The divine love triangle of “Interview with the Vampire”
leztat:
LESTAT – THE GOD:
- Offers eternal life, creates new life – The
Maker.
- Immersed in light,
associated with divine, godlike imagery: enchanting, described as “luminous”
and “radiant”, an “overwhelming experience.” Compared
by Louis to a biblical angel and Jesus, he comes like a solace to save Louis from his misery (“I’ve come to answer your prayers”) and offer this
wondrous life after death. Lestat’s general love for light is often emphasized, even later in the series. His iridescent eyes “burn with an incandescence” and “convey the power to walk on water.”
- Louis dying and becoming a vampire (“afterlife”)
as Heaven: Louis seeing light as Lestat’s
taking his life, everything suddenly becoming more beautiful and vibrant and angelic,
Lestat waiting for him all radiant and happy, his laughter like “peals of bells”, the night like “a chorus of whispering women.”
“It sounds as if it was like being in love.”
The vampire’s eyes gleamed. “That’s correct. It is like love.” He smiled.
- Perceived by Louis as unattainable, distant, emotionally inaccessible like a celestial being – wants Louis to stay and
follow him, but also keeps pushing him away as far as emotional intimacy and communication are concerned. Avoids answering difficult questions or answers them
vaguely, and so Louis has no choice but to secretly adore him from
afar, “studying him with a detached fascination”, and the act of
gazing at him is described like a self-transcendent experience, a
religious one almost:
“Sometimes I’d find myself staring at his wrist from which I’d drawn my
vampire life and I would fall into such a stillness that my mind seemed
to leave my body or rather my body to become my mind (…)”
- Is desperate to keep Louis close and prevent him from leaving, and out of this desperation creates Claudia, the token of his love for Louis: the dark immortal child, “evil of [Lestat’s] evil.” Claudia is the actual victim of the story, an innocent sacrificed in order to stop Louis from turning his back on Lestat, her martyrdom for Louis’s “repentance.” She dies abandoned, “forsaken” by her father. (For the record, I do NOT believe Claudia’s entire purpose is martyrdom or Louis’s character development!!! Claudia is a completely separate, fascinating character, one I could write a whole other essay about. I’m pointing out the circumstances of her creation and death merely in regard to Lestat’s “godhood.”)
“MADELINE, the Doll Maker, resplendent in green taffeta, sitting like a
Madonna with Claudia on her lap.” (‘92 movie script)
- Like a judge of a sort, Lestat
mostly
takes the lives of evildoers (interestingly, he’s actually the only vampire in the story who doesn’t really follow the “indiscriminate killing” rule, though it is something he teaches his fledglings/“angels”).
- Represents Louis’s dreams and aspirations, what he longs for, what he wishes he was: liberated, lively, unapologetic, self-assured and without regrets (in Louis’s eyes at least). In TTOTBT, when asked “Why do you love me?” Louis replies: “I wish I could be you.”
- Lestat’s godhood reveals itself in the duality of his personality, too. He’s cruel, vengeful and full of wrath, yet surprisingly forgiving and capable of unconditional love: doesn’t hold a grudge against Claudia, loves and is ready to take Louis back despite his rebellion. The roles are even reversed at the end of the story: it is the fallen “God” who asks for forgiveness and absolution rather than the other way around. Louis leaves, but even then, it’s like “the sorrow hadn’t left [him] suddenly, but had been near [him] all this time, hovering, saying, ‘Come.’”
“But you’ll come back… you’ll come to visit me… Louis?”
Literally has a god and hero complex and thinks he’s Dionysus?
ARMAND – THE DEVIL:
- Takes/destroys what Lestat creates.
- Immersed in darkness, magnetic and eerie, serious and collected in nature unlike Lestat. Associated with dark, satanic symbols and red/black colors: the edgy paintings of Hell and The Devil surrounding Armand, his dark angel aura, his deceivingly innocent appearance; eyes inscrutable, deep and dark, hair red/auburn. The contrast between him and Lestat is plain, from the way they look to the way they act: Lestat being this bright, loud, flamboyant, careless persona; Armand, on the other hand
–
dark, quiet, composed, distinguished.
- Théâtres des Vampires as Hell: the underground dungeons (“underworld”), Armand as the Devil, Armand’s minions as demons, the audience and tortured human “actors” as souls, even the black waters Louis crosses while traveling to Europe and fantasizing what it would be like to look into Satan’s face –
like a journey to Inferno itself. Visiting the theatre, Louis immediately feels uneasy, like something’s wrong with the place and its aura, though he’s too enthralled to draw any conclusions.
“The very ceiling writhed with skeletons and moldering dead, with demons
and the instruments of pain, as if this were the cathedral of death
itself.”
- Very open and accessible; suspiciously, temptingly so – reaches out to Louis himself, seeks contact, answers questions, willing to actually talk – attracts Louis’s attention by giving him what Lestat couldn’t: a connection, a lesson.
“God? Or Satan? It struck me suddenly what consolation it would be to
know Satan, to look upon his face, no matter how terrible that countenance
was, to know that I belonged to him totally, and thus put to rest
forever the torment of this ignorance.”
- Represents Louis’s dark instincts, including his inner resentment towards Claudia. Louis’s attraction to Armand might be rooted in his initial “desire to be thoroughly damned.” Armand mirrors Louis’s deepest, darkest secrets. A little push from him is all Louis needs to forsake Claudia entirely. Curious about how far down he can possibly go, he follows, distancing himself and getting rid of the only remaining element of the bond between him and Lestat at that time: the rock bottom he’s been trying so hard to hit.
LOUIS – THE FALLEN:
- The Rebel, The Angel of Death:
calls himself the Grim Reaper (“Dark
Angel” and “Merciful Death” also sound quite suggestive), his weapon of
choice is a scythe, he takes life regardless of whether someone’s a
good or a bad person, their age, identity, social status, etc. He
doesn’t even mention Lestat tends to kill mostly “evildoers”, probably because
it doesn’t really matter to him. The “angelic” side of Louis’s nature
reveals itself in his emotionality, empathy, preference for peace and
quiet and fascination with humanity.
- Filled with this inner rage, he rebels against God, literally and figuratively, even during his mortal life (going against his “saint” brother, beating up a priest).
Lestat comes as a saviour from his faithless, pointless life, as if to
give him a second chance, but Louis keeps resisting regardless,
projecting his own issues and anger at God and himself onto Lestat, always shifting the blame, always fighting, disobeying and stubbornly disputing his tenets on every occasion.
“(…) I believed I was damned when I went over to [Lestat], just
as Judas must have believed it when he put the noose around his neck.”
- Says he’s “damned like angels put in hell by God” and simultaneously associates his doom with Lestat.
The motif of Louis’s rebellion and Lestat “damning” him/”condemning him to hell” is also apparent in the scene where Louis imagines Lestat’s face right before feeding on Claudia, then bites her almost out of spite.
“(…) and I saw Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this is hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into her soft, small neck (…)”
- Louis feels about Lestat the same way he feels about God. The indecisive, love/hate nature of his relationship with his Maker(s), the guilt, the
secret adoration, the miscommunication, the detachment, the betrayal: characteristics of a God/Rebel dynamic. Louis biting, Lestat reaching out anyway. Louis reaching out, Lestat not responding. Damned and bitter
and stubborn and proud, he hates. Though spellbound and intrigued,
he can’t help but idealise Lestat in secret, yearning for emotional
connection and contact.
“But aren’t angels capable of love?” asked the vampire. “Don’t angels gaze
upon the face of God with complete love?” The boy thought for a moment. “Love
or adoration,” he said. “What is the difference?” asked the vampire
thoughtfully. “What is the difference?” It was clearly not a riddle for the
boy. He was asking himself. “Angels feel love, and pride… the pride of The
Fall… and hatred. The strong overpowering emotions of detached persons in
whom emotion and will are one.”
- Struggling with moral doubts and repressed sexuality, confused about Lestat’s enigmatic motivations, Louis initially suspects Lestat of being the Devil that came to tempt and “damn” him. It is only after he’s met Armand that he realises he was wrong, that his accusations were misplaced and baseless, and his judgement of Lestat faulty.
“It seemed more than ever absurd to me that Lestat should have died, if in fact he had; and looking back on him, as it seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before.”
“I have wronged Lestat, I have hated him for the wrong reasons.”
“What right had I to be so bitterly disappointed in Lestat that I would let
him die! Because he wouldn’t show me what I must find in myself? Armand’s
words, what have they been? The only power that exists is inside
ourselves…”
- Oblivious and blind to his Maker’s love, he insists Lestat only stayed for his wealth, though secretly wishes that wasn’t the case. His confusion about Lestat’s motives seems to parallel his religious existential crisis.
“‘I want to die. You have it in your power to kill me. Let me die.’ I refused to look at him, to be spellbound by the sheer beauty of his appearance. He spoke my name to me softly, laughing. As I said, he was determined to have the plantation.”
“Why, if God exists, does He suffer me to exist! (…) Why does He suffer me to live!”
- “(…) why, Louis, you know…” says Lestat in their last scene together. And when he despairingly tries to Tell Him Something once again, Louis “speaks of it with great reluctance”, and when Lestat fails to speak the words again, Louis feels “a profound, undeniable relief.” It’s less about him not knowing or failing to see the real reasons, and more about denial, the fact that it scared and overwhelmed him at the time, challenging him to question things about himself and his beliefs. Maybe there is no God.
Maybe he loves Lestat back.
Louis presents his story as an allegorical journey to eternal damnation: first death, Heaven
and becoming one of “God’s angels”, then rebellion, Fall, Hell and eternal damnation. Finishing the book, the reader is left with this intense feeling of
emptiness, this profound sadness and regret, a yearning for something irrevocably
lost.
Indecisive and conflicted, torn between Heaven and Hell and not really belonging to either in the end, Louis is sort of stuck in this gray area between the two, behind the “veil that hangs between [him] and the world feeling”, through which – even when he joins Armand “in Hell” – he still perceives Lestat, like a damned angel who in spite of himself keeps looking up, wishing to get rid of that insufferable numbness, to reascend and step through “the veil” to see the face of his Creator once again, as clearly as he used to.
Lestat and Louis through the years
I wanted to forget him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face - not as it had been the last night in the fire, but on other nights, that last evening he spent with us at home, his hand playing idly with the keys of the spinet, his head tilted to one side. A sickness rose in me more wretched than anguish when I saw what my dreams were doing. I wanted him alive! In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the only vampire I’d found.
Interview With The Vampire (1976)
"But why, Lestat? “ he asked a little suspiciously. "Why the danger, the risk? After all, you have done it. You have come back. You’re stronger than ever. You have the old fire as if it had never been lost, and you know how precious this is, this will simply to go on. Why risk it immediately? Have you forgotten what it was like when we had the world all around us, and no one could hurt us except ourselves? ”
“Is this an offer, Louis? Have you come back to me, as lovers say?” His eyes darkened and he looked away from me.
“I’m not mocking you, Louis,” I said.
“You’ve come back to me, Lestat,” he said evenly, looking at me again. “When I heard the first whispers of you at Dracula’s Daughter, I felt something that I thought was gone forever- ” He paused. But I knew what he was talking about. He had already said it.
The Vampire Lestat (1985)
I smiled. I kissed him suddenly, thrilled by the warmth of him, the soft pliant feel of his near human skin. God, how I hated the whiteness of my fingers touching him, fingers that could have crushed him now effortlessly. I wondered if he even guessed.
There was so much I wanted to say to him, to ask him. Yet I couldn’t find the words really, or a way to begin. He had always had so many questions; and now he had his answers, more answers perhaps than he could ever have wanted; and what had this done to his soul? Stupidly I stared at him. How perfect he seemed to me as he stood there waiting with such kindness and such patience. And then, like a fool, I came out with it.
“Do you love me now?” I asked.
He smiled; oh, it was excruciating to see his face soften and brighten simultaneously when he smiled. “Yes,” he said.
The Queen of the Damned (1988)
He grew reflective again and very sad. It almost hurt me to look at him. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, but that would only have made him furious.
“I love you,” he said softly.
I was amazed.
“You’re always looking for a way to triumph,” he continued. “You never give in. But there is no way to triumph. This is purgatory we’re in, you and I. All we can be is thankful that it isn’t actually hell."
The Tale of The Body Thief (1992)
"Come home with me,” he said. Such a human voice. So kind. “There’s time to come here and reflect. Wouldn’t you rather be home, in the Quarter, amongst our things?”
If anything in the world could have truly comforted me, he would have been the thing—with just the beguiling tilt of his narrow head or the way that he kept looking at me, protecting me obviously with a confidential calm from what he must have feared for me, and for him, and perhaps for all of us.
My old familiar gentleman friend, my tender enduring pupil, educated as truly by Victorian ways of courtesy as ever by me in the ways of being a monster.
Memnoch the Devil (1995)
“I’ll spend the next few evenings with Lestat,” Louis said quietly. “I want to read to him. He doesn’t respond but he doesn’t stop me. You’ll know where to find me when Merrick returns.”
“Does he never say anything to you?” I asked, regarding Lestat.
“Sometimes he speaks, just a little. He’ll ask for Mozart perhaps, or that I read him some old poetry. But in the main, he’s as you see him yourself, unchanged.” He paused, then looked directly at the sky. “I want to be alone with him for a few nights, I suppose, before Merrick comes back.”
His tone had a finality to it, and a sadness that touched me to the quick. He was saying farewell to Lestat, that’s what he was doing, and I knew that Lestat’s slumber was so deep and so troubled, that even such a dreadful message from Louis might not rouse him at all.
Merrick (2000)
I
stopped. I put my arm around him. I held him close to me.
“I’m Lestat,” I said in a low voice. “Your Lestat. I’m the same Lestat
you’ve always known, and no matter how I’m changed, I’m still that same
being.”
“I know,” he said warmly.
I kissed him. I pressed my lips to his and I held this kiss for a long
silent moment. And then I gave in to a silent wave of feeling, and I
took him in my arms. I held him tight against me. I felt his
unmistakable silken skin, his soft shining black hair. I heard the blood throbbing in him, and time dissolved, and it seemed I was in some old
and secret place, some warm tropical grotto we’d once shared, ours alone
in some way, with the scent of sweet olive blossoms and the whisper of
moist breeze.
“I love you,” I whispered.
In a low intimate voice, he answered: “My heart is yours.”
Prince Lestat (2014)
“Very well,” Louis said.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged and smiled.
“I’ll come if you want me. I’ll come and I’ll stay and I’ll be your companion if you want. I don’t know why you want this or how long you’ll want it, or what it’s going to be like, being with you and watching all your antics up close, and trying to be of help and not knowing how to be of help, but I’ll come. I’m tired of fighting it; I give up; I’ll come.”
I couldn’t believe I’d heard right. I stared at him as helplessly as I had in the hallway of the townhouse when I’d first seen him, trying to grasp what he had said.
He leaned close to me, and he put his hand on my arm. “ ‘Wither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people’; and because I have no other god and never will, you shall be my god.”
Prince Lestat and The Realms of Atlantis (2016)
“When I was finally led down the stairs, Louis came with me. In the
darkened passage before my resting place, he embraced me and held tight
to me, his lips pressed to my ear. I was aware of my hands moving over
his hair, embracing his neck, drawing him ever closer, in a way I had
never done in our long years in New Orleans. We joined in the posture of
lovers, brothers, fathers with sons.
“I love you with my whole soul, and I will always love you”, he confided
to me. “You are my life. I have hated you for that and love you now so
much that you’ve been my instructor in loving. And believe me when I say
you will survive because you always have and you always will.”
I couldn’t answer. I knew I loved him more than words could say, but I couldn’t respond.”
Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat (2018)
lioncourtz:
Lestat and Claudia in Interview with the Vampire (1994) dir. Neil Jordan
“And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which we moved amid the lacquered furniture and the darkening oil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should. Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart.
And on a warm sultry night in the spring of the year 1860, she rose up to settle the score. She enticed me, she trapped me, and she plunged a knife over and over again into my drugged and poisoned body, until almost every drop of the vampiric blood gushed out of me before my wounds had the precious few seconds in which to heal.
I don’t blame her. It was the sort of thing I might have done myself.”
lioncourtz:
Interview with the Vampire (1994) dir. Neil Jordan
“What I mean is, the moment I saw him, saw his extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I’d ever known, I was reduced to nothing. (…) All my conceptions, even my guilt and wish to die, seemed utterly unimportant. I completely forgot myself!” he said, now silently touching his breast with his fist. “I forgot myself totally.”
lioncourtz:
Apparently the early drafts of “Interview with the Vampire” (1994) are interesting
and more textual rather than subtextual, so here’s a collection of some of my
personal favourite ROBBED moments for myself, the gays and the curious
just so we can yearn and be uselessly bitter about it almost 30 years
later.
*under the cut because the whole thing turned out kind of long
Keep reading
