Maredwill

Whoever is listening realising they went bankrupt so they could listen to this shit:

I MISS YOU!

I love this scene. It's so economical – gives us the story of Gabriella's turning and the killing of Lestat's family as well as Lestat's commentary on his complicated emotions about it in just three minutes. It's one of TVL's best uses of music as an expression of thoughts and feelings that Lestat can't or won't express in words.

And of course, because this season makes nothing easy for us, the lyrics are a nineteenth-century poem by Baudelaire: la fontaine de sang/the fountain of blood. And there's a fun irony in the way the poet's blood metaphor gets a lot more literal in the mind of a vampire, but the romantic, elegiac, painful self-pity and regret of the poem are somehow not at all diminished by this.

The YouTube excerpt kicks off just after Gabriella has said to Lestat that she can see why he gave Louis a daughter, and she can see why Lestat 'took her back'. And Lestat bristles at the implication that he killed Claudia on purpose to punish Louis, and although he doesn't contradict his mother, he retreats into French in order to annoy her ('your father's tongue!') and pours his emotion into the song.

So he sings this as we watch how he turned his mother, making her a vampire daughter like Claudia, as voracious and ruthless and exhilarating as Claudia:

Il me semble parfois que mon sang coule à flots, Ainsi qu'une fontaine aux rythmiques sanglots. Je l'entends bien qui coule avec un long murmure, Mais je me tâte en vain pour trouver la blessure.

À travers la cité, comme dans un champ clos, Il s'en va, transformant les pavés en îlots, Désaltérant la soif de chaque créature, Et partout colorant en rouge la nature.

It seems to me at times my blood flows out in waves Like a fountain that gushes in rhythmical sobs. I hear it clearly, escaping with long murmurs, But I feel my body in vain to find the wound.

Across the city, as in a tournament field, It courses, making islands of the paving stones, Satisfying the thirst of every creature And turning the color of all nature to red. (Aggeler, 1954)

And as we hear this, we see Lestat's literal blood flow into his mother's mouth, covering her, changing her, and her gleeful killing of the servant in the doorway. And the words and the melody are like a lament, in which we hear Lestat's sense of wonder and regret and helplessness that his blood/his love/his energy gushes out of him like a fountain, profligately. He is a lot. And he can't find in himself what it is that is wrong with him, the wound that would explain why he pours himself out so freely and gives so much and feels so drained. And it is all his fault somehow, the way his blood spills everywhere, sobbing, turning everything the same red, the violence of his magnificent mother-daughter unleashed on the world.

And then the final two verses, about the impossibility of forgetting and the futility of attempts to distract himself (revisited in the Loneliness):

J'ai demandé souvent à des vins captieux D'endormir pour un jour la terreur qui me mine; Le vin rend l'oeil plus clair et l'oreille plus fine! J'ai cherché dans l'amour un sommeil oublieux; Mais l'amour n'est pour moi qu'un matelas d'aiguilles Fait pour donner à boire à ces cruelles filles! I have often asked insidious wines To lull to sleep for a day my wasting terror; Wine makes the eye sharper, the ear more sensitive! I have sought in love a forgetful sleep; But love is to me only a bed of needles Made to slake the thirst of those cruel prostitutes! (Aggeler, 1954)

As he sings this, we watch as Lestat kills the older brother who had tormented him and Gabriella kills Lestat's other brother, her son, in front of her husband, Lestat's father, and completes her revenge by killing the marquis and stringing him up. This is what Gabriella thinks of Lestat – that he is the same as her, that he killed Claudia like this, and that, perhaps, he should also have killed Louis.

But there is no more satisfaction for Lestat in his revenge on his older brother than there was for Louis in his killing of Bruce. It's the horror of those deaths that haunts Lestat now. The last thing he recalls is the screams of his nieces and nephews crying 'mama!' and 'papa!' as he fades to dark in the tomb of his ancestors – one more trauma to try to bury in wine, as the poet says, or perhaps in the mountains of coke Lestat is currently taking, or the killing spree he is on with Gabriella.

The final verse hits on one of the key themes of the season – the attempt to use love to fill the void of immortality, and the way that desperation warps the various relationships between Lestat and Gabriella, Lestat and Louis, Louis and Armand, Armand and Daniel.

'Filles' in the last line is often translated as 'prostitutes' and it does suggest that in the context of the poems – these are the women of the demi-monde that the poet falls in love with and drinks with and gets screwed over by. But 'fille' has a primary meaning of 'girl' or 'daughter', and that meaning of daughter comes to the surface when Lestat sings here, his voice rising to a fine point on the word: 'I've tried to use love to forget and to sleep, but my love is just a bed of nails made so my cruel daughters have something to drink.' In his current state of mind, Lestat sees his love as something that hurts him, that allows others to use him, something that others sustain themselves on while he gets none of what he needs from them. We see this in some of his songs about Louis, but here it's Gabriella, and perhaps also Claudia, who are on his mind: his magnificent cruel daughters who he loves despite everything he's done to them and they've done to him.