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kutputli · 5 months ago

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Claudia, continued

So - Claudia as abuse survivor.

Everyone agrees that Lestat was textbook abusive parent to her right? Right. No need to even discuss that. Her reasons to need to murder him to leave make perfect sense, and can, I think, be framed as survival. But she did choose to poison him, so it wasn't man-slaughter in self-defence.

Now, like I've said before, I'm not condemning her at all. Sometimes abuse survivors have to do what they have to do. It's a fact that when no fault divorce is made easier, the number of spousal homicides go down. The reason it matters though, is that not every abuse survivor reacts with externalised violence. And it certainly isn't the ideal reaction. It is a response that indicates the utter failure of every system around them.

It's important to me because Louis was also a victim of Lestat's abuse, and I do not agree that his inability to kill Lestat was a failure of his duty of care to Claudia. I understand why Claudia feels it is. I empathise with her sense of betrayal and resentment. Especially because he used an act of violence (grabbing her by the throat) to prevent her act of violence (incinerating Lestat). But I can feel immensly for her, without condemning Lous the way she might want me to. Quark said, "The main issue is that Louis can never meaningfully put Claudia first. I think one of the main things that made Claudia leave the first time in S1 was, in addition to Lestat's abuse, is Louis' passivity."

The thing with abuse is, it almost always fractures other relationships besides the ones the victims have with abusers. We lose friends, we lose siblings, we lose loved ones. Because everyone has their own standards for what is acceptable, and what is a betrayal, and there isn't one clear absolute answer. One person's "you didn't kill the person trying to kill me" is another person's "you tried to turn me into a murderer".

And here is where Claudia's youth and inexperience show up - this person has not really had any meaningful relationships as a human child. As a vampire, she was closed in with two parent figures and taught to go on hunting sprees. She has not lived long enough to know what regret feels like. Everything is NOW and INSISTANT and HUGE to her. Again, she is entitled to plot Lestat's murder (and what a bang up job she did with it. How anyone could argue that she does not have survival skills after the head game she played on Lestat is inexplicable). But Louis's instinct to soothe things over - let's just get out and go - is an equally valid reaction. He didn't want to murder Lestat out of vengeance, he just wanted to get him out of their way so they could escape. And maybe he felt that later on Claudia might regret it. (It's safe to say that she would not.)

So inasmuch as Louis is able to put anyone first, I think he does put Claudia first. But his own survival instincts limit the choices that he sees available to him. (Sidenote: there's a book that depicts this dynamic between wife and children of an abuser really beautifully - Split by Swati Avasthi.)

However, Quark made some excellent points about season 2:

"Louis treats her interchangeably as his sister or his daughter depending on what suits him. She is a child who needs to be protected from the truth of the coven and the knowledge that Armand knows about Lestat. ("You were happy. I didn't want to ruin that.") But she is an adult who needs to handle her own problems. ("Go sit in your choice sister."). This happens in the same conversation, btw! Also him not believing her when she tells him Armand threatened her? "Doesn't sound like him". Bro! He tried to kill you an episode ago. Please be serious!"

I straight up forgot about him not believing her about Armand. I need to rewatch, even though I sort of don't want to because the weight of that lynching scene just covers the entire season in retrospective smog.

Which is why I wish we could have seen their goodbye when Claudia and Madeline left, instead of hearing it reported to Armand.

And why the cafe dinner scene was so beautiful and so heartbreaking. This was what they could have been, all four of them, sharing affection, basking in the love each had for the other.

Right up till the end, Claudia keeps reminding Louis that Lestat is, in fact, an unforgiveable abuser. I just wish she had had time to come to terms with the way that Louis chose to deal with him. I think that with time, she would have been able to reconcile their differences.

But of course, instead, we get the lynching.

How any viewer thinks they can move past that I do not know. I am aware people watch TV for many reasons, and sometimes just want to watch villians chewing scenery. But that was a fucking lynching.

And it was racialised - and that is the reason why Claudia's last threat was to the audience, not to the coven. Logically, she should have concentrated all her hatred for the vampires, because they were the ones knowingly murdering her, and who knew her and had befriended her. (That's why Louis killed them in vengeance, and not all of theatre-going Paris.)

But Claudia had to deal with the hypervisibility of being a Black actor in what was a near Minstrel show, and face the white French audience's commodified objectification of hers night after night. And then she had to watch how they pivoted, on a dime, to gleefully cheering on her lynching. Claudia understood the rules of the vampires, she had tried to respect them, she knew the consequences, she knew why Santiago and co were trying to kill her.

But this was the first time that Claudia had to deal with the nature of white supremacy, who would sit there and smugly forgive an adult man for abusing his child, but would not extend any forgiveness to the child they had entertained themselves with night after night.

Claudia already knew intimate abuse. But this was the first time she was faced with not micro, but the macro aggression of the human world. And all she could do was hold on to the one person who chose to die with her, and sing a fuck you to everyone.

It's ludicrous - the idea that her death was inevitable, when she fought with so much dignity and when she was so perceptive, and so grounded.

oh, Claudia, oh, my dear girl. The injustice to you in unforgiveable.

It's been two days since I finished watching Interview with the Vampire, and the show has been consuming all my brain space. I didn't have the energy to live blog each episode of season 2, but I want to get my reactions down, before I go in search of reading other people's. This will be a haphazard collection of thoughts, so I think what I will do is start talking character by character and see if that helps me organise things any.

Louis

This one is the beating heart of the show, and I don't see how it would have worked if they had not made him a Black man. Everything stems from what he learned during his life of how to survive and thrive and yet remain kind and compassionate, and watching him be fragile and loving and grieving is soul stirring. Perhaps other people might still have found the show engaging with the role played by a white character (given fandom's embrace of the slave owning pirates in Our Flag Means Death, I am sure a slave owning Louis would not have been an insurmountable problem).

But this story belongs to the Black Louis, and to what Jacob Anderson made of him. Just impeccable acting choices, all down the line. I am mesmerised by him.

Praise for the character aside, he is the moral heart of the show. (I know there is a case to be made for Claudia, but I will get to her after this.) I don't actually much enjoy villains presented as anti-heroes, and Louis engenders so much empathy in a show filled with rather awful people.

Of course, he loves Claudia. And I do see him putting her first to the best of his ability. Claudia may be entitled to her resentment, but that doesn't make it rational fact. Louis encouraging her to leave the first time, knowing that Lestat would follow him if he left, that's a valid choice. And then choosing not to burn Lestat... I am reminded of how few victims of domestic abuse actually murder their abusers. The main desire is always to get away. I don't condemn Louis for choosing to not kill his lover.

Claudia had no roots laid down in New Orleans, but Louis did, and he gave all of that up to support her really rather nonsensical search for mystical vampires who were not as awful as Lestat. He helped her join the coven even if he could see it was a cult. And when she introduced him to Madeline, he listened to her. He turned her for Claudia. I don't ever see a moment where he stopped actively caring for her and doing the labour to prove it. I took the line about her being a burden as fully just transparent bait for Armand.

And when Lestat shows up at the trial, its Claudia that Louis is focussed on. He Always. Puts. Her. First.

The way that Louis finds his way into a relationship with Armand is so heartbreakingly soft. We never see them in their intimate moments as dom and sub, but I get the sense that he would be a tender lover -what he wants is to be respected, to have control.

And then we come to the post-trial choices.

I can somewhat buy him sparing Armand's life during his vengeance murder spree, because it wasn't just that Armand said he had saved him during the trial - if you remember, Armand was only encouraging him to leave Paris. Louis was the one who asked. But also, Armand was the one who let him out of the coffin. He did save Louis, and Louis would have tasted the blood of the person who saved him and known it was him.

I think maybe Louis was able to get over Armand facilitating Claudia's murder, because he saw him as a victim paralysed in the same way that he himself had been. Louis knows about having to keep his head down and be complicit with an oppressive system, and I think he offered the benefit of the doubt to Armand because of that. Perhaps also - Louis forgave Claudia for attempting to murder Lestat because he could see her desparation and why she needed to do it. Maybe Louis created a story for himself where Armand was similarly trapped. I don't know. To me, his choice of staying with Armand is the one I am the most questioning of.

(All of this is presupposing that what we saw was what actually happened. There are indications that there is yet another layer to the trial that we don't know about, and because Louis wasn't there as primary witness for the end, maybe some new facts will emerge to make Armand either more sympathetic, or more manipulative.)

Louis's relationship with Daniel is endearing and charming and all things adorable. I hope they whatsapp each other often and have some uncomplicated relaxing stress-relieving sex.

As for Louis and Lestat... see, I was ok with what I saw on the screen. I saw an abuse survivor leave his second marriage the instant he found out he had been lied to, and I saw him visit the parent of his child for closure. Taking on the burden of Claudia's death is nonsense, of course, but it was believeable nonsense. In that I accept that Louis, after having learned that Lestat did lift a finger to partially save his life, spilled out from all his generosity and love, what he thought might help the wretched ex he saw eating on rats and playing on a plank.

But what I am not ok with, what repulses me to the core, is the apparent conviction of the show producers that Louis and Lestat are destined to return to each other, as the great love of each other's lives. It is true that some domestic abuse survivors never manage to completely free themselves from their abuser, and some spouses continue to stay with the abuser of their child (Alice Munro, looking at you). But that storyline is a horror story. Nothing in the framing of the show indicates that horror. And I do not wish for a season 3 that walks down that road.

#claudia de pointe du lac #interview with the vampire #my meta

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