“If you’re still listening” (reading) “after the Oedipiphany of the last hour” (episode) “welcome back.” Oedipiphany! More than the domestic abuse and the murder and the incest, puns like these are what make Lestat a bad person. At least it reminded me of Lesley Manville’s Tony win for Oedipus, which reminds me that the Tonys were last week. If you haven’t seen Ali Louis Bourzgui’s beautiful acceptance speech for The Lost Boys, it is a beautiful (and coherent!) companion piece to whatever it is that’s happening here in Lestatland. Please humor me as I quote at length: “Sometimes, humanity needs a fantastical lens outside of ourselves to look at and explore questions about our own nature. Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a nonexistent sense of superiority. The billionaires will never find happiness from their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal. The fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not in this lifetime or eternity.” As this season moves forward and we stare down the existential threat of the Great Conversion, I’ll be keeping Bourzgui’s speech in mind and hoping that Rolin and Hannah can fit him into the AMC Immortal Universe somehow.
But back to Lestat de Lioncourt’s “Freudian storms,” in which “the boat is a penis,” the ocean is his “mom’s vagina,” and the viewer is a dolphin choking on plastic. We’re back in 1772, when Lestat was a tow-headed lad with a stutter and a Tony McNamaran nightmare of a family. His father and brothers are anti-intellectual bullies letting their aristocratic hold go to rot, and his mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), is an Italian noblewoman who is sort of like if Belle from Beauty and the Beast was a huge bitch — nose always in a book, trapped in a castle in a poor provincial town, and a heart full of hate towards her family, her life, and France in general. Gabriella has zero maternal instincts, but still has an affinity towards her youngest son, not as a mother, but as a fellow human with a philosopher’s soul, stranded amongst the “cabbages” (derogatory, even though in French, cabbage — chou — is a term of endearment.) I’m sure the two of them use the “not as a mother” excuse a lot to justify their extrafamilial relations — she never felt like his mom, your honor! — but for now, we see the seeds of Lestat’s superiority complex as a defense mechanism for sensitivity take root. As a teen, Lestat briefly runs away and joins up with a traveling theatre troupe, which is the closest thing in the late 1700s to coming out. It’s an act of artistic defiance that Gabriella respects but that infuriates the others, so his dad, the Marquis, commands his older sons to break Lestat’s legs and curses him. As his brother chokes him out, he reaches out to his mother and admires her cold beauty; both froid and Freud.
I would have loved to have actually seen young Lestat amongst the players, discovering his love of performance. We know that this chapter in his life was very important to him — he brings up Lelio the way Gus the Theatre Cat brings up Firefrorefiddle the Fiend of the Fell. But we move along to young-man Lestat, playing with his gun at the dinner table while a mob of angry, unwashed villagers begs the Marquis to do something about the wolves eating their livestock. Gabriella insists that her family “be men,” so Lestat storms out to take on the wolves single-handedly. He hates his stupid, chungus life anyway, so he may as well get torn apart by wolves and, in death, finally capture mommy’s attention. AMC does not have a pack of wolves budget, but I find this sequence artfully shot, Lestat looking very Barry Lyndon out there in the wildflowers with his blunderbuss, his mastiff mauled, and his horse AWOL.
Lestat somehow makes it back home, where he doesn’t want food or care, only mommy, who I have to pause and say is doing the funniest accent work ever. “You-a keeled feyyve woulfs,” she says, Europeanly. “Eight,” he says, crying over his dead dog. He describes an Oedipal fantasy of teaming up with Gabriella and killing off his father and brothers. Gabriella is horny for how Lestat’s heroism emasculated her husband and other sons, so she fingers Lestat’s gaping wounds and slips a hand down his pants while recounting her sexual fantasies: “I’m-a dreenking wine, so druhnk, I streep off-a my clawthes and baythe in the mountain streeeeeeam, naked. I go eento the village, eento the inn, and I taik into bed any man that comes. Crrrrude men, biiiig men, old men, boys …” she goes on like this, trilling some words, pausing at others, making charged eye contact with a crying, dying, confused, and lovestruck Lestat. The fantasy thrills her because in it, she is free, belonging to no one. “Except for me?” Lestat says, hopeful, looking at her as a newborn would, which makes her withdraw completely. She coughs, says she’s dying, and that she won’t survive the winter, and then abruptly leaves the room. A scene like this is everything that is twisted and unique about IWTV; it is psychosexually fucked up and operatic, and offering camp in one hand and heartbreak in the other. This scene, more than the eight wolves, is Lestat’s foundational trauma. He reaches out for care and love from his mom, but she has no love to give and can only offer attention in the form of something inappropriate, grooming, and incestuous. These different types of intimacy become tied up for Lestat; they are a monster origin story for him, explaining why he responds so violently to abandonment.
These memories of his brief, sad human life are uneasy dreams that Lestat wakes from on his tour bus as the sun sets over the road to Toledo. His mother, now going by “Sophia,” brought him back to his band the other night. The band is still freaking out over the revelation that their “vampire” frontman is an actual vampire, but Lestat is just chuffed that his mother “came a great distance to comfort me” — the poor baby is completely unaware that she so clearly is up to some sort of ulterior scheme — and in voiceover he tells the audience that we are “being very patient regarding the vampire incest factor, and I do appreciate it.” How are we feeling about these sorts of on-the-nose script/narration beats? Do we like? I’m undecided.
The theme song drops a full 13 minutes into the episode (love when that happens), and then the band continues to bombard Lestat with questions about vampire logic. It turns out that modern vampires get their blood from somewhere called “the farm,” that they have been a part of the “ecological landscape” for thousands of years, that the band is committing vampire sacrilege by exposing vamp-secrets, but that it’s “not to worry, I have the blood of Akasha in me,” (said in a very French blasé tone. It is my favorite sentence to hear Lestat say) prompting Larry (Schitt’s Creek guy) to go “alright, what the fuck is a kasha?” Alex wants to call the cops or quit the band because there is nothing less straight edge than drinking human blood, so he leaves the bus, and Lestat tells him telepathically that if he blabs about any of this, he’ll kill his brother.
In narration, Lestat distinguishes between his mother and his fledgling, “The Vampress Gabriella,” as though they are two different people, a coping mechanism that Gabriella tramples over when she says, “My maker called for his mama, and I came … and came … and came.” Lestat wants his mom to stay near him, but couching his boundaries in flirtation, would like it to be “companionship without the ‘cum’.” He wants to know how long she’s going to stay, because “I only saw you two times last century, it’s not an unreasonable question.” She doesn’t give a straight answer, and then they fly to a Toledo strip club called Chubbs to suck off a businessman. While his lover-mother catches ping-pong balls shot out of [redacted], Lestat fields a phone call from lawyer Christine, who says that she is whoring him out tomorrow night to do sexual favors for Thomas Pitt, the owner of the hotel that he trashed. Mother-fledgling and son-maker listen to their prey having sex in a motel while she drinks blood from his neck in a manner that barely commits to their recently-established no-shtup clause.
The next night, Lestat and his lawyer meet at a negotiating table with Thomas Pitt and his lawyer, only “Thomas Pitt” is an alias for Louis, and his lawyer Lemuel is a sexy vampire that he’s sleeping with. Just like in the last episode, when Daniel said he heard that Lestat requested him personally to film his tour doc, now Louis’s lawyer is saying that Lestat is the one who called this meeting. You gotta love how he acts like he’s been dragged into situations that he himself sets up. He feels emotionally ambushed, and what plays out is as if Marriage Story were an absolute chucklefest, as Lestat gets increasingly worked up and jealous over Louis’s relationships with other men. Lestat learns that Louis owns a 45 percent stake in his tour merchandise; if Louis is getting a huge cut from Lestat writhing around topless onstage, and Louis literally used to be a pimp, does that make Lestat Louis’s unknowing whore? Can this literal motherfucker catch a break? At the concert in Toledo, Lestat flies up to the front row mezz seats and shoves his heavily annotated copy of Interview with the Vampire into Louis’s lap; it’s covered in more pink highlighter than Chappell Roan.
After the show, Daniel and Louis meet at a hotel bar. Lestat explains in voiceover that even for scenes where he wasn’t present, he’ll be depicting them, “because it’s my hour, and when tertiary figures appear in it, I will speak for them.” All so he can tell the story of “how I woke the queen and unleashed her wrath upon the world,” and I don’t think he’s referring to dragging Louis’s grumpy ass to Toledo. “I am everywhere,” says Lestat-as-omniscient-narrator for the purposes of this season of television, and he insists that his way of telling spooky vampire tales comes with “a lot less whining,” which already feels blatantly false. He admits to fabricating the bar where the scene we’re watching takes place. I know he just nonchalantly snuck in a teaser about how by the end of the season he will wake Akasha and cause an apocalypse, but I’m more interested in the way this show continues to do historicity and truth-bending. You know that voice that pipes in a few times an episode ahead of Lestat’s narration, and goes, “You are listening to ‘The Failures, Album X, Side X?’ That’s filmmaker Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg, one of the greatest works of Canadian filmmaking about the blurring of autobiographical truth and lies, and mythmaking, and imperfections of memory, and how these flaws are all inherent to filmmaking (see also: Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, Matt Johnson’s whole deal.) This season is filmed in Toronto, and it’s awesome to see some local influence seep in and complement this theme of the show so well. Southern Ontario is, famously, where the vampires hang out.
Louis and Daniel’s first face-off since Daniel went ahead and published Louis’s burn book is less explosive than I would have wanted; Louis says he and Lestat had been “finding our way back again when the book dropped,” and Daniel confesses that he has zero cool vampire powers, only a vampire curse where the world drops away and he senses Armand. Babe, that’s not a power, that’s a crush. Things take a turn for the fun when rambunctious ragamuffin Raglan James pops up out of nowhere like Gene Parmesan (anyone can be Gene Parmesan if you scream with enough delight for him), and he’s brought Real Rashid with him; Real Rashid was a Talamasca agent the whole time! Seeing as Louis massacred a whole vampire theater troupe in Paris and took out 31 vamps in Dubai, the Talamasca wants him to help them take out a troublesome Detroit vamp cluster led by a guy named Killa, who once went by Bruce; he’s the biker vamp who assaulted Claudia in season one, so Louis the Vampire Slayer is activated.
Across town, Lestat’s on a dinner date at a checkered tablecloth Italian joint with his Mamma Mia, having eaten the diners and waitstaff like a regular rabid Cujo and the Tramp. He serenades her on piano with one of his Baudelaire songs, and she’s a bit salty about his French. “Your father’s tongue,” she says.
“My tongue,” he asserts. We see flashes of memories: of his turning her into a vampire on her deathbed, and the two of them fulfilling his fantasy of killing his father and brothers, her own sons, set to him singing the words to “La Fontaine de Sang” (“The Fountain of Blood.”) Like the other flashbacks this episode, it would have been nice to see these scenes play out in full, but this is how memories come to Lestat, unbidden and jarring. He tries to justify, in voiceover, his situation with his mother, with something about how Noah and his family on the ark propagated all of mankind. He can’t even justify it to himself, not really. “Fuck it. It’s different for vampires. That’s it.”
• Thank you so kindly for sharing your thoughts in the recaps! I appreciate you all pointing out that Louis’s foot or part of his leg is straight up gone at the auction. Not only is the screener site dark, but there aren’t subtitles either, so everything I’m picking up on is based on pure vampire-hearing. I thought her name was Baby Jinx!
• Among the changes to Lestat’s origin story from the book is that, instead of his dad refusing the monks’ offer to take him away and teach him to read, he refuses the offer to take him away and fix his stutter. It’s especially cruel in the book that Gabrielle loves reading so much and doesn’t give enough of a shit to give the gift to her son. On the show, at least they have that in common.
• Daniel is “a Taurus on the cusp of Aries” and is hitting on Lestat’s mom.
• I don’t like the trope of vampires talking about blood types like wine types.
• “Do you have a lot of sex?” “Of course I do, I’m a rockstar now.” Lol.
• Another reference to the rapture in as many episodes. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.
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