labingi | Entries tagged with anne rice

This 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.( Read more... )

Season 1 of AMC’s Interview with the Vampire broke my heart. To avoid further heartbreak, I avoided commentary on the series, and I apparently did this so assiduously that I convinced the algorithm I didn’t care about it, because I had no idea season 2 had aired until months after it was finished. But I have now watched it and will share a handful of reflections.

Personal Impressions
I liked S2 a lot more than S1 for a few reasons. 1) S1 taught me that this isn’t really an adaptation of the book, so I knew what to expect. 2) It was comparatively closer to the book than S1, which made it go down easier. 3) I think it was better written; it didn’t hit the tin notes some of S1 did for me. As I said of S1, if I were going into this series with no book knowledge, I’d probably be a huge fan. It’s very good in many ways.

Spoiler-Free Review
This season covers roughly the second half of the titular novel and follows the plots points fairly closely with lots of changes in character and motivation.

The Good
* Stellar acting across the board. The recast of Claudia works pretty seamlessly (for me).

* Great production values/ambience.

* Unreliable narrators. Arguably mostly an accident in the VC books (Rice’s concepts changing over time), this series runs with issues of POV and memory to very good effect.

* Not being afraid of complexity: at times the characters, interactions, plot mechanics, and questions of what’s real run deep and nuanced without ever being confusing.

* Good reimagining of secondary characters. Daniel, Santiago, and Madeleine have little in common with their book counterparts, but the characters given their names are good original characters, more deeply drawn than their namesakes.

The Bad
Honestly, not much, but the series’ decision to ditch most of the novel’s themes requires centering secondary themes, which—in my opinion—leads to less interesting storytelling, both because motivations don’t track as well and because the substituted themes are more common in today’s popular media and, therefore, proportionally less creative and engaging: ex. focusing on dysfunctional relationships (definitely there in the book) to the exclusion of religion, parenthood, ontological questions of morality.

The Verdict
It’s good. Vampire fans should see it; most Rice fans will probably like it too. I’m a bit sad, though, that it will probably supplant the books for many and, thus, drown out a lot of the books’ most creative and original qualities.

Spoilery Thoughts( Read more... )

I 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...)( Read more... )

This is more meta than review, but here we go. Light spoilers for the episode, promo stuff, and book follow…

This is a fantastic quality show. Of the shows I'm following right now (The Rings of Power, House of the Dragon, Andor, and this), ep. 1 suggests this may be the best—or it's vying hard with Andor. If I were coming in cold with no knowledge of TVC, I would be enthralled and an instant die-hard fan… ( Read more... )

I consider myself a fan of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The early books captivated me in high school and while I find much of the later material not great, my love for the core characters and concepts is enduring. My recent reread of Interview with the Vampire did not change that view, but it was definitely a different experience from reading it as a teen and young adult in the '90s. Here are my main takeaways on the book, in no particular order:

* It's really racist.
* It does good historicizing.
* I still love its refusal to engage with standard gender discourses.
* Louis is an extremely angry unreliable narrator (at least re. Lestat).
* Damn, Armand is a good character.
* Louis and Claudia's and Louis and Armand's relationships are both moving, realistic, non-clichéd, non-didactic examples of dysfunction.

Spoilery commentary on these below( Read more... )

Prince Lestat: Or Return of the Divine Right

Anne Rice's Prince Lestat is one of the most disturbing books I have read in a long time. I remain a fan of The Vampire Chronicles; it has an inviolate place in my heart. And after waiting ten-plus years to see if Rice would ever write in this series again, it is sort of pleasant to catch up with old vampire friends, who are, by and large, in character if only due to minimal development. I mildly recommend the book to VC fans for the nostalgia, the fun of seeing the old characters wielding iPhones[1], and the sense that these persistent vampires still persist. However, the social values this novel promulgates should terrify anyone who still holds out hope for the post-Enlightenment commitment of equality and democracy.( Read more... )

I like vampire lit for much the same reason I like science fiction: both change the premises of our life experience and, thus, challenge our usual cultural and psychological assumptions. Vampire lit, in particular, lends itself to upending commonplaces about gender and family structure. It's often been noted that vampire reproduction is inherently incestuous: vampires typically make new vampires through some sort of blood exchange that reads as both a parenting act and a sexual act, so parents and children are, almost by default, also lovers. By the same token, vampire lit can, in one fell swoop, eliminate all physically based power differential between the sexes: in many tales, males and females have identical reproductive biologies and no sex-linked difference in physical strength (or if they do, it is much overshadowed by other differences, like age or "strength" of their blood, etc.). Add in functional immortality and the politics of relating to humans as people and foodsource, and all this makes for fascinating reinventions of culture for those stories that choose to exploit this potential. Some examples...

( The Vampire Chronicles )

( Blood+ )

( Buffy the Vampire Slayer )

( Twilight )

I don't believe that vampire lit is an exhausted field by any means; it simply requires creativity to keep reinventing itself. And while I don't read vampire lit just for the sake of reading vampire lit, I am always open to being swept up in the next thought-provoking reinvention.

(Thanks to