More IWTV Thoughts: Armand and Themes
Aug. 18th, 2024 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiThis is my promised further thoughts on Armand in S2 of IWTV.
NB: he is my favorite VC character, so I have strong feelings about his portrayal. Also Spoilers for Armand-related stuff in a lot of the VC books and S1-2 of the AMC series. Warnings: it’s a dark vampire story, plus this may read like sour grapes from a book fan.
I think our current popular culture suffers from a lack of curiosity. I have my personal and generational biases. It may be this has always been true but I notice it more now because, in my youth, they had a different list ideas worth exploring. At any rate, I notice it now.
At some point, socially left-leaning pop culture (which is the majority of it and what I consume) seemed to freeze its attention on a handful of issues, all of which are important and deserve more exploration. But the list is rather small. It includes the three pillars of equity discourse: race, LGBTQ+ issues, and (dis)ability, as well as gender/women’s power. It also includes abuse, power imbalance in relationships, and mental health/illness. It doesn’t seem to include much else.
The thing about Interview with the Vampire as a book is that its main themes aren’t on this list. I would say they are religion (the relationship between morality and Christianity), monstrosity, and parenthood (parental grief/guilt). The book certainly touches on messed-up relationships and power imbalances and is absolutely queer. But it’s not chiefly concerned with the issue of abuse/condemning abuse, and its queerness is differently delineated than the LGBTQ+ acronym categories. In other words, the characters aren’t so much abusive/abused as they are vampires, and vampires tend to be messed up. And they aren’t so much “gay” or “bi” as they are men who can be attracted to men. (I think S2 was more aligned with the book than S1 in terms of handling unhealthy relationships, by the way.)
The AMC series, like most 2020’s pop culture, has low/no interest in the book’s themes. So it took the plot events and the IWTV characters (either as recognizable characters or mostly new characters with old names) and used them to explore themes from the list of topics considered relevant today.
Race absolutely needed handling. IWTV is a very racist book in a 1970’s-well-meaning-white-woman way that is oblivious to how appalling it is. (To be transparent, as a well-meaning white teen in the 1990’s, I was as oblivious as I assume Rice was.) This required adaptative changes. I would have preferred different ones, as I’ve written about elsewhere, but I get it, and overall, I think the series handles race quite well.
I won’t analyze my praises and discontents for its handling of other themes because that’s not my point here. My point is what gets lost.
I’d offer this as a dictum about adaptation. It’s a very tall order to adapt a well-written work and change its core themes, and do it well, because a well-written work is structured around its themes.
For example, let’s say a team wished to adapt Hamlet to be about class issues, not grief, revenge, (in)action, madness. Class issues are there in Hamlet, and class is an important topic to explore. You could add in a nice scene observing that Gertrude’s hopes that Hamlet might marry Ophelia were always naive due to the class difference, and so on. But what are you going to do about the guy whose father has just been murdered? If the story is not about grief, where do you put his grief? Does he not grieve his father? When he learns his uncle had murdered him, does he not want revenge? If he does, is this trivial? Or is his uncle not the murderer in this version? If so, what is the plot about? Centering Hamlet on class and eliminating or minimizing other themes immediately opens up a myriad of adaptation problems because Hamlet is structured around its themes.
Note that I’m not talking about works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That doesn’t change Hamlet much. It is a filler fic, a side story. The IWTV equivalent of this might be the story of Celeste and Estelle, exploring their perspective on the events in IWTV. This is not the AMC project.
I like Armand in the AMC version. The actor is spectacular (as they all are), and his manner feels authentic to the book character most of the time. He’s about as good an adaptation of Armand as you could have without clear character motivation. But his motivation has been lost. When the writers chose to erase his defining themes, they were still left with a plot structure built on those themes, and into this vacuum fell the character. His actions usually feel Armand-like, except ultimately they don’t make sense.
Book spoilers follow.
To sketch book Armand’s life chronologically, he was born in Ukraine or thereabouts and, at a young age, was sent to live in a medieval Eastern Orthodox monastery that was highly ascetic and punitive. There, he quickly gained prominence as a gifted iconographer. That is, he was truly seen as having a divine gift for translating God’s presence through the medium of an ikon, and he felt this gift himself. He fell somewhat into the model of the fool for Christ. Still quite young, he was captured and sold into slavery, where he had the sort of traumatic experiences you would expect in a brothel, until he was bought by Marius.
Marius took him to Venice and raised him as a favored protégé, laboring to liberate him from his sense of sin and shame by converting him into a secular humanist Epicurean. He succeeded insofar as he overcame Armand’s sense of sexual shame, but he failed in the “secular” part. More precisely, he succeeded in shaking Armand’s belief in God, which had about three major psychological effects: 1) Armand replaced his adoration of Christ with adoration of Marius; 2) he lost his sense of connection to God through art; 3) he lost his faith that God was there but discovered nothing to put in its place.
Eventually, Marius turns Armand into a vampire, and then the Children of Darkness attack and, as far as Armand knows, kill Marius and absorb Armand into their ranks. He rises to be a leader, but he never really believes their theology (as Lestat figures out early in their encounters). Instead, he’s faced with a yawning void, which he describes well (is it to Daniel?) when ponders that death may be a horrific state in which one is eternally conscious but severed from sensory experience, just lost in the black, alone forever. That’s the fear of a lapsed Christian who has found nothing to replace his faith with.
With that profound inner wound—that void where God was—he navigates life through to leading the theater, but without any core grounding to live for. He tells Louis he needs him to make contact with the age (the 19th century), which, I think, is not a lie but is a bit of a misdiagnosis of his own situation. He needs someone to give his life meaning. It used to be God; then it was Marius; for a flash, it might have been Lestat; and then it was Louis. Later, he tries it with Daniel. He needs something to replace the depth he used to feel through the ikons. But a person cannot be God, and relying on a person to anchor oneself to life itself makes one frightfully dependent on that person. Because Armand is so needy and so existentially afraid, he routinely connives and lies and engages in all manner of unhealthy relationship practices to protect himself (he hopes) from losing his anchor. Because no one likes to be treated that way, he always loses that person.
That changes with the events of Memnoch. Witnessing what he takes to be good evidence of a traditional Christian miracle reignites Armand’s faith, and he is, in effect, reborn as a believing Christian. His personality and daily manner don’t radically change, but his deep handling of relationships does. He becomes far more compassionate and far more honest in his dealings (ex. with Sybil and Benji) because he doesn’t need to control those relationships with the same desperation. He is grounded again in Christ (though I expect he still has a long journey in figuring out what it means to be a good Christian vampire). This is book Armand as I understand him.
Here’s AMC Armand:
He comes from Delhi and was sold into a brothel as a teen, then bought by Marius, used as model in some paintings (also true in the books), and eventually ends up attaching to Louis and trying to hold onto him through a deeply manipulative series of lies and mind games that eventually drive Louis away in disgust.
Their breakup is fiercer than in the book but not along radically different lines. My question, though, is why. Why does AMC Armand behave this way? The best explanation I can come up with is that abuse, abandonment, and broken attachments from his youth have left him emotionally insecure and needy, so, like his book counterpart, he manipulates people to keep from losing them. Book and show do have this in common, which probably accounts for much of why AMC Armand feels like Armand to me.
The best reading I can give this thematic transformation is that it maintains an interesting character while losing a lot of VC’s most powerful philosophical questions: what is the meaning of life? What is the nature of the universe? Of morality? Does God exist? Does this matter? What can the damned have to say to the damned? Are they damned? What does that mean?
But even by the measure of its own chosen themes, AMC Armand’s actions don’t make sense. Say he is insecure because of abuse and abandonment and, thus, manipulates Louis because he’s terrified Louis will leave him. He’d save Louis’s life, as he does in the book and for the same reasons. He wouldn’t cut his losses and just let the coven kill him in exchange for nothing.
But isn’t it in exchange for safety? Is it? If Armand is so terrified of the coven’s power that he’d sacrifice the life of the person he’s been desperately clinging to, how did he end up their leader for 200 years? How did he go from near unassailable control to utterly cowed in, what, a year, a few years? Or maybe Armand is not clinging to Louis as much as he seems to be, and the seeming loss of power is a ruse. Maybe he can cut his losses and let Louis die. Then, why let the coven treat him so badly? Why even seem to lose so much control? Why spend 77 years maintaining lies to keep someone who’s not all that important?
The season lost me when it tried to tell me Armand was willing to let Louis die, indeed, to put detailed effort into directing a play about it. It doesn’t track. He either needs Louis or he doesn’t (“need” in the sense of deep emotional clinging). If he does, he won’t just give up and let him be killed. If he doesn’t, he wouldn’t have put so much work in trying to keep him across so many decades with so many lies, so much humiliation, and so much evident hurt.
He has no clear motivation. He wasn’t written one to replace the one erased. The series is incurious about what motivates him. (Yes, with Daniel too—revenge?) It doesn’t ask the questions enough.
One thing that gets me about erasing Armand’s core identity is that the writers didn’t have to. I suspect some of the backstory changes are a consequence of wanting to cast him with a person of color. Therefore, he can’t be a Ukrainian Christian, yes? But they could have cast the same actor—who is very good—and retained almost the same story. For example, his family might be Coptic in origin. For either historical or personal family reasons, they might have migrated into an Eastern Orthodox orbit, and there you have it. Easy. No, it wasn’t a necessary change, even if we grant that changing his race was necessary. No, his backstory dropped because they didn’t care. (I can’t read their minds, but if they cared, they’d have kept it, like they managed to keep Lestat white and blond, the need for racial representation notwithstanding.) Religion is not on the list, so to speak. Neither is culture. Note that while they tag Armand as Indian in origin, they give not one word about any Indian cultural background of any kind, except that his name suggests his family was Muslim. On such topics, the series is profoundly incurious.
Addendum: It’s always possible they’ll build in more backstory in later seasons, and it might be done well. However, since they’ve laid no foundation here, minimally it will miss the book’s resonances between IWTV and The Vampire Armand. It’s a sad loss, and it didn’t have to happen.
NB: he is my favorite VC character, so I have strong feelings about his portrayal. Also Spoilers for Armand-related stuff in a lot of the VC books and S1-2 of the AMC series. Warnings: it’s a dark vampire story, plus this may read like sour grapes from a book fan.
I think our current popular culture suffers from a lack of curiosity. I have my personal and generational biases. It may be this has always been true but I notice it more now because, in my youth, they had a different list ideas worth exploring. At any rate, I notice it now.
At some point, socially left-leaning pop culture (which is the majority of it and what I consume) seemed to freeze its attention on a handful of issues, all of which are important and deserve more exploration. But the list is rather small. It includes the three pillars of equity discourse: race, LGBTQ+ issues, and (dis)ability, as well as gender/women’s power. It also includes abuse, power imbalance in relationships, and mental health/illness. It doesn’t seem to include much else.
The thing about Interview with the Vampire as a book is that its main themes aren’t on this list. I would say they are religion (the relationship between morality and Christianity), monstrosity, and parenthood (parental grief/guilt). The book certainly touches on messed-up relationships and power imbalances and is absolutely queer. But it’s not chiefly concerned with the issue of abuse/condemning abuse, and its queerness is differently delineated than the LGBTQ+ acronym categories. In other words, the characters aren’t so much abusive/abused as they are vampires, and vampires tend to be messed up. And they aren’t so much “gay” or “bi” as they are men who can be attracted to men. (I think S2 was more aligned with the book than S1 in terms of handling unhealthy relationships, by the way.)
The AMC series, like most 2020’s pop culture, has low/no interest in the book’s themes. So it took the plot events and the IWTV characters (either as recognizable characters or mostly new characters with old names) and used them to explore themes from the list of topics considered relevant today.
Race absolutely needed handling. IWTV is a very racist book in a 1970’s-well-meaning-white-woman way that is oblivious to how appalling it is. (To be transparent, as a well-meaning white teen in the 1990’s, I was as oblivious as I assume Rice was.) This required adaptative changes. I would have preferred different ones, as I’ve written about elsewhere, but I get it, and overall, I think the series handles race quite well.
I won’t analyze my praises and discontents for its handling of other themes because that’s not my point here. My point is what gets lost.
I’d offer this as a dictum about adaptation. It’s a very tall order to adapt a well-written work and change its core themes, and do it well, because a well-written work is structured around its themes.
For example, let’s say a team wished to adapt Hamlet to be about class issues, not grief, revenge, (in)action, madness. Class issues are there in Hamlet, and class is an important topic to explore. You could add in a nice scene observing that Gertrude’s hopes that Hamlet might marry Ophelia were always naive due to the class difference, and so on. But what are you going to do about the guy whose father has just been murdered? If the story is not about grief, where do you put his grief? Does he not grieve his father? When he learns his uncle had murdered him, does he not want revenge? If he does, is this trivial? Or is his uncle not the murderer in this version? If so, what is the plot about? Centering Hamlet on class and eliminating or minimizing other themes immediately opens up a myriad of adaptation problems because Hamlet is structured around its themes.
Note that I’m not talking about works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That doesn’t change Hamlet much. It is a filler fic, a side story. The IWTV equivalent of this might be the story of Celeste and Estelle, exploring their perspective on the events in IWTV. This is not the AMC project.
I like Armand in the AMC version. The actor is spectacular (as they all are), and his manner feels authentic to the book character most of the time. He’s about as good an adaptation of Armand as you could have without clear character motivation. But his motivation has been lost. When the writers chose to erase his defining themes, they were still left with a plot structure built on those themes, and into this vacuum fell the character. His actions usually feel Armand-like, except ultimately they don’t make sense.
Book spoilers follow.
To sketch book Armand’s life chronologically, he was born in Ukraine or thereabouts and, at a young age, was sent to live in a medieval Eastern Orthodox monastery that was highly ascetic and punitive. There, he quickly gained prominence as a gifted iconographer. That is, he was truly seen as having a divine gift for translating God’s presence through the medium of an ikon, and he felt this gift himself. He fell somewhat into the model of the fool for Christ. Still quite young, he was captured and sold into slavery, where he had the sort of traumatic experiences you would expect in a brothel, until he was bought by Marius.
Marius took him to Venice and raised him as a favored protégé, laboring to liberate him from his sense of sin and shame by converting him into a secular humanist Epicurean. He succeeded insofar as he overcame Armand’s sense of sexual shame, but he failed in the “secular” part. More precisely, he succeeded in shaking Armand’s belief in God, which had about three major psychological effects: 1) Armand replaced his adoration of Christ with adoration of Marius; 2) he lost his sense of connection to God through art; 3) he lost his faith that God was there but discovered nothing to put in its place.
Eventually, Marius turns Armand into a vampire, and then the Children of Darkness attack and, as far as Armand knows, kill Marius and absorb Armand into their ranks. He rises to be a leader, but he never really believes their theology (as Lestat figures out early in their encounters). Instead, he’s faced with a yawning void, which he describes well (is it to Daniel?) when ponders that death may be a horrific state in which one is eternally conscious but severed from sensory experience, just lost in the black, alone forever. That’s the fear of a lapsed Christian who has found nothing to replace his faith with.
With that profound inner wound—that void where God was—he navigates life through to leading the theater, but without any core grounding to live for. He tells Louis he needs him to make contact with the age (the 19th century), which, I think, is not a lie but is a bit of a misdiagnosis of his own situation. He needs someone to give his life meaning. It used to be God; then it was Marius; for a flash, it might have been Lestat; and then it was Louis. Later, he tries it with Daniel. He needs something to replace the depth he used to feel through the ikons. But a person cannot be God, and relying on a person to anchor oneself to life itself makes one frightfully dependent on that person. Because Armand is so needy and so existentially afraid, he routinely connives and lies and engages in all manner of unhealthy relationship practices to protect himself (he hopes) from losing his anchor. Because no one likes to be treated that way, he always loses that person.
That changes with the events of Memnoch. Witnessing what he takes to be good evidence of a traditional Christian miracle reignites Armand’s faith, and he is, in effect, reborn as a believing Christian. His personality and daily manner don’t radically change, but his deep handling of relationships does. He becomes far more compassionate and far more honest in his dealings (ex. with Sybil and Benji) because he doesn’t need to control those relationships with the same desperation. He is grounded again in Christ (though I expect he still has a long journey in figuring out what it means to be a good Christian vampire). This is book Armand as I understand him.
Here’s AMC Armand:
He comes from Delhi and was sold into a brothel as a teen, then bought by Marius, used as model in some paintings (also true in the books), and eventually ends up attaching to Louis and trying to hold onto him through a deeply manipulative series of lies and mind games that eventually drive Louis away in disgust.
Their breakup is fiercer than in the book but not along radically different lines. My question, though, is why. Why does AMC Armand behave this way? The best explanation I can come up with is that abuse, abandonment, and broken attachments from his youth have left him emotionally insecure and needy, so, like his book counterpart, he manipulates people to keep from losing them. Book and show do have this in common, which probably accounts for much of why AMC Armand feels like Armand to me.
The best reading I can give this thematic transformation is that it maintains an interesting character while losing a lot of VC’s most powerful philosophical questions: what is the meaning of life? What is the nature of the universe? Of morality? Does God exist? Does this matter? What can the damned have to say to the damned? Are they damned? What does that mean?
But even by the measure of its own chosen themes, AMC Armand’s actions don’t make sense. Say he is insecure because of abuse and abandonment and, thus, manipulates Louis because he’s terrified Louis will leave him. He’d save Louis’s life, as he does in the book and for the same reasons. He wouldn’t cut his losses and just let the coven kill him in exchange for nothing.
But isn’t it in exchange for safety? Is it? If Armand is so terrified of the coven’s power that he’d sacrifice the life of the person he’s been desperately clinging to, how did he end up their leader for 200 years? How did he go from near unassailable control to utterly cowed in, what, a year, a few years? Or maybe Armand is not clinging to Louis as much as he seems to be, and the seeming loss of power is a ruse. Maybe he can cut his losses and let Louis die. Then, why let the coven treat him so badly? Why even seem to lose so much control? Why spend 77 years maintaining lies to keep someone who’s not all that important?
The season lost me when it tried to tell me Armand was willing to let Louis die, indeed, to put detailed effort into directing a play about it. It doesn’t track. He either needs Louis or he doesn’t (“need” in the sense of deep emotional clinging). If he does, he won’t just give up and let him be killed. If he doesn’t, he wouldn’t have put so much work in trying to keep him across so many decades with so many lies, so much humiliation, and so much evident hurt.
He has no clear motivation. He wasn’t written one to replace the one erased. The series is incurious about what motivates him. (Yes, with Daniel too—revenge?) It doesn’t ask the questions enough.
One thing that gets me about erasing Armand’s core identity is that the writers didn’t have to. I suspect some of the backstory changes are a consequence of wanting to cast him with a person of color. Therefore, he can’t be a Ukrainian Christian, yes? But they could have cast the same actor—who is very good—and retained almost the same story. For example, his family might be Coptic in origin. For either historical or personal family reasons, they might have migrated into an Eastern Orthodox orbit, and there you have it. Easy. No, it wasn’t a necessary change, even if we grant that changing his race was necessary. No, his backstory dropped because they didn’t care. (I can’t read their minds, but if they cared, they’d have kept it, like they managed to keep Lestat white and blond, the need for racial representation notwithstanding.) Religion is not on the list, so to speak. Neither is culture. Note that while they tag Armand as Indian in origin, they give not one word about any Indian cultural background of any kind, except that his name suggests his family was Muslim. On such topics, the series is profoundly incurious.
Addendum: It’s always possible they’ll build in more backstory in later seasons, and it might be done well. However, since they’ve laid no foundation here, minimally it will miss the book’s resonances between IWTV and The Vampire Armand. It’s a sad loss, and it didn’t have to happen.
