August 10: Interview with the Vampire (1994)

[kinetic_elaboration]

Watched Interview with the Vampire (1994) tonight, which is pretty fitting after 2-3 days of gorging myself on IWTV (2022) to a frankly worrying degree. It was… interesting. I’m glad I watched it. I wouldn’t say it sparked anything in me though I can see how it would in other people.

Overall, it was just… too stylized for me, I think. It was 100% Gothic at all times but I never really felt the emotion of it; the style was like a pane of glass between me and any sort of feelings. It was highly dramatic, but not as unhinged as the show.

I didn’t really get into it until Louis and Claudia get to Paris and find the Theatre des Vampires, which I was not expecting to be the case. I think there was just too much restraint in the beginning, maybe? But Santiago’s little dance thing was some actual humor (not a lot of humor in this movie) and the theatre spectacle itself was pretty deranged. I liked Armand, and I actually got the chemistry between him and Louis. Like, that was pretty gay! “He wants you as you want him. He’s been waiting for you. He wants you as a companion.” Okay then!

And look, not me shipping Louis/Armand over Lestat/Louis, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? They really, really had to tone down the Loustat in this and it shows and it makes it a lot more boring, honestly. I think I was expecting something very charged, something by no means explicit but nevertheless sizzling with homoeroticism. Something straight people can ignore but no one with their hetero-goggles off could. But it was mostly just… Louis and Lestat existing near each other and I kept wondering why exactly. I got neither love nor hatred from them. I did a little more at the very end, their reunion, but even that felt like it hadn’t been earned, for me.

Maybe I’m not being fair to it. The extremely stylized nature of the whole thing sort of threw me.

Also I sort of get why people get frustrated with Louis and think of him as a whiny wet blanket. He was coming across that way a little bit! I liked him better at the end, setting the theatre on fire and then turning down Armand but for the most part not even Brad Pitt’s beauty and soft long hair was doing it for me. I mean, TV!Louis certainly loves his dramatic, pitiful monologue and his Pretension but he also decidedly has some verve to him. AND he’s hot. The clear winner.

Lestat making Claudia to quite literally babytrap Louis was pretty wild, I will admit that. Oh, she’ll be our little doll, our little daughter! Now Louis can never leave me! I mean, that’s the sort of fucked up move that makes Lestat interesting. For the most part I actually found him weirdly subdued, even though there was a sort of outrageousness to the performance… I don’t know how to explain. It was like a little bit of clownery sometimes, but I was not afraid of him. I wasn’t really afraid of anyone.

None of which is to say I disliked it. It was interesting. I guess I’m not really watching it fairly because I’m so deep in the show, which is so different. I can definitely see how people could get really into it but for me it was a little too stylized Gothic and thus hard to connect to emotionally. But they had a really short run time to cover a lot of ground and I’m sure that upped the difficulty immensely versus the more expansive, slow pace of the show.