I have to say. The things I’ve been hearing about s3 of the AMC show the past couple days are (alongside just being very, very upsetting regarding the female characters and characters of color) strangely at odds now with the spirit of The Vampire Chronicles despite the fact that their questionable portrayals of difficult subject matter aren’t always dissimilar on the surface.
I wasn’t originally going to give any kind of in-depth opinion on this without watching the season, but some of the specifics that have been shown to me and the clips I’ve now watched in the past two days after making my original, very confused post feel like the ultimate culmination of what made me lose interest in the show’s vision in the first place back during episodes 5, 6 & 7 of s1.
The thing about TVC is that it was always subversive but not in a way that prioritized being progressive. In many ways, what Anne Rice created WAS progressive, but that was never the point of the work. In all the wild, over the top defenses she made for herself and for the many shortcomings of her work, being progressive was still never a claim she made about anything she wrote. I find that, in a way, much more respectable than I find what seems to have occurred with the AMC show this season.
I would rather hear all the dark, dirty, cruel, honest thoughts of a very broken individual presented with total conviction and artistic selfishness (that I can evaluate on my own terms) than be toyed with by a corporate showrunner who wants to milk the taboo sensationalism cash cow with one hand and the left wing Twitter accolades cash cow with the other until he creates something that is, in my subjective opinion, causing much deeper harm than anything Anne Rice wrote.
Rolin Jones sold a promise of something a little kinder and safer and more thoughtful than what Anne Rice created—a perfectly reasonable thing to want—and then dashed that safety into the rocks for what? A bigger payday? I’m honestly not sure. But that was never the point of TVC. Anne Rice didn’t want you to be comfortable, she didn’t even want her work to be particularly monetizable. She just wanted her audience, however large or small, to really hear her authentically.
TVC showed us the complicated and often indefensible person of Anne Rice in such a startling, unflinching manner that I don’t even know if popular media can capture anymore with how commodified everything is. TVC were written by someone who was, at her core, an outcast writing to other outcasts hoping for their understanding. She was overcome with wild, manic inspiration when she had it but raging with anger and, I think, grief when she didn’t. All of that combined was the lifeblood of the series, for better or worse.
What Anne Rice created isn’t just more interesting to me than what Rolin Jones has now ultimately created, but I would argue also more impactful artistically because of the burden her honesty places on the reader to decide right from wrong and evaluate their own beliefs with no manipulation on the creator’s end to fall back on. I want to read a book where the gay sex is there because it gave the author a boner, where all the bad politics are completely unironic, where the author’s rage against her own gender is scathing and raw and uncomfortable, where a lifetime of traumas and wild fantastical imaginings of all kinds are on the page in their respective ugliness and absurdity.
And I want that not only because of the brutally impassive mirror it creates to explore our own deepest darkness, but because it forces more thought, more soul-searching, more reckoning with our best and worst selves than something made simply to sell ad space at the expense of POC, queer people, and women ever will.
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