Aging Trash

Hannibal (2013-2015)

130 favorite horror movies: (122/130)

"something's happening to me that i just don't understand. i can't think straight anymore. it's like my reasoning is all, uh, twisted and distorted, you know? i seem to be disassociating myself from reality more and more each day. i'm anti-social. i'm becoming dangerously amoral. i've lost the ability to distinguish between right from wrong, good from bad. I'm scared, ma. i mean, i feel like I'm - i'm plunging headfirst into some kind of black void of sheer and utter madness or something."

- Once I become thin and beautiful, I'll just take the antidote. - You're sick in the head.

tender:

marked by, responding to, or expressing the softer emotions : fond, loving

You want help? There's none coming.

The thing about the Vampire Lestat is that not only does it have an unreliable narrator, it also has multiple addressees within the text for Lestat's multiple versions of his story. There's the tapes, but also the songs and the documentary – versions within versions of his story – and then there are the potential listeners: the unknown future purchaser of the tapes, but also Daniel, the vampire audience, the beautiful unwell human audience, Louis, Gabriella, Armand, Lestat himself.

This multiplicity and unknowability explodes the formal structure of seasons 1 and 2. Daniel has the role of addressee in text of IWTV – Louis addresses his story to him (and implicitly to Lestat, as Armand points out in San Francisco). But even in IWTV season two, the show rewrites our understanding of Daniel as addressee in season one, when we find out that Daniel had a much bigger role in Armand and Louis' life than we knew in the first season – his life is a symbol of their enduring companionship. And TVL doubles down on this with Armand's confession that he's been following Daniel for years and telling Louis all about it. Daniel meant something different to Louis and Armand than we knew, and that affects how we understand what they are saying to him on a rewatch. So although we have Daniel as an addressee for Louis' story, we have to constantly go back and revise what we thought we understood of their dynamic to unpack the performance Louis and Armand are putting on for him in IWTV.

In TVL, the viewers don't have any fixed addressee in the text to align ourselves with or to give us the key to Lestat's performance on the tapes. In the books, as @sunscall points out here, Lestat is writing explicitly for Louis. Here, Louis has to bid to be the one to listen to the tapes in the first scene of the season – and does it make a difference if we imagine Louis or Armand being the one to hear them? But the final scene has Lestat wondering who he's even speaking to – 'do you smoke?', he wonders. In the text, it's a lonely, solipsistic image of Lestat talking to nobody, to an imagined patron, to himself. For us, as viewers, it makes the fractured narrative all the more difficult to parse.