#ramell ross

Nickel Boys (2024) dir. RaMell Ross

-- RaMell Ross, "Renew the Encounter." Film Quarterly.

the vampire lestat is the open mouth masticating a Sam's Club platter of cold cuts. interview with the vampire, in retrospect, is a buffet froid, still cold, but haute. iwtv showed its hand with the trial, revealing the show to be a spectacle of black suffering constructed as a beautiful diversion from the real stuff, the real show, the vampire lestat--Jones showed that when he trotted the book around as his personal talisman and AMC underscored its significance with its marketing.

this is a reiteration of tags of a reblog of somebody's post and my roman empire: the only bodies in this series thus far to suffer explicit, continuous body mortification are black. the amount of times Claudia's burning body has been grafted into a gifset about her relationship to Lestat as his daughter centered on his horror and not her murder testifies to this recursive relationship between show and fandom to view black pain, black suffering, black death as in service to giving whiteness something to become against, to form itself, and enliven itself. the diminishment of the trial as a lynching began in the drafts of the writing room and was cemented in the final aired cut with it being classified as a stoning, allowing the white audience to obliviate Claudia's blackness and totalize her as a woman persecuted by the callous emotional savagery of her Black father-pimp, Louis. the Claudia conjured in the vampire lestat is but a papier-mâché version of iwtv Claudia, a B-movie shade signifying the angry black woman of the white imagination.

trial diminished, the show's coup de grace is the finale, specifically the reunion of Lestat and Louis in New Orleans. the lobotomy begins here, when Louis accepts and soothes the tragically fracturing Lestat despite being left in the "care" of the genuinely psychotic mindflayer who scripted the lynching and would have succeeded in murdering Louis if not for Lestat, idk, tapping into the blood of Akasha to save his beloved in a moment of lucidity(?) (Armand s3: the slavecatcher cometh to finish the job). the Louis in the vampire lestat is a continuation of the Louis soft-launched in that scene, one who possesses the supernatural capacity for finding cheeks to turn and, when the narrative demands it, be a nurse, a shark, and a nurse shark.

the actors, Hayles and Anderson, struggled to swallow the meal ready-made of their performance. they occupy a dynamic positionality in that they are closer to the material than the audience--they enliven it--and they are also of the audience, witnessing repeated viewings of their live performances for the camera's gaze. whose eye directs the gaze? not theirs. they are a minor audience within a majoritarian spectatorship that has already imagined how they must perform, how they must look and what they must feel.

thinking that having black writers in the room would change the representation of blackness in the vampire lestat falls into a trap of indexical burden, outsourcing the responsibility of imagining otherwise to those who possess the same skin color and cultural contexts. writing is shaped by the gaze, the power of the gaze, and those who hold that power are informed by a whiteness creating the conditions in which describing a character as Louisiana Fried Chicken is perfectly acceptable in its edginess. this series is a product of its culture. it visually diversifies its source material, it comes from a system operating under the neoliberal guise of multicultural post-racialism. do i think Rolin Jones and the writing and directing and the AMC production staff are personally racist? does it matter when they give into the racist impulses and implicit biases of the culture in which they produce? does it matter when the only person consistently employing the oppositional gaze is Jacob Anderson?

anyway, not looking forward to anything. "Montreal" might be a dream or some convoluted sleight of hand to catch out somebody or it might even mean nothing in the grand scheme of Akasha being the mother of all of Lestat's monstrosity instead of his actual mother. Louis temporarily lost his head, but he definitely lost his leg (and Armand lost his eye, yes, and the camera establishes that with a brevity it does not reserve for Louis, where it lingers, savoring).