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codependent 🐰🦊

Think where it begins: Daniel's commercial. He is the audience surrogate and he will guide you through the interview. If you want to follow the "Divine Comedy" metaphor from season 3, Daniel is our Virgil--the wise old poet guiding us through the Inferno, where he isn't one of the tormented (a vampire) but also isn't part of the normal world anymore. Daniel is alone in the pandemic, his only social interaction is with a doctor, he keeps children's toys in his closet but there is no evidence of familial connections on screen.

The show is already telling the audience how to experience this piece of art. Pay attention to visual cues, like the toys in the closet. Daniel will eventually have dialog about his estranged daughters but the show also sets up this info visually with the old toys in storage. Another thing to focus on is Daniel's hands shaking as he attempts to solve a puzzle. His exact diagnosis comes up relatively quickly in dialog later this same episode, but the show has again already set it up visually. The audience is expected to notice these cues--where is the camera pointing? What is happening on screen? What info can we infer just from the language of film, before the dialog comes in later to explain and either confirm or refute these inferences?

Now pay attention to the dialog. Who does Daniel talk to in this pre-interview interlude? Whose voices are heard on screen, and what technology is used to hear those voices? Daniel speaks only to his doctor, using a smart phone and referencing "varients," so we know it's about the present day based on the tech and the use of a term common at the height of the COVID19 pandemic. (This also tells us something about Daniel's health.) Then Daniel has to find a stereo in storage to be able to hear the cassette tapes from Louis. This indicates the first interview took place in an older time with older technology, but just in case you missed that visual cue, the voice-over of Louis's handwritten letter says that the interview on the tapes took place decades ago in San Francisco.

I could go on and do this for almost every scene in season 1. I think a lot of people like the season 1 NOLA era the best because the show is so deliberately accessible in terms of film language and narrative that season. It's telling the most straightforward part of this huge vampire story in the most straightforward way possible. And it's doing this because the story will get much more complicated and demand a lot more from the audience in later seasons. The narrators are going to get more unreliable. One of the main characters, Armand, introduces the power of controlling minds and altering memories, which significantly changes how the audience can interpret and confirm info on the screen. Another main character, Lestat, refuses to let Daniel interview him at all, depriving the audience of the guide we've relied on for 2 seasons.

However, these factors don't mean that "Everyone could be lying at any time!" or "Nothing on screen can be trusted!" The show also used season 1 and Daniel's dialog to show the audience that THIS is what characters will lie about, and THAT is a visual indication that some sort of lie or obfuscation is happening.

Louis lies to make himself seem like a better person. It's things like the recording of the Louis-Armand fight in 1973 that reveal Louis to be far crueler and more selfish than he's willing to admit. So when Louis is onscreen making the decisions that he does, the audience needs to remember that he'll lie about how "good" he thinks he is. Think about the seance line, "What about what you should be thanking me for?" That's the Louis that Louis himself doesn't like to think about--the vicious part, the entitled part, the part that expects praise from his loved ones even though he withholds what they actually need from him.

Louis isn't going to lie to Lestat about what he's been doing with "Fraudia." The show has shown the audience that this is not the sort of thing Louis lies about, so the audience should accept that the Fraudia plot that we see onscreen with is largely true. (There is a big lie at the center of the Fraudia plot, but it's from Armand, not Louis.)

I personally found that the groundwork laid in seasons 1 (and 2) were most helpful when it came to the Gabriella and Lestat plot. Lestat lies about Gabriella in his dialog for the entire season, because the last episode is going to revolve around Lestat finally telling the truth to himself about how Gabriella makes him feel. If you're only paying attention to Lestat's dialog, you might believe him when he says he likes spending time with her and that "they" (together) have a perfectly acceptable sexual relationship. But if you're also paying attention to the visual cues, it's obvious that Lestat feels Bad when he's with Gabriella--that he hates the way she touches him, he hates the way she talks to him, and he hates the way she doesn't care about his music and his band. She plugs her ears at his concerts, she leaves in the middle of one, she's playing on her phone during "Stained Glass Eyes."

Lestat says this is a good (if complicated) relationship. He asks Gabriella to stay with him on tour and he agrees to abandon his own artistic pursuits in order to serve HER agenda for HIS songs. But the audience knows this is all part of the lie, the biggest lie at the center of Lestat's character, because of literally everything else happening on screen for this narrative arc.

Additionally, the audience knows how Lestat feels about Gabriella (and all his other friends and family) because of the SONGS. Season 3 isn't an interview like seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 is "liner notes" for the music, which is the main narrative vehicle. The music takes up so much screen time because it's how we're meant to understand Lestat and his story. The songs contain all the metaphors needed to fill in any gaps or missing info that audiences aren't getting otherwise. The music IS Season 3.

That demands a lot more from the audience than season 1 and season 2. The showrunners said that those seasons were "two old guys in a room trying to figure things out." Season 3 is about a character trying his hardest NOT to reflect on his past, and finding out that the past comes knocking anyway. Because as Daniel pointed out in season 1, "Memory is Monster. We forget, it doesn't."

Yes! The unities are GONE gone, and it's an artistic journey that crept up during season 1. First comes the question about the rain, indicating we've moved on from the formal narrative structure of 19th century novels and into the modernist era. The story is now self-consciously recognizing that it exists as a Story. And TVL Ep 1 is a car crash into the post-modernist literature era. It's mixed media, it's non-linear, it's a performance art piece about the art of performing. It takes for granted that the audience knows how a story is supposed to be structured, so that when the show takes that structure apart, the audience can see the destruction AND consider each of the component parts separately.

I was talking with a friend about season 3 and she said it's a miracle Lestat was on the Billboard chart at all, considering he's a tribute band to a supernatural gay lit-fic novel. Technically, Lestat's music is filk.* Any mainstream success is shocking in its own right. Initially, I wondered by the show didn't point this out, and then I realized IT DID. The weird hyper-modern "Internet" dialog Lestat throws out is a reference to the way audiences in a fandom speak to each other in online spaces. The show never uses the word "fandom," but everything about the way Lestat interacts with fame, his popularity, and his industry is infused with tumblr-speak because that's the type of person who would be a fan of a gay Gothic literature filk band!