Every single time I think about this show, I think about one image: the photo someone posted of the first page of The Tale of the Body Thief, but with “Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel” written over the first line (which is “The vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It’s about something that happened to me.”).
The vampire Lestat (Sam Reid) does not yet use YouTube. The vampire Lestat does not write a cheugy little book. He would never do anything so obvious as responding to Louis’ story—as told by Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian)—with another book. “No one reads anymore!” according to Louis (Jacob Anderson), and while that may not actually be the case, it is the case that Daniel’s book came out, everyone learned that vampires were real, and then they went, “Huh,” and opened TikTok again. Modern life, as a very different band once said, is rubbish. People are out there swiping left on gods. What’s a lovelorn drama queen who wants to set the record straight to do?
Welcome to the show formerly known as Interview with the Vampire, in which the immortal Lestat is going to spend a good deal of time never giving a simple answer to the question “Why rock music?” In the season premiere, he is for much of the time incapable of giving a coherent answer to anything, having once again made very poor choices about which people on which to snack. The episode title/location of this week’s vampire concert, “Detroit,” summons up recollections of Tom Hiddleston’s modernity-avoiding vampire in Only Lovers Left Alive, but there’s none of his reticence here. No: We are here for flamboyance, tight pants, unsubtle lyrical double entendres, drug-trip fight sequences, and a story so out of order Lestat himself keeps getting mixed up.
There are also about a million hints about a vampire queen and assorted suggestions that shit is going to go epically, globally sideways before long, but, like Lestat, I’m getting ahead of myself. This episode will make your brain do that. It was remarkably challenging, after one viewing, to line up the scenes in my head, make them sit still and solidify. Narrative, as has been shown over and over again on this show, is slippery. Stories are told; the teller makes all the difference.
Now Lestat is doing the telling. But to whom? With a new season and a new name comes a new framing device (one that the more fluent-in-musical among us noticed is a direct Phantom of the Opera reference). At some unspecified point in the future, an auction takes place in an airplane hangar. Several known quantities arrive looking the worse for wear: Louis is missing a foot, Armand (Assad Zaman) an eye. There’s a cardinal? (The church guy, not the bird; IMDb lists him as “Vatican rep.”) Raglan James (Justin Kirk) looks just fine, though he gets up in apparent alarm when the second item goes up for sale: a “music box” curated by Lestat, containing a vinyl pressing of all his masters and 111 vinyl records containing an “omniscient history” of the album release and tour of the band The Vampire Lestat—and the global catastrophes that followed—as narrated by Lestat. The collection is called The Failures.
There is also a bottle of port from 1863 and a bottle of Lestat’s blood. Armand and Louis both bid for this object, but it is not at all clear who obtains it.
That’s a lot to process all at once, but there is no time to linger: It’s straight into Lestat’s version of events, picking up in Detroit, in the middle, he says. One must leave room for lots of flashbacks, after all. Lestat also makes a casual reference to the attempted extinction of the Y chromosome, which was not totally his fault, promise! It’s just teaser after teaser, and he hasn’t even gotten on stage just yet. Lestat’s voiceover has the distinct flavor of someone looking back from some distance, which does make a person wonder from how far in the future he’s speaking. Or, alternately, he’s just fucking with us—“us” including his unknown, in-show listener. Everything is a performance, darling.
“Detroit” is a lush and chaotic tangle that asserts itself, repeatedly, dizzyingly, as a whole new show. It’s stage lights and dingy backstage spaces, black hallways and band flyers and stickers everywhere; it’s lush hotels and a mystifyingly spacious tour bus (complete with middle-of-the-room shower); it’s insistently of the now, giddy and replete with references to FOMO and Tiktok dances and how humans shouldn’t be allowed to swipe left on “a god.” Louis and Armand’s Dubai penthouse was almost as far from this as it was from Louis’ New Orleans flashbacks. This is a world where vampires said “Hey, we’re here,” and the world mostly just shrugged.
Lestat is here to shock us out of our anesthetized algorithm comas. He may be going about it rather oddly, but at the same time he’s fairly poetic about it all: “They came for cosplay and left converted and I baptized them the beautiful unwell.” If his poetry has the ring of the overpracticed, well, he did say he needed about 50 years of practice.
Thrown into the chaos of Lestat’s narration of his pursuit of hedonistic delights are the practical details of vampiric life on the road with a band that doesn’t even really know there’s a vampire among them. There is a manager. There is a doofy body double (also played by Sam Reid) who is sent to strip-mall Applebee’s to take photos with fans in order to convince people that the vampire schtick is just a schtick. There is a familiar on-call doctor for blood transfusions. I am not entirely clear on the role of Dee (Amaka Umeh), but she seems to serve in several capacities and be on the payroll, if her unintentionally hilarious, deeply stressed-out recitation of a mantra about work-life balance is anything to go by.
And then there is Daniel Molloy, now a vampire and quite chipper about it, who is directing a documentary about the tour. At present it mostly seems to consist of crowd scenes and Lestat being difficult to interview. The documentary, Lestat says, is the liner notes to his story. The band’s sound is what he hopes will “counteract Mr. du Lac’s portrayal of me as a mayonnaise villain with sociopathic tendencies.”
Or is he just saying that?
In The Vampire Lestat, the novel, it is rock that brings Lestat up out of the coffin where he has been sleeping for years. It is Satan’s Night Out, in part, that tempts him back to the world, where he decides to use music—and his own autobiography—to tell his side of the story. At the end of Interview with the Vampire’s second season, I had a theory about why he would do it this time: not just to tell his side of the story, but to take the heat off Louis, who closed out that season by basically inviting all the vampires in the world to come visit. It would, could, be a way of saving Louis again.
But as far as we know, he’s still quite angry with Louis. The Montreal-at-Halloween flashback is charming as hell: vampire Facetime! Louis being naive about saving files in the cloud! Lestat’s outraged “NO THANK YOU!” at the bookstore clerks! Lestat’s editing binge!!! That moment may, in all honesty, be my favorite moment in this entire episode, especially for how it’s mirrored by his editing of the band’s painful song. But first: LITTLE TINY LOUIS HALLOWEEN COSTUME WITH HIS PERIOD-INAPPROPRIATE CAMERA! That poor kid. Bless. I hope one of his friends traded him for that Mounds. (The worst candy. He can have all of mine.)
Lestat is reacting to everything: someone else’s version of him, someone else’s bad songs, someone else dressed like Louis. It’s Lestat’s version of the story, and yet he’s not at all in control. But the next performance demonstrates that sometimes, it’s better to not be in control: When his guitarist (Noah Reid) once again steps all over Lestat’s violin solo (!!!!!!), he tries, in a rage, to bite him, and instead gets slapped back by… what, exactly? The majesty of the song going somewhere unexpected? The rawness of his own feelings? I’m not a thousand percent sold on his sudden onstage moment of transformation, or the revelation that he was the one holding the band back. In concept, yes: if it’s a band, not a frontman with a backing group of paid players, it has to be a band. But nothing changes except that Lestat tries to bite one of them. The song remains the song. (The best of the songs, to be fair.)
Our unreliable narrator feels extra unreliable here, when the muses come out. And he’s not even drugged to the gills yet. Lestat, Lestat, Lestat. I will take a million of his bad choices when they lead to scenes like the one in which Daniel and Dee are using blood and cocaine to revive drained Baby Jenks (Ella Ballentine), who meanwhile is floating on the ceiling, Trainspotting baby style, telling Lestat all kinds of things she could not possibly know. Why is Lestat so sad? Why does he keep coin-op dryering himself? And why is Daniel going to die badly?
When Lestat is on drugs he is especially incoherent, leaping around in time (the narrative voice that announces which of his 111 albums you’re listening to skips attentively with him). Puking blood in a motel toilet. Dressed to the nines in a pink corseted suit for the fancy hotel opening. Face melting. Pissing in eco-friendly urinals and making the locals mad. (I quite liked Rus. They were right about “Long Face.” Even Lestat said so.) Sex in the elevator, with bonus tangent about where sex ranks on the things that vampires enjoy (fourth place, no trophy). He keeps talking about the queen’s blood (we are very clearly setting up Queen of the Damned, which feels like it’s going to creep into this season for sure). He gets disrespectful about pronouns when he’s mad. He is very into all the things about the body, about the physiology of vampires, that Louis, so tasteful, left out.
This—when he’s high as a kite and peeing and fucking—is when he gets the most overt about what Louis got wrong and elided. The writing in this episode is dizzying, poetic, dense, cramming things in one on top of another, like Lestat wants to change the record through sheer overwhelm. He talks about the wolves he fought as a youth, and how for a time he let that define him, while fighting the Tooth Team in the hallway. (The way he snarls at their outdated vampire biases, like he’s stuck at dinner with a homophobic uncle!) He tosses off some lines about how he probably owes Daniel his life for that hallway save and a bit about how probably a bunch of other people wouldn’t be dead if he’d died then. He never stops talking. Where Louis was measured and cautious, trying to control the narrative, Lestat just goes. He’s a wind-up toy of emotional damage.
And some physical damage, too. The hallway fight is great. There is a body stuck in the ceiling by the end of it. I do want to know about the cleanup, though. Lestat rolls back into the party, murders Tim, reveals his nature once and for all to his previously skeptical bandmates, and flies out the window while muttering about how gods hang out in the clouds alone. There are a LOT of bodies back in that hallway. These vampires don’t conveniently turn to dust like they did on Buffy. Did Daniel have to deal with them? Does the vampire themed hotel also have a handy incinerator?
I know these are not important questions. I know I’m supposed to be left gasping at the Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle) reveal. This is where my recent reread of the book is a detriment: I love book Gabrielle, who wants to fuck off to the wild places of the world and basically ignore the world of men (one of the texts Lestat gets hints at this). I am not sold on Ehle’s wig and I am not sold on focusing on this part of her character rather than her immediate embrace of trousers and freedom.
But! It’s just an introduction. And showrunner Rolin Jones—who co-wrote this episode with Hannah Moscovitch—has, by the end, pulled off something astonishing: When Lestat crawls across the bed and kisses his “fledgling, lover, mother,” it’s just one more moment of excess. One more variety of physical chaos; one more item on the long list of ways Lestat has used, discussed, abused, enjoyed, overshared with, his physical being in this episode. The physical excess is everywhere: OD’ing on drugs and blood; the bassist getting a blowjob in the middle of the backstage space; Daniel drinking from Dee; the long, long scene of vampire pissing. Of course Lestat gives out full-size candy bars for Halloween. If you’re going to do it, do it. And if you have an immortal body, you get to do it—whatever version of “it” floats your boat—more, harder, louder, longer. (Or not that long, in the case of the elevator. But he was on a lot of drugs.)
Rock is where you go to do excess. It’s where you go when you admire icons like Bowie and Prince and Freddie Mercury. It’s a welcoming place when you want to join a long and storied and occasionally dubious tradition of songs that are just elaborate metaphors for sex (“Black Licorice” is going on that playlist along with “Little Red Corvette” and Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” among ever so many others).
In the early pages of The Vampire Lestat, Lestat says:
I was enchanted by the world of rock music—the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels or devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I don’t think the world of ages past had ever seen.
He also compares it to the Italian commedia. He compares it to a lot of things. Lestat has been a performer for centuries (though sure, yes, he spent one of those literally underground. Or so he says). He’s a theater kid who is also a vampire. Honestly I don’t think he could do anything but rock. (That doesn’t mean he’s doing it well.)
I have a million more thoughts on this—sorry not sorry, but you got as your Lestat reviewer the last unembarrassed rock-enjoyer on the internet, apparently—but I’m trying to stop myself from doing too much theorizing until I see more of what the mad geniuses behind this show are doing here. “Detroit” is a new paradigm, a new narrator, a new everything. It takes the beautiful, perfect two seasons of Interview with the Vampire and tosses them up into the air to scatter like cocaine-laced glitter. It’s carnal and lush and overtly destructive. This is what a quarter-millenium crisis looks like.
LITTLE SIPS
- CORVALLIS. I am deceased that he got sloppy in Corvallis. Corvallis is a town in Oregon of about sixty thousand people. Corvallis is in between Portland (where a lot of bands play) and Eugene (where a decent number of bands play). Corvallis is not a place where a lot of bands play. Someone on this writing staff has been to Corvallis.
- The way Sam Reid as Lestat pronounced Red-DEET just sent me.
- I was quite charmed to find that Joey Chestnut is in fact a real competitive eater.
- As a fan of the Scottish band Idlewild I was intrigued by the many posters for “Idyllwild.”
- Lestat noting that there are “no witches” in Montreal made my ears prick right up.
- VAMPONS
- Really feel like that was entirely too casual a response to the entire city of Detroit going dark.
- You absolutely know that Lestat calls Daniel “Dan” to annoy him.
- “And yet it’s respectful, like silence at a urinal.”
- “I am building a career that supports my well-being.”
- If the Talamasca put Sam (Christopher Geary) at the Theatre des Vampires, and then he wrote that terrible play for Santiago—were the Talamasca involved in trying to overthrow Armand? I know that show got cancelled but I feel like I really need to go back and watch it.
FYI, rock is big again with the kids.