because vampires don't have genital sex (or only in a very token, symbolic way on very rare occasion), all the gender roles pertaining to sexual dominance and submission don't apply—top, bottom, penetrator, penetrated—all irrelevant. The only gender norms that are left are holdovers from vampires' human lives—and that matters: 100% of them came from societies with strong gender roles, and they don't lose that socialization, but it does become rather quickly very attenuated because it isn't being reinforced by material realities.
Put back all the sexual dominance issues pertaining to sex, and women are on the bottom again, still subordinated, just like humans (in most extent cultures). But then, thought I in my mental screed, much of TV today is predicated on pretending that physical differences between men and women don't matter. It's all full of warrior women who can out-wrestle any male body builder. So even though the showrunners' choice logically re-subordinates female vampires, they'll probably ignore that and just pretend there's no gender difference...
And then they raped Claudia. And made it a turning point of her "growing up." And made it the main source of pain Louis has in thinking back on her. And talked about it over and over.
You can't make this stuff up. (Well, I wouldn't anyway.)
The most galling thing about this show is that in many ways it's very good, and it seems to have been very well received. The latter may be because (unlike LotR, Star Wars, Star Trek), there isn't a huge fandom around the book waiting to spot every change from canon. (Just me!) If I had come to this show cold, knowing nothing about Rice's books, I probably would have liked it a lot and now consider myself a fan.
The problem is it has almost nothing to do with the book. And, yes, that is a problem for an adaption. It's not for a fan fic (which is what this is, a very AU fan fic), and it's not for the 700th iteration of a classic story like King Arthur or the Trojan War. But for the one legally allowable adaption of a copyrighted work, for which AMC paid millions of dollars to forestall anyone else from adapting it—yes, having nothing to do with the thing it's adapting is a problem. Whatever the showrunners may say, whatever they may believe, it is disrespectful to the book. It essentially says, "The book is worthless; it's not even worth engaging with except for some vague name recognition."
And it's not worthless. It's not a work of genius, but it's a good book. It's an unusual book and an important book in the history of vampire lore, and it deserved an adaption, not a radically AU knock-off. And, no, the 1994 movie was not the adaption it needed. It was 1000 times more an adaptation than this, but it was poorly cast and did not capture much of the spirit.
But before I complain more, let me offer some things I liked:
(SPOILERS for season 1 follow...)
The Good
Lestat—perhaps because he's the most iconic character, they didn't mess with him too much, and overall (with some exceptions), he pretty much is an adaption of Rice's character. You can recognize him, and he's well written, cast, and acted.
Armand—We only got a bit of him, and I'm not sanguine they'll pull him off ultimately, but what we've seen so far, though in a made-up plotline, felt very "Armand" to me. His manner and lines seemed appropriate if Armand were in that situation: 100% better than the 1994 movie at characterizing him.
Daniel—A bit like Armand, he's in a situation that never happened in the books, but if Daniel had lived to be an elderly mortal, I could see him ending up this guy. In fact, I think this guy is more interesting than book Daniel, and I appreciate that he calls out Louis (and by extension angsty vampires) on a lot of his bullshit. That's sorely needed.
Racial commentary in about the first three episodes—While it's radically different from the book, as an original story, I think they handled race in the 1910s-20s quite thoughtfully. (After that, they seem to have mostly forgotten that Black people were/are treated differently, not totally, but mostly.)
There are other good bits, but those are the highlights for me. Now for the complaining. Here are some good things about the book that they threw away:
The Bad
Louis—He's gone. It's incredibly disingenuous for the showrunners to claim they didn't fundamentally change him by turning a White, 18th-century slave holder into a Black, 20th-century brothel owner. If their native personalities were identical, those would be two entirely different people. But their native personalities are not identical. They have a few wisps in common, like being kinder and gentler than Lestat and loving Claudia, but it's thin at best. This shows most in the interview timeline, where Louis behaves nothing like modern book Louis. Modern Louis in the book is a pretty understated, self-effacing soul, not a billionaire in Dubai engaging in some weird performance art (though there is some performance art in the original interview, yes). Armand might do the Dubai thing, but giving Louis 65% of Armand's personality is just weird. Louis is gone—and he's a character I really love in TVC, so I miss him, particularly in the one book in which he is actually the protagonist. Bye, Louis.
Regarding race, yes, the white slave holder thing needed handling, but it would have been less craven, I think, to actually handle it, to look it in the face and do racial commentary about it, instead of taking the easy path of having us sympathize with the oppressed Black man. As to Black representation, Lestat could have been mixed race with little change to his underlying story or character. Or Daniel could have been Black—also opportunities for great tension and commentary without massive change to the protagonist.
Claudia—Claudia's whole deal (in the book) is that she's a child vampire, an adult trapped in a child's body and largely divorced from human experience, having died at five. The show aged her up to physically 14, introduced her behaving like a seven year old, which made her seem psychotic, then grew her up to just an ordinary adult-looking person behaving like an adult—a vampire adult, yes, but no odder in her conduct and ideals (vs. a human norm) than Lestat, arguably a lot less odd. In essence, everything that made her matter as a character archetype is gone.
As to her relationship with Louis and somewhat Lestat, the main point is that they are the parents of a monster, a freak who can never fit into human or vampire society and never display genuinely human feeling. Yet they made her this way, and they are responsible for her. They are her Frankensteins. Well, since Claudia's basic identity as the monster is gone, the theme of being the parent of the monster is also gone and with it most of the guilt and tension that made Claudia the center of Louis's life up to his interview. (What's left I'll discuss in the next section.)
All the book's main themes are gone—As I see it, the book principally has two: the monstrous child (see above) and religious angst.
(Note on the monstrous child: Rice wrote Claudia as part of her own grieving process over her daughter's death; that's partly why it feels so real and lands so hard. Eliminating that, to me, feels disrespectful to her own pain and journey. I'm sure the showrunners didn't mean it that way, but that's how it feels to me.)
The main theme of Interview, the thing that defines it as a different kind of vampire story from Dracula, is its religious questing: Louis's attempts to understand if he is damned or not, if he is a creature of Satan or not. This is gone too. There's one (good!) scene in which TV-Louis tries to confess to a priest, and he never feels more Louis-like. But then it ends, and that's that. Religion doesn't matter. God doesn't matter. Damnation doesn't matter. It's just not talked about. Louis's attempts to be "good" by only killing animals are still there but pretty understated.
Logically also eliminated, at least mostly, is Louis's entire religious dialectic with Armand. Next season might attempt some version of it, but since TV-Louis is not interested in religious questions and didn't meet Armand till the 1940s or later, they most certainly aren't going to have the same kind of 19th-century-inflected discussion about God and Satan that they have in the book. This means, perforce, that one of the best pieces of character construction for Armand (the scene discussing the painting) will also be eliminated or radically changed, along with the loss of massive intertextuality with his backstory The Vampire Armand. Oh well.
So with both of the book's main themes gone, what did the show put in their place? What is it actually about? As far as I can see, it's about two things: oppression of the less privileged and domestic violence. These are both fine as themes; they just have little-to-nothing to do with the book. In the former case, as I've said, race could have been more courageously addressed in other ways, though the show, taken as an original story, does a pretty good job with it.
As to domestic violence, as an original story, the show doesn't do a bad job here either. It gets one of the thorniest things about domestic abuse, which is that it often involves real love, which makes everything harder. But it makes Lestat really dark. This is an interesting choice, the opposite of what I'd expect, which would be to make him more sympathetic than he is in the book, in keeping with his presentation in later books. Overall, he works for me in the show as a standalone character, but they'll have some interesting work ahead to make him sympathetic if they get to TVL and beyond. However, maybe he gets more sympathy than he otherwise would because all these folks are vampires, so violence, etc. is somewhat to be expected—and somewhat lower stakes, given their healing powers. This, though, raises a problem: the show somewhat applies human standards to a vampire household, and it feels... like it misses the point a bit. But perhaps that's because I thought the point was about vampire guilt and God and damnation and monstrosity. Oh well.
One final thing that's gone—much of what makes Rice's vampires different from humans, which brings us to...
The Ugly
It dawned on me pretty late that this version of Rice's vampires actually have sex in the human way (unlike in Rice's universe). When this finally came through to me, I went on a mental screed that went something like this:
By just having vampires retain (unaltered) all their human sexuality, the showrunners eliminated one of the most interesting, refreshing, and empowering things about Rice's vampires—parity between the sexes. In Rice's books, there is no real, substantial physical difference between male and female. Both sexes reproduce vampires in exactly the same way. Physical strength is based on (1) age and (2) the power of the blood that turned one into a vampire, so even if, all things being equal, a male vampire might be stronger than a female, all things will never be equal. Factors (1) and (2) will always vastly outweigh muscle mass. Sex, thus, has no bearing on physical power. Finally, because vampires don't have genital sex (or only in a very token, symbolic way on very rare occasion), all the gender roles pertaining to sexual dominance and submission don't apply—top, bottom, penetrator, penetrated—all irrelevant. The only gender norms that are left are holdovers from vampires' human lives—and that matters: 100% of them came from societies with strong gender roles, and they don't lose that socialization, but it does become rather quickly very attenuated because it isn't being reinforced by material realities.
Put back all the sexual dominance issues pertaining to sex, and women are on the bottom again, still subordinated, just like humans (in most extent cultures). But then, thought I in my mental screed, much of TV today is predicated on pretending that physical differences between men and women don't matter. It's all full of warrior women who can out-wrestle any male body builder. So even though the showrunners' choice logically re-subordinates female vampires, they'll probably ignore that and just pretend there's no gender difference...
And then they raped Claudia. And made it a turning point of her "growing up." And made it the main source of pain Louis has in thinking back on her. And talked about it over and over.
You can't make this stuff up. (Well, I wouldn't anyway.)
no subject
Date: 2023-01-04 11:43 pm (UTC)I agree about the hazard of trying to address race through minor characters, but I don't think it would be minor characters pontificating if Lestat was mixed race. In a general sense (IWTV aside), I do think there's a place for stories that center White people sincerely grappling with race--not that that move should take over from other stories centering people of color, as would always be a hazard. But as James Baldwin observed ahead of the curve (as usual), race is largely a problem of Whiteness. I think how a White slave holder born in the 1760s would grapple with that in the 20th or 21st century is utterly worth examining. It could be a more extreme mirror for how many White folks have to show up and grapple with what our Whiteness means.
But if you don't connect to original Louis as a character, I totally understand preferring TV Louis.