wildwomensblues

The problem with this is that he’s still, at heart, an artist’s model, needing to become the scene and not make decisions about its construction. This is signalled in an early exchange of theirs in 2.2 when Louis tells Armand, “You carry yourself well” (i.e. you’re a good model), and is later confirmed by Armand himself. Despite all the trauma of his past (or more likely because of it), he’s still fixated on the artist-model relationship (and the parallels he sees between it and his worship of his maker Marius). In the museum scene in 2.4 Armand asks:

Armand: Who am I, Louis? Am I my history I have endured? Am I the job I do not want? I do not know anymore. No one has painted me in 400 years.

This line highlights Armand’s deep crisis of self, related to his trauma, and connects it back to modelling/portraiture. Armand only knows who he is and how to define himself when someone paints him—i.e. through the eyes of another. This makes Louis appealing as a photographer, a contemporary portrait-taker. (And that pic he snaps of Armand so symbolically crucial). It also sets the stage for their kink dynamic, where they respectively adopt the roles of the taker and the taken.

However, as the show reveals, Louis is not a good photographer—following the metaphor, because he’s using photography as a tool to remove himself from the frame, i.e. as a distancing strategy in reaction to what being ‘in the picture’ emotionally and personally cost him in his entanglement with Lestat. After losing himself in Lestat, he seeks to withdraw entirely, hiding behind the camera lens, as defence mechanism and distraction both (“I liked taking photographs. It took my mind off things.”) 

In 2.2 when Claudia asks Louis who he is outside of her and Lestat, he dodges the question by framing himself through photography, at one point literally using the camera lens as a shield to avoid her question. (Louis’ photography habit also relates to the notion that he’s ‘mad in love with humanity’: they are both a distraction to avoid engaging fully with his vampiric self.)

Louis doesn’t know his own answer to Armand’s question, ‘Who am I?,’ but it resonates with his own crisis of self. He finds comfort in helping Armand to define himself, but also in having his withholding nature characterized as an alluring trait, as opposed to what it is: a tactical retreat masking his broken sense of self. 

Similarly, Armand fashions himself to please Louis, defining himself through their relationship. In choosing to answer his own question ‘who am I?’ with ‘Louis’,’ he avoids thinking or reflecting on his trauma or coming to terms with himself—leading to concerning statements like, “If I'm not with him, I'm nothing,” and shedding light on why the notion that Louis finds him boring is so devastating.  

There’s a line exchange that highlights this dynamic in 2.3: 

Armand: You are drawn to portraiture. Louis: It hides the cracks in the walls.

The literal action here is Armand inspecting Louis and Claudia’s apartment and observing the many portraits lining the walls. However, this scene also functions on a deeper, metaphorical level. Armand sees Louis as a passionate portrait-taker, someone eager to capture him. However, Louis’ motivation to cover the cracks might be better understood as him fixating on others to obscure the cracks within himself. While he says “I’m out here finding myself,” he’s really hiding from himself. 

We might lastly consider the difference between photography and painting. As a medium, photography engenders less intimacy between photographer and subject than between a painter and theirs. It’s done in a literal flash, compared the hours of sustained contact needed to complete a painted portrait, perhaps signalling Louis’ relative unavailability and the incompatibility of their chosen forms. 

As the show’s framing of photography and painting helps to make clear, Armand and Louis are in a partnership that neither are putting their full self into, hampered by their respective wounds, (and in the infamous 2.5 fight scene they choose to hurt each other by prying open these wounds, rather than addressing them). And that’s the tragedy of their relationship. 

Coda: Revisiting Armand's director persona, there is one way that it suits him. Notwithstanding his aversion to leadership and his desire to form himself around his partner, directing aligns with his need for control. His favoured staging style, projecting conjured images over the bodies of live (I mean, technically, undead) actors, says a lot about him, too, signalling his penchant for manipulation of the real (or the truth) via constructed images and narratives.