I Watch TV: Interview With The Vampire
Interview With The Vampire
In 1973 journalist Daniel Molloy interviewed Louis Du Pointe Du Lac, a vampire, in San Francisco. Now in 2022 Molloy is considerably older, also ill, with a lifetime of successes and failures behind him. He’s contacted again by Louis, invited to Dubai, where Louis lives on the top floor of a tower with wealth, servants and willing donors of blood.
Louis proceeds to talk about his life for the next seven episodes. Originally from New Orleans the character from the book* has been reimagined as a black man running a string of brothels, making money, gaining respect, yet always struggling against the white society that controls the town, never able to become truly respectable or powerful. Arriving in town is Lestat De Lioncourt, a French aristocrat**, handsome, sardonic, sophisticated.
Louis’s gay; his brother disapproves of both his business and his personal life. Louis is intoxicated by Lestat’s blood, realising he is supernatural he decides to leave Lestat. When their sister gets married, the brother jumps off the roof of the house, killing himself. Louis tries to confess in the church but Lestat kills the priest and Louis is turned into a vampire.
They spend the next six episodes, or thirty years, hanging out in New Orleans. Louis attempts to hit the big time, but the authorities don’t like a black man getting above himself so use city ordinances against his big, fancy hotel (brothel). Eventually Louis has Lestat turn a teenage orphan girl they rescue from a fire, Claudia. Forever young, she nevertheless ages in her mind. Her influence, created to make Louis happy but inevitably making him unhappy, failing again with his created family as he did with his original, causes the major conflicts between Lestat and Louis. Thirty unaging years also makes the people of New Orleans suspicious.
Molloy has learned some things in the last forty nine years. He’s unafraid of Louis. He’s dying anyway, he’s achieved the heights of his profession and fallen down as a family man, he’s had breakdowns and abused drugs. When Louis provides him with private medical care, with fine dining, with antiques, with proof of his political connections here in Dubai, he’s not precisely unimpressed. But he’s seen this before. He has context and theoretical structure and language to understand it. He’s spent his life diving into the secrets of the rich and powerful. And now there’s one last secret, that of the vampires. But he’s not accepting Louis’s word for it.
(Louis can’t offer him anything other than the interview, as is made explicit in one episode when Louis hints and Daniel turns down the possibility of becoming a vampire.)
As in previous versions: being a vampire sucks, you have to live at night, your mistakes haunt you for longer than a human lifetime. Your strange desires and powers do not equip you to live better in your undying state. Also being a vampire in Jazz Age New Orleans is brilliant, you get to do what you want, live large, achieve your ambitions and when the white people who control the city get in your way you can cast them down, with secrets, with riches, and with blood and fire. You can rule the night, do whatever you want.
Except stay with the people you love.
Watch This: Stylish, 21st century adult vampire
show, bringing the gay subtext into the text, and making the framing story
deeper and more compelling
Don’t Watch This: It’s sex, costumes, depression and weird
vampire powers
* And film
** Perhaps even more unusual in the New Orleans of 1910 that the 1790s of the book.
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