the failures of iwtv (2022) — an outline
editor's note: this was directly after s1. my ass is never getting around to a full amc's interview with the vampire review, as much as i wanna dissect exactly why i disliked it. once again, my full thoughts in chronological order and in real time, are on tumblr.
here's some points of failure imo, things that i'd want to expand upon if i were to actually write this review thing. full spoilers obviously but not detailed plus the book has been out for forty years
- ~150 pages of book being stretched into ~6 hours of television
- the timeline being extremely compressed
- claudia being aged up to 14 while also being much younger (36 iirc) when killing lestat (because of the above)
- claudia's drama revolving around men (killing her boyfriend, being assaulted by another vampire, being threatened / forced to stay in new orleans by lestat)
- daniel molloy's presence being amplified, and him constantly psychoanalyzing louis in a very "the audience learned the term gaslighting from twitter" way
- the 1973 interview existing in-universe
- lestat hinting at his story and those who must be kept
- vampiric powers (flight and telepathy) being a lot more prominent (also inherited from tvl / qotd)
- their only onscreen sex scene being actually about louis and claudia telepathically planning lestat's murder
- and the lack of penis
- lestat's survival being entirely explained as soon as he is killed
- lestat's survival being made to look like louis' intention — although i could give it a pass
- antoinette — both in general and her replacing the musician
- rashid / armand (not elaborating, it was just weird to have it there as a plot twist)
the thing is, none of this really explains the aura. the missing je ne sais quois that makes this adaptation unsexy. i guess it's like that thing they say about porn, you know it when you see it? the first episode was successful and sexy, because there was seduction. i said it before, it's like once louis and lestat were safely in a relationship, they stopped caring about depicting it, whereas the book and 1994 movie kept homoerotic tension throughout. and i don't mean that subtext is always sexier than text, just that ambiguity has some intrinsic tension.
it's unsexy because the first episode shows passion and ass and then they don't fuck in that coffin.