o, we do not have the time to get into fan studies

Journalists are not vampires, or at least, it's unlikely there were any vampire journalists until Armand turned Daniel at the end of season 2. Journalism is a public service and an essential component of a healthy society. The problems with journalism, such as they are, are the same as in every profession, including other public goods like education and healthcare: unregulated capitalism has contorted the profession beyond its most righteous iteration. Tabloid journalism is predatory and sensationalist -- but that's not the kind Daniel is producing. An ever-smaller number of media conglomerates are laying off their newsrooms and leaving local news consolidated in the hands of right-leaning monopolies. Social media allows misinformation to spread more rapidly than traditional news can be published, and your random Twitterer isn't subjected to the same ethical and legal standards as someone employed by a news organization, or who wants to be taken seriously as a journalist, and so on. 

(On that note -- at several points in this essay I note that I have seen certain kinds of posts in the fandom. If I haven't linked to one it's because the posts have been deleted. Don't worry, though, I messaged them to my friends in Discord at the time and we discussed them with big quotes, so like, don't worry, I fact checked.)

The US concept of journalism as being practiced without bias is absurd on its face, in the sense that all people are biased; pretending to be "fair and balanced" etc. doesn't change that, only creates an unrealistic expectation. There are many fair critiques to be made of how journalism is practiced now in the Anglo-European media market, and yet journalism remains an unabashed public good. Speaking truth to power is incredibly important. I can't believe this even needs to be clarified, but I am disturbed by the number of takes I've seen in this fandom suggesting that merely wanting to interview a person is in some way predatory, or that publishing a person's life story is predatory, or that merely being a journalist is predatory. I don't know what kind of right-wing nonsense people are buying to have this position.

I have made this point, but to reiterate, it is not incidental that dictators shut down the free press, or stifle access, or interfere in access, or withdraw funding from independent news outlets. It is not incidental that billionaires continue buying up news outlets and platforms where journalists operate when media is a deeply economically troubled industry. There’s no profit reason to do this. Very few media outlets are super lucrative right now. It is fully about controlling narratives, spreading influence, and seizing the free press. I’m emphasizing this because I want people to understand that journalism at its core exposes where money and power lie and how it’s fucking things up for almost everyone, and this is a neat summation of what Daniel Molloy has been working for his entire career. 

It’s inconvenient and uncomfortable in life and in art that sometimes people whose work is very good, righteous and valuable even, are just not very good people. Before I go any further I want to make clear that I don’t think Daniel is some kind of serial rapist or whatever. He seems to be a fairly garden-variety asshole. He commits some microaggressions. We don’t know all that much about how he comports himself in relationships, exactly, but between the paper bag and the two divorces and the estranged daughters, it seems like he’s not interpersonally that great. He’s obnoxious and full of himself, pretty convinced of his own talent. (Of course, his talent is extremely convincing.) I think IWTV fandom (maybe all fandom) has a problem differentiating between moral offense and the much more banal condition of being a jerk. Again, a wonderful contradiction of reality is that someone whose contribution to society is great may be just kind of an asshole. This makes Daniel an interesting character, but I also think it makes him a fully felt person. 

IWTV does not offer didactic character interpretations. Every single character on the show is pitiable and horrifying in equal measure. They are all charismatic and charming and beautiful and sensitive, and selfish and cruel and monstrous. All of them are, at one point or another, the most and the least powerful person in the room they occupy. I have also said this before, but that was the influential stroke of genius in Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice said, what if the vampire was a person and not a trope? What if the vampire had subjectivity instead of being a hollow monster? Wouldn’t it be interesting if monsters were complex and had thoughts and feelings and insights? By 2026 this insight, that monsters have feelings too, seems itself a trope, or tired, or perhaps in light of our collective social weariness, there isn’t much patience for finding the humanity in the monster, given that we are ruled by monsters. Yet there is an appetite for stories about this condition: every memorable TV antihero of the past three decades has followed a similar model, to say nothing of the more direct heirs of the vampire franchises tilling this soil. 

All of this to say, it would be an interesting irony, wouldn’t it, if Daniel the human being were the only character the viewer was meant to read as a total monster, lacking depth and pathos. But I don’t think that is what the show is doing. I don’t think the writers show you this man trembling fitfully, and asking for a session for himself, and whimpering as a scared youth about the blood running down his torso because you are supposed to find him an uncomplicated monster without virtue. Undeserving of pity.

Rice was writing this turn in the late 1960s and early 1970s, amid the birth of postmodernism. This is a really annoying term that forty different people will yell at you for using incorrectly while they all have a different definition in mind, so I’ll define my engagement with it here as, very broadly, intentionally thinking or creating against the dominant mode in the postwar context. I have for some reason watched about eight thousand video interviews with Anne Rice since late December, often conducted by her regrettably hot former twink son. One thing she keeps circling back to is that the dominant mode of fiction in the period when she was writing Interview was modern-life realism, probably thinking of figures like Updike and Cheever. She saw herself as doing something that was not the dominant mode at the time. I guess Interview might be said to be a postmodern book, because it interrogates the psyche and position of the monster. It’s doing this in the postmodern era, grappling with the aftermath of global monstrosity that felt like the world was spinning off of its axis. 

At roughly the same time as Interview was being written, New Journalism was flowering. This is a style marked by what’s often called a “novelistic” approach: writing stories and books that had narrative, dialogue, and literary flourish. The best-known practitioners are Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer. Maybe you would cite Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood here. In 1972 Wolfe wrote a piece for New York codifying New Journalism, an essay that is itself a work of New Journalism. You might put Hunter S. Thompson in this camp, too. Before this, the prevailing journalistic style was hard, straight factual reportage. I was once in a journalism class where we had to pull stories in old newspapers from 1951. I remember finding a story about who-can-remember set that year, and it gave so much contextless information that the address of the events in the story was given. Like, “The incident happened at 123 Whatever Street” was part of the story. The concept of “what’s the point” didn’t breach the piece.

The final attribute of New Journalism that Wolfe identified was something like third-person subjectivity. The writer of the piece is a part of the story. This is where we sync back up with Daniel Molloy: although a limp character in Rice's book, the "boy" in that novel could be working in that mode, and his Interview with the Vampire as depicted on the show is clearly in the vein of this style of journalism. From what we’ve seen, the book recounts not Louis’ story, but the story of Louis telling the story to Daniel. Daniel is a character in the story. The journalist is there. It is a vampire-themed Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. 

Daniel’s nascent career in 1973 fits in with these trends. He is going around the Bay Area interviewing people on the outside of society. He mentions a single mother working as a stripper, and a Vietnam vet living with an amputee refugee boyfriend. I have, again, seen it commented that Daniel is somehow preying on these people, stealing their stories. It seems like what he’s doing is more or less something in the vein of the as-told-to, that is, interviewing them to get their words down and then editing the accounts into stories that can stand on their own. (The as-told-to is a very common and widely accepted format.)

The idea that it is somehow unethical or predatory is a severe misunderstanding of Daniel as a journalist, or maybe just journalism. Both times he interviews Louis, in 1973 and 2022, he starts the interview by clarifying that the interview is being recorded and that he has consent to the interview. It’s sloppier in 1973 — because he’s younger and less professionalized, because he’s high, because he’s terrified — but he’s not doing anything Louis doesn’t want. In each instance it’s extremely clear why they are there. The phrasing of “don’t be afraid, just start the tape” is Louis literally telling Daniel, yes, record this interview. He is fully consenting. The start to their first session in 2022 has a more formal journalistic beginning, with Daniel saying when and where the interview is being recorded, and then prompting Louis to speak his own name, signaling on the transcript that Louis is, again, consenting to the interview. I would presume, from this context, that Daniel’s non-vampire interview subjects are also willing, or rather, that sources consenting to be interviewed is an ethical standard Daniel upholds. According to his fake LinkedIn profile, he’s won two different awards for ethical journalism. His Masterclass rip-off course contains the topics “Off The Record Is An Agreement,” “Don’t Do Clickbait,” and “Hot Takes Are Hot Trash.” I’ve seen some people presume that when he says “honesty is not a tactic” he means, don’t be honest. Of course that’s not what he means. He means that honesty is not merely a strategy to get what you need, but the entire fucking point.

Moreover, simply wanting to tell someone’s story, or conduct an interview, is not in any way predatory or vampiric. The interviewees we hear about in 1973 are telling, because US journalism had historically centered on stories about great men, and electoral politics, and other matters of perceived import. What Daniel is doing here is turning instead to the periphery, indeed, making the point that the real story is on the periphery. Maybe it should not be peripheral. Maybe the effects of, in this instance, the Vietnam War on actual people, rather than the politicians and generals, is the thing that should be news? That readers need to hear?

Daniel goes with Louis in 1973 out of a combination of drugs, horny, and wanting to know what this dude’s deal is. Here is a Black man in a gay bar in 1973 San Francisco who is claiming roots in nineteenth-century Louisiana and, also, to be a vampire. What’s this guy’s story? This is also peripheral. This is not the dominant mode. This is a big weirdo. Daniel goes back in 2022 for truth and reconciliation as much as Louis is seeking it when he invites Daniel. I don’t know that he’s looking to expose the location of power in that instance, at the beginning, but at the very least, Louis initiates this second round. The invitation is on his letterhead and it’s got his signature on it. This is a lead, and Daniel is a journalist.

I do think race is important to this conversation. I think it is worth asking, why is Daniel white? I would posit that it’s because it’s been projected by the writers that, to viewers of the show, journalists are white. That if the viewer imagines the archetypal journalist, they conjure up someone more or less like Daniel, a crotchety and dogged truth-seeking white man. That if most viewers were asked to name a journalist, they would conjure up Woodward and Bernstein, or Thompson, or maybe Ronan Farrow, especially in 2022. Black journalists exist, obviously, as much as I feel stupid even writing that I also want to emphasize that this isn’t about who is a journalist; it is about what kind of person this journalist character is being drawn as for the sake of the TV show.

Of course, journalism is a very expansive field. The things that fall under the category of “journalism” encompass a wide array of styles, media, practitioners. But Daniel is an investigative journalist, a type that’s seen as brawny and heroic. Again, this has nothing to do with who is an investigative journalist, in actuality. (Ida B. Wells, for example, was an investigative journalist.) It’s about what the show is trying to get across in drawing a portrait of this character. We need a type of person who is willing to go to extremes, to risk bodily harm, in order to get the story. Daniel’s drug problem is part of this too: think, again, of Thompson, or of Anthony Bourdain, or of David Carr. (There is some evidence that the association between journalism and substance abuse is more than incidental.) This is the media narrative, the collective memory, of a type: the person whose brilliance in investigation and boldness in truth-telling is coupled with a self-destructive edge. You need someone like this to walk into that flat in San Francisco and tell Louis that he doesn’t even understand the meaning of his own life. Again, Daniel is right, of course, from a certain point of view. Surely Louis needs to unload about his traumatic past, but also, why can’t Louis see that all humanity longs for more life? Why is he hung up on some figure from his past when he has what every mortal on the planet wants, endless room to move forward? The dramatic irony of this show is that the characters’ insights are curdled by their faults. Daniel is self-destructive, even hubristic, but he isn’t wrong.

Importantly, he is a good journalist. In Dubai in 2022, he makes fun of his tactic of asking, “and then what?” But even in 1973 he was a good journalist, or had the makings of one. Was a good journalist in the making. He is clearly very confident in his abilities, but then, he is not wrong. About the journalism, he is not wrong. As much as he is looking to score, in whatever sense of that word, he also knows there is a story. He is also 20 (Lestat’s season 3 voiceover gives his birthyear as 1953), seemingly in college at Berkeley, and writing for the Berkeley Barb, “one of the earliest underground newspapers to serve the civil rights, anti-war, and countercultural movements in the Sixties,” but also “burgeoning fights for disability rights, gay rights, and environmental awareness.” This is an unabashedly leftist project. Does being part of it make Daniel not an asshole? No, but being on the right side of history, or simply being right, has never precluded that. And a lot of counterculture ideas that were needfully pushing on the status quo in 1973 would look regressive now.

In terms of misunderstanding Daniel, I think it’s often assumed that, actually, he is a bad journalist, or not as good as he thinks he is. I really don’t get this from the show up to this point. For one thing, it’s memetic (even in canon), but having two Pulitzers is not nothing. Like, saying it’s not nothing is a monumental understatement. There are many different credentials and bona fides this show could have given us if its game were to doubt Daniel’s reportage skills. It could have given him one Pulitzer. It could have given him a Polk, or an ASME. It didn’t have to give him any awards at all, actually. The awful twist on Daniel’s skills as an investigative journalist isn’t that actually, he is a bad journalist. It’s that he’s bad at the rest of his life. The show even says as much, in 2.5. This is like having two Oscars. Maybe one is a fluke. Two is irrefutable.

He's confident in his abilities and he should be.

After 3.3 aired, I saw some posts indicating that Daniel’s failure to capture Lestat’s comments on Nicki indicated that he is actually no longer a good journalist, now that he’s a vampire, or overly confident, or something to that effect. I think this disregards that Daniel got exactly what he was looking for. His line of questioning is totally successful. Likewise, his approach to the interview in Dubai is successful. 

Something I find really compelling about the show’s depiction of Daniel is that being an investigative journalist who is reliant on sources requires an immense amount of emotional labor. Sources are people (or people in the way that vampires are people) and their emotions can be unregulated. Something that’s striking to me about the Louis-Daniel interview and how it’s interpreted in the fandom is that people accuse Daniel of being, like, unduly an asshole. Again, a big theme of this entire essay is that he is an asshole. But Louis also knows this. For one thing, he already met Daniel in 1973 and knows what happened at the end of that interview. (It’s everything after that’s been confounded.) For another, he’s been following Daniel’s entire career. I think it’s actually undermining Louis to presume he did not know what this was going to be like. (This doesn’t mean he has to like it.)

Moreover, Louis is an asshole right back to him. In some senses, Louis withdrawing his consent to publish the interview — we don’t see him do this, by the way, just suggest it when he passively-aggressively sets the computer on fire — is the cruelest thing he does. He’s flown this man to the other side of the world for two weeks in the middle of a pandemic, at the end of his life, to basically participate in a vanity project. It’s only midway through that Daniel insists Louis pay him; that wasn’t part of the initial bargain. (To Louis’ credit and also problematically, you don’t get to be 500th-richest rich by offering to fairly compensate people’s labor.) Daniel’s in it purely for the pursuit of the story, at first. The sense of danger he’s always chasing along with the story. Between Louis and Armand, someone tries to kill him three times; the last attempt was successful. Over a week in San Francisco he was subjected to incredible torture. The two weeks in Dubai, as much as Daniel is rude and a dick, see the torture less physically intense and more heavily psychological, but still, they’re both in his brain without consent. Louis causes him to have spasms. They make him an unwilling participant in drawn-out master/servant roleplay. That Louis knows all of this and thinks the $10 million is a fair exchange says very much about Louis. Of course he doesn’t have to give Daniel his consent to publish the book. Of course it would have been nice if Daniel asked. But these characters are so far away from the condition of niceness being part of the equation. None of them are nice. Louis isn’t nice. Why did any of this happen, if not for the fucking story? Louis doesn’t give a shit. He got what he was seeking. Was it journalistically ethical? At what point are we allowed to ask why human ethics should apply to the characters who are eating people? If Louis wanted to see his desires through he could have hashed it out with Daniel on the plane to New Orleans. He threatened Armand with death if he harmed Daniel. Do we think Louis is going to circle back to that?

Writing this essay in the lead-up to season 3, and as the season is airing, I’m hyperaware that the show itself might joss (there’s an old fandom term for you) some of my suppositions. As I’m finishing this essay, I’ve just seen 3.4. I think there are a couple of differences between the Daniel-Louis interview and the Daniel-Lestat documentary project that are instructive, and worth discussing. One is that we’re getting Lestat’s version of events, whereas the scenes in Dubai were objective, that is, meant to be understood as something that actually happened. I don’t think we’re meant to call into question the broad strokes of these scenes, but it’s important to consider that Lestat doesn’t seem overly interested in journalism, or truth and reconciliation, even as he claims they’re “doing a rewrite.” He calls his songs “my story” and the documentary the “liner notes.” The positions of the subjects to Daniel as the interviewer, as sources, is very different. Louis explicitly wanted his story told (until he didn’t). 

On the other hand, I would describe Lestat as a hostile source, by which I mean, he is purposely a difficult subject, almost as if he doesn’t want this documentary to work out at all, despite supposedly initiating it himself and requesting that Daniel participate. Maybe we’ll find out this is untrue; interestingly, there are several contradictions in Lestat’s account of this tour. He makes it seem like Louis requested to meet with him, and then it sounds like he requested the meeting. He tells Gabrielle/a that he told Louis she died a mortal in the 1790s, and then tells Daniel she died a vampire who couldn’t hack it. Louis, even in admitting that there were things he didn’t entirely remember, seemed genuine in his desire to strive toward the truth of what actually happened. Lestat doesn’t seem too bothered by these discrepancies. How did this documentary project get initiated, even? It’s not totally clear, but it’s also not unbelievable that Lestat brought Daniel on tour to basically fuck with him. Even if he didn’t, relaying his history via telepathy so that it doesn’t get put on film is a hostile gesture. You could say that Lestat doesn’t owe Daniel this testimony, but — at the point when you invite a documentarian or journalist onto your tour bus and agree to make a documentary about your life, I mean, you kind of do?

Now, if Daniel were in an earlier decade of his life — well, okay, looking at Daniel’s output, about acid rain and for-profit prisons, it’s possible he wouldn’t be interviewing a rock star in an earlier phase of his life. (Then again, according to his LinkedIn, he wrote a story for the LA Times at one point called “Has Anyone Seen Bob? A weekend in Malibu looking for a Rock icon,” I guess about Bob Dylan probably. So you know what, maybe.) In any case, if Daniel were in an earlier decade of his life, with many stories ahead of him and another project to jump to, you can imagine he might just quit this. If Lestat isn’t going to helpfully participate, why bother?

I have seen some gif sets that imply that Daniel’s reaction to the emotional climax of Lestat’s story is like he’s getting a drug fix. It could be. Or maybe he just wants to get the story. Maybe he’s been following this vain, unhelpful vampire who says he wants to be documented around for a month and a half, wondering what he is doing. Parkinson’s and the changing media landscape were slowly pecking away at Daniel’s sense of self. Serious journalism, given its stakes and its social and political utility, is a higher calling. You don’t go into it to get rich. (That $10 million is Daniel’s “whore number” also suggests he is not wealthy; in comparison, again, Louis is the 556th wealthiest person in the world; the US itself has about 1,000 billionaires.) You don’t go into it to become famous. You go into it for some combination of desire to serve the public in this profession that strives toward a greater good, compulsion to do the actual work, and sense of self-destruction. It is like academia: If you felt like you could do anything else, for your own sanity, you would. You trade wealth and stability for your sense of self. This is more or less what Hamilton Nolan was getting at. I guess you could argue this is like drug addiction. Why not? I don’t know that I would take Armand’s word for it.

But, Daniel is a vampire now. What kind of journalist is he supposed to be? How can he investigate if he’s confined to nighttime hours? How can sources trust him if he’s not even human?

What else does he have but this?