My beautiful repressed princess Louis de Pointe du Lac
Another gay vampire show has ruined my life. RIP here lies my sanity
That’s right. The relentlessly persuasive PR machine known as my tumblr mutuals has done it again. For months, I’d managed to stay strong and ignore the seductive pull of the sensual gay vampire gifs that my beloved mutuals threw my way. But alas, it appears my strength has finally failed me.
Interview with the Vampire well and truly earned my full and undivided attention in the very first episode when Louis de Pointe du Lac, emo boy extraordinaire and love of my life, is screaming and crying about the devil (and being gay) in a catholic confession box. I would like to take a moment to thank Jacob Anderson for his service as well as his hauntingly beautiful face. Dare I say performance of a lifetime. I am now insane because of this.
I feel like you can tell a lot about a person’s psychological problems by who their favourite evil vampire in this show is and how they interpret them. Which is another way to say that I am about to completely expose myself. I went on a bit of a mad one, falling down the abysses of tumblr and traversing the hostile lands of entertainment industry publications asking actors really boring questions. My mission: understanding Louis de Pointe du Lac and why he’s my favourite evil vampire. Disclaimer that this is my personal reading of Louis, there are enough layers and complexities to him that offer room for differing interpretations. Part of why he’s so compelling is that he does not make himself obvious to the viewer.
The cool thing about Louis is that he's complex. He's not one thing or another. Characters like that reveal things to you slowly, both about yourself and about people. There are things I thought about Louis in the beginning that have completely changed now.
Part I - Louis wants to eat the world
Are you even a Louis girl if you don’t have a weird guilt complex about your own rage and bloodlust? Louis obviously struggles with self-acceptance and feels some sort of fundamental shame for existing. He’s a repressed homosexual wrecked with catholic guilt and the trauma of oppression. His response to trauma seems to be this unholy concoction of violently repressing parts of himself through shame and guilt, and then completely losing control when this repressed rage comes back to haunt him. To me he reads as someone who has a very aggressively vindictive response to being threatened, who can go very low when trying to hurt someone who has wronged him, but who cannot reconcile this reality with his own need to see himself as a good person.
I think that Louis’ state of mind is perfectly summed up by what Lestat says to him after the confession scene and right before he turns him into a vampire. All these roles you conform to, and none of them your true nature. What rage you must feel as you choke on your sorrow. In this episode, we learn that Louis is severely constrained by the social roles he is required to perform to survive. He struggles to feel comfortable in his role as male breadwinner, as both the assertive and deferential businessman in an extremely hostile environment, as a role model of heteromasculinity to his family. He carries so much shame from his own perceived inadequacy that he probably believes himself to be fundamentally unlovable, nevermind the fact that he doesn’t even know who he truly is in the first place, since his current social circumstances do not allow him to explore this. It’s Lestat who offers him a way out of this cage by turning him into a vampire and offering his unconditional love.
Lestat, for all of his considerable faults, is the person who genuinely loves Louis as he is. He turns Louis into a vampire because he wants to give him the freedom to embrace his own nature. But Louis at that point has such a fractured sense of identity that he’s unable to truly accept what Lestat is offering him, both in the form of self-acceptance and unconditional love. Louis clearly struggles to be unapologetically gay, and he struggles to be a “good” vampire because he carries so much guilt. Louis’ rejection of vampirism is a manifestation of his own repressed desires. He is terrified of his own desires - his desire for men, for blood, for power, for revenge, for love.
[Jacob] My feeling about Louis is that he is the most vampire of all of them. He has the highest drive and jonesing for blood, I think he really wants blood, I think he hates human beings. Everything he says he is, I think he is the opposite. [...] I think he feels the need to overcompensate for a really deep blood lust, and he really wants to be a vampire. [...] He's the reticent vampire because he is reticent to embrace what he is.
[Sam] Until he isn’t.- Interview with Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid, In Creative Company
Lestat (or more accurately Louis’ flawed memory of Lestat), on the other hand, fully takes pride in what he is and enjoys it, and that joyful display of vampiric cruelty reflects Louis’ own self-hatred back at him. He loathes Lestat’s extravagant murders not because of his own honourable moral compass (although that’s certainly what he tells himself), but because it reminds him of his own desires. You know, the ones he is so debilitatingly afraid of that he constructs an elaborate system of lies around his identity to protect himself from that contradiction. And of course he is so afraid of his monstrous instincts when his own mother sees the devil in him and accused him of causing his brother’s suicide. His need to see himself as Good is directly related to his very catholic mother seeing literal Evil in him.
Lestat is so disgusted with Louis snacking on cats and rats because to Lestat, this is the height of Louis’ self-denial, and also the source of his weird sense of moral superiority over Lestat. And Lestat, out of all people, knows exactly what Louis is capable of. He chose him as a companion after watching him pull a knife on his own brother, after all. Lestat sees Louis’ violent impulsive side, and desperately wants him to embrace it. To him, hunting and killing together is a sort of love language, and Louis not only rejecting this but actively condemning it amounts to a sort of betrayal to Lestat. Especially because he knows that at the core of him, Louis wants to eat the fucking world.
#and he doesn't avoid human blood cause he doesn't want it but because he wants it so bad it scares him
Part II - the repressed has a way of returning
When I first watched the show, it was really Louis’ manic moments of rage and viciousness that made me fall in love with him. I guess I’m very Lestat-coded in that sense. But I like to read these moments through the Gothic trope of haunting and eruption. When something is hidden or concealed for a long time, it has a tendency to return with a vengeance. In Gothic stories, the repressed often returns as a haunting, or as an uncontrollable destructive force.
In season 1, after years of enduring racist abuse, Louis kills Alderman Fenwick in a moment of unrestrained revenge in the very same episode where he tells Lestat he doesn’t want to kill people anymore. He takes a sadistic joy in that murder, smiles when the blood splatters on his face, and artfully disfigures Fenwick’s body to put it on display for the entire town to see. He kills with the same animalistic instinct as when he jumped that white guy who condescendingly told him he did a good job, an incident that Lestat woefully misunderstands because he is dismissive of Louis’ traumatic experiences of oppression and abuse by a racist society.
But it makes perfect sense that Louis has these moments where he just snaps. After all, for most of his life he was forced to play nice even as everyone around him condescended and dismissed him, because the consequences of him breaking out of his role would have been severe. Even when he becomes a vampire, his revenge killing of Fenwick incites a race riot, and the guilt this causes is so unbearable to Louis that he asks Lestat to turn Claudia into a vampire in an attempt to absolve himself from it.
#louis aren't you tired of being nice all the time... don't you just wanna go apeshit..
Louis is so alienated from his own desires because for most of his pre-vampiric life, he had to be in order to survive. When the slightest show of defiance can get you beaten up, you repress your desire for power. When being gay can get you ostracised from your community and everything you know, you repress your desire for love. And when you constantly have to restrain your own nature in order to survive, you become terrified of who you actually are. What if there’s something monstrous inside of you that could explode at any moment? What if you’re deeply afraid of your own capacity for evil as a result of what has been done to you? And what if all of this comes back to haunt you forever unless you learn to look it in the eye?
#I LOVE LOUIS MY LITTLE REPRESSED FREAK 🥰
When Louis burns down the theatre to avenge Claudia’s death, his body literally becomes possessed by rage. I was dead, but my rage had risen. And when all the rage had left my body, there was nothing left. Possession becomes the most invasive, all-consuming return of the repressed, to the point of losing yourself entirely. Rage is such a powerful emotion that you can completely surrender yourself to it and experience a loss of self that’s somehow both horrifying and freeing, repellent and desirable.
I think it’s that intense desire for the horrific that Louis struggles with most. He has this self-image of being the Ethical Vampire who’s oh so uncomfortable with killing people in cold blood, yet secretly this is exactly what he desires, and he’s very very good at it. He thinks he is so different from Lestat and Claudia, who kill without shame, but the only difference is that Claudia and Lestat kill deliberately and with a sense of agency, whereas Louis spends most of his time in self-denial until he completely loses it and starts eating people crazygirl style.
This is why Raglan James warns Daniel of Louis, not of Armand. Remember the 128 young men he fucked and killed in San Francisco because he couldn’t get over Claudia’s death and felt trapped in his relationship with Armand that he was literally in just to spite Lestat? He basically goes on killing sprees to cope. But he cannot allow himself to face that reality because it would destroy his carefully constructed self-image, an image he holds onto because he cannot live with himself otherwise. He cannot look at this part of himself and still believe himself to be deserving of love.
#literally hi louis my codependent apathetic withdrawing needy all consuming self rejecting king <3<3<3
Part III - wow you’re kinda mean (said with lust)
Now is an excellent time to talk about Louis inheriting his mum’s extreme hater spirit. His hater game is strong. He is incredibly petty and delightfully self-interested in a way that often makes him seem stand-offish and aloof (I say this with utmost affection). Someone made a beautiful compilation of moments where Louis is deliberately cruel to the people close to him. He has an excellent sense for how to hit people where it really hurts, and he makes use of it quite deliberately. He can be a real bitch and it makes me like him more. In fact, a lot of people seem to specifically like that side of Louis. I love it when he gets mean. It’s hot. It’s cathartic. When I say I love Louis because he’s kind of a cunt I mean that.
Some excellent tags on the aforementioned compilation:
#I love when he snaps a little #a splinter of coldness in him #I love it when he’s a bitch #louis is a bitch and i like him so much #you're awful i love you #it should worry me that when he's mean it's when i like him the most lmfao #for someone who struggled with the morality aspect of being a vampire louis sure does know how to go for the throat lol #i love when he’s evil!!!!#his evil smile at the end 💕💕🤗🫶(Also for the love of god watch this incredible Louis meangirl edit by @loust4t)
I wonder if part of our attraction to that side of him is that it gives him an interesting sense of agency. He is in an abusive relationship but he’s not passive, he fights back and relishes in it. When someone goes low he goes lower, when he’s backed into a corner he goes for the throat. It’s a type of agency that’s sort of “unclean”; it’s neither healthy nor rational behaviour, but that’s exactly what makes it so desirable. There’s a strength in him, an instinct for self-preservation despite his chronic suicidality, that often manifests as something toxic and destructive. But it’s a claim to life nevertheless.
I think we like Louis’ mean side so much because it allows us to engage with our own worst instincts. It’s a power fantasy in which you are allowed to act on your desire for things that we categorise as morally wrong without being dehumanised for it. This works so well with Louis because even at his worst petty vindictiveness, he is an incredibly sympathetic character. His rage is quite often righteous if not justified, it acts as a reclamation of power and agency. It also helps that Jacob Anderson radiates such an effortlessly charming aura that he manages to make Louis likeable even when he is cold and withdrawn and all-consuming and manic.
I think there is something about vampires living in the shadows, and living at night, and only being able to come out at night that speaks to the things that we hide about ourselves or the things that we are, I don’t know, that we’re ashamed of but they’re alluring and repelling at the same time. And I think there’s something very desirable about that, but there’s something very scary about it because there are things that you might be frightened of other people knowing about you or thinking about you.
I’m thinking of how stories about monsters are always stories about the Other. That’s why they’re so frequently associated with queerness, deviance and forbidden desire. But they can just as much be about the Other within ourselves. It’s about revealing the parts of ourselves we don’t want other people to see, the parts that are carefully guarded by shame. If we can love these terrible people, if we can love them when they are liars and murderers, we can examine some of this shame in ourselves. We all have desires for things that are alluring and repelling at the same time, things that we categorise as wrong - power, selfishness, revenge, self-destruction.
Louis is often portrayed as the most human vampire on the show. Maybe Louis is the most human vampire not because he’s reluctant to kill, but because he is so overcome by the very human instincts of revenge and righteous anger that it makes him the most dangerous vampire. It's his human lack of detachment that makes him an especially emotional killer. He represents the monstrous that resides within the human. If Lestat is the human within the monstrous, Louis is his perfectly fitting counterpart. Where Lestat is terrified of his human vulnerability, Louis is terrified of his monstrous desires, and he punishes himself for this by living in perpetual self-denial. Until he doesn’t.
Conclusion - what if it’s all a metaphor for the fucked up nature of existence??
What makes Interview with the Vampire truly stand out to me is that it asks us to sit with uncomfortable, conflicting feelings. It doesn’t shy away from depicting really messed up stuff and still not branding anyone as The Villain or the Good Guy. It respects its audience enough to trust us to handle ambiguity and incompleteness. People who try to moralise these characters scramble to fit the world into neat moral categories so they know who they’re allowed to love and who they’re required to hate. I believe that watching this show through a moral lens is boring and also misses the point. Stories about fucked up people are not a morality contest. These characters are interesting because they allow us to aesthetically appreciate and engage with the fundamental messed-up-ness of existence.
[Our] aesthetic sympathy for bad people is entirely compatible with morally condemning them. From an aesthetic perspective, we can curiously explore and be fascinated by evil, while also taking practical steps to minimise it wherever possible. Aesthetic value is distinct from moral value, and there will be times when one ought to act urgently rather than engage in aesthetic contemplation, but aesthetic and moral value are not mutually exclusive.- Tom Cochrane, Attuned to the aesthetic
Louis is so interesting to me because he struggles so much with the moral aspect of his existence. In this sense, he kind of acts as an audience surrogate, and it’s this aspect of his character that makes him intuitively sympathetic. Most people want to see themselves and the world as morally good. But the fact is that most people aren’t, and maybe that’s okay. Part of Louis’ eventual self-acceptance is coming to terms with the reality that he is a messed up vampire with decades of rage to process who is lusting for blood and maybe that’s okay. He starts to understand his vampiric nature, the part of himself that he has Othered, as something to be embraced. To me, it’s an act of accepting existence the way it is - fucked up, insane, imperfect, but somehow nevertheless worth it.
To finally conclude this madness: my genuine hope for season 3 Louis is that he has some real fun killing people while he’s in his self-actualisation single era. It’s called self-care. Go crazy babe.
