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\u201cIf you\u2019re still listening\u201d (reading) \u201cafter the Oedipiphany of the last hour\u201d (episode) \u201cwelcome back.\u201d Oedipiphany! More than the domestic abuse and the murder and the incest, puns like these are what make Lestat a bad person. At least it reminded me of Lesley Manville\u2019s Tony win for Oedipus, which reminds me that the Tonys were last week<\/a>. If you haven\u2019t seen Ali Louis Bourzgui\u2019s beautiful acceptance speech for The Lost Boys, it is a beautiful (and coherent!) companion piece to whatever it is that\u2019s happening here in Lestatland. Please humor me as I quote at length: \u201cSometimes, humanity needs a fantastical lens outside of ourselves to look at and explore questions about our own nature. Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a nonexistent sense of superiority. The billionaires will never find happiness from their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal. The fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not in this lifetime or eternity.\u201d As this season moves forward and we stare down the existential threat of the Great Conversion, I\u2019ll be keeping Bourzgui\u2019s speech in mind and hoping that Rolin and Hannah can fit him into the AMC Immortal Universe somehow.<\/p>\n But back to Lestat de Lioncourt\u2019s \u201cFreudian storms,\u201d in which \u201cthe boat is a penis,\u201d the ocean is his \u201cmom\u2019s vagina,\u201d and the viewer is a dolphin choking on plastic. We\u2019re back in 1772, when Lestat was a tow-headed lad with a stutter and a Tony<\/a> McNamaran<\/a> nightmare of a family. His father and brothers are anti-intellectual bullies letting their aristocratic hold go to rot, and his mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), is an Italian noblewoman who is sort of like if Belle from Beauty and the Beast was a huge bitch \u2014 nose always in a book, trapped in a castle in a poor provincial town, and a heart full of hate towards her family, her life, and France in general. Gabriella has zero maternal instincts, but still has an affinity towards her youngest son, not as a mother, but as a fellow human with a philosopher\u2019s soul, stranded amongst the \u201ccabbages\u201d (derogatory, even though in French, cabbage \u2014 chou \u2014 is a term of endearment.) I\u2019m sure the two of them use the \u201cnot as a mother\u201d excuse a lot to justify their extrafamilial relations \u2014 she never felt like his mom, your honor! \u2014 but for now, we see the seeds of Lestat\u2019s superiority complex as a defense mechanism for sensitivity take root. As a teen, Lestat briefly runs away and joins up with a traveling theatre troupe, which is the closest thing in the late 1700s to coming out. It\u2019s an act of artistic defiance that Gabriella respects but that infuriates the others, so his dad, the Marquis, commands his older sons to break Lestat\u2019s legs and curses him. As his brother chokes him out, he reaches out to his mother and admires her cold beauty; both froid and Freud.<\/p>\n I would have loved to have actually seen young Lestat amongst the players, discovering his love of performance. We know that this chapter in his life was very important to him \u2014 he brings up Lelio the way Gus the Theatre Cat brings up Firefrorefiddle the Fiend of the Fell<\/a>. But we move along to young-man Lestat, playing with his gun at the dinner table while a mob of angry, unwashed villagers begs the Marquis to do something about the wolves eating their livestock. Gabriella insists that her family \u201cbe men,\u201d so Lestat storms out to take on the wolves single-handedly. He hates his stupid, chungus life anyway, so he may as well get torn apart by wolves and, in death, finally capture mommy\u2019s attention. AMC does not have a pack of wolves budget, but I find this sequence artfully shot, Lestat looking very Barry Lyndon out there in the wildflowers with his blunderbuss, his mastiff mauled, and his horse AWOL.<\/p>\n Lestat somehow makes it back home, where he doesn\u2019t want food or care, only mommy, who I have to pause and say is doing the funniest accent work ever. \u201cYou-a keeled feyyve woulfs,\u201d she says, Europeanly. \u201cEight,\u201d he says, crying over his dead dog. He describes an Oedipal fantasy of teaming up with Gabriella and killing off his father and brothers. Gabriella is horny for how Lestat\u2019s heroism emasculated her husband and other sons, so she fingers Lestat\u2019s gaping wounds and slips a hand down his pants while recounting her sexual fantasies: \u201cI\u2019m-a dreenking wine, so druhnk, I streep off-a my clawthes and baythe in the mountain streeeeeeam, naked. I go eento the village, eento the inn, and I taik into bed any man that comes. Crrrrude men, biiiig men, old men, boys \u2026\u201d she goes on like this, trilling some words, pausing at others, making charged eye contact with a crying, dying, confused, and lovestruck Lestat. The fantasy thrills her because in it, she is free, belonging to no one. \u201cExcept for me?\u201d Lestat says, hopeful, looking at her as a newborn would, which makes her withdraw completely. She coughs, says she\u2019s dying, and that she won\u2019t survive the winter, and then abruptly leaves the room. A scene like this is everything that is twisted and unique about IWTV; it is psychosexually fucked up and operatic, and offering camp in one hand and heartbreak in the other. This scene, more than the eight wolves, is Lestat\u2019s foundational trauma. He reaches out for care and love from his mom, but she has no love to give and can only offer attention in the form of something inappropriate, grooming, and incestuous. These different types of intimacy become tied up for Lestat; they are a monster origin story for him, explaining why he responds so violently to abandonment.<\/p>\n These memories of his brief, sad human life are uneasy dreams that Lestat wakes from on his tour bus as the sun sets over the road to Toledo. His mother, now going by \u201cSophia,\u201d brought him back to his band the other night. The band is still freaking out over the revelation that their \u201cvampire\u201d frontman is an actual vampire, but Lestat is just chuffed that his mother \u201ccame a great distance to comfort me\u201d \u2014 the poor baby is completely unaware that she so clearly is up to some sort of ulterior scheme \u2014 and in voiceover he tells the audience that we are \u201cbeing very patient regarding the vampire incest factor, and I do appreciate it.\u201d How are we feeling about these sorts of on-the-nose script\/narration beats? Do we like? I\u2019m undecided.<\/p>\n The theme song drops a full 13 minutes into the episode (love when that happens), and then the band continues to bombard Lestat with questions about vampire logic. It turns out that modern vampires get their blood from somewhere called \u201cthe farm,\u201d that they have been a part of the \u201cecological landscape\u201d for thousands of years, that the band is committing vampire sacrilege by exposing vamp-secrets, but that it\u2019s \u201cnot to worry, I have the blood of Akasha in me,\u201d (said in a very French blas\u00e9 tone. It is my favorite sentence to hear Lestat say) prompting Larry (Schitt\u2019s Creek guy) to go \u201calright, what the fuck is a kasha?\u201d Alex wants to call the cops or quit the band because there is nothing less straight edge than drinking human blood, so he leaves the bus, and Lestat tells him telepathically that if he blabs about any of this, he\u2019ll kill his brother.<\/p>\n In narration, Lestat distinguishes between his mother and his fledgling, \u201cThe Vampress Gabriella,\u201d as though they are two different people, a coping mechanism that Gabriella tramples over when she says, \u201cMy maker called for his mama, and I came \u2026 and came \u2026 and came.\u201d Lestat wants his mom to stay near him, but couching his boundaries in flirtation, would like it to be \u201ccompanionship without the \u2018cum\u2019.\u201d He wants to know how long she\u2019s going to stay, because \u201cI only saw you two times last century, it\u2019s not an unreasonable question.\u201d She doesn\u2019t give a straight answer, and then they fly to a Toledo strip club called Chubbs to suck off a businessman. While his lover-mother catches ping-pong balls shot out of [redacted], Lestat fields a phone call from lawyer Christine, who says that she is whoring him out tomorrow night to do sexual favors for Thomas Pitt, the owner of the hotel that he trashed. Mother-fledgling and son-maker listen to their prey having sex in a motel while she drinks blood from his neck in a manner that barely commits to their recently-established no-shtup clause.<\/p>\n The next night, Lestat and his lawyer meet at a negotiating table with Thomas Pitt and his lawyer, only \u201cThomas Pitt\u201d is an alias for Louis, and his lawyer Lemuel is a sexy vampire that he\u2019s sleeping with. Just like in the last episode<\/a>, when Daniel said he heard that Lestat requested him personally to film his tour doc, now Louis\u2019s lawyer is saying that Lestat is the one who called this meeting. You gotta love how he acts like he\u2019s been dragged into situations that he himself sets up. He feels emotionally ambushed, and what plays out is as if Marriage Story were an absolute chucklefest, as Lestat gets increasingly worked up and jealous over Louis\u2019s relationships with other men. Lestat learns that Louis owns a 45 percent stake in his tour merchandise; if Louis is getting a huge cut from Lestat writhing around topless onstage, and Louis literally used to be a pimp, does that make Lestat Louis\u2019s unknowing whore? Can this literal motherfucker catch a break? At the concert in Toledo, Lestat flies up to the front row mezz seats and shoves his heavily annotated copy of Interview with the Vampire into Louis\u2019s lap; it\u2019s covered in more pink highlighter than Chappell Roan.<\/p>\n After the show, Daniel and Louis meet at a hotel bar. Lestat explains in voiceover that even for scenes where he wasn\u2019t present, he\u2019ll be depicting them, \u201cbecause it\u2019s my hour, and when tertiary figures appear in it, I will speak for them.\u201d All so he can tell the story of \u201chow I woke the queen and unleashed her wrath upon the world,\u201d and I don\u2019t think he\u2019s referring to dragging Louis\u2019s grumpy ass to Toledo. \u201cI am everywhere,\u201d says Lestat-as-omniscient-narrator for the purposes of this season of television, and he insists that his way of telling spooky vampire tales comes with \u201ca lot less whining,\u201d which already feels blatantly false. He admits to fabricating the bar where the scene we\u2019re watching takes place. I know he just nonchalantly snuck in a teaser about how by the end of the season he will wake Akasha and cause an apocalypse, but I\u2019m more interested in the way this show continues to do historicity and truth-bending. You know that voice that pipes in a few times an episode ahead of Lestat\u2019s narration, and goes, \u201cYou are listening to \u2018The Failures, Album X, Side X?\u2019 That\u2019s filmmaker Guy Maddin, director of My Winnipeg, one of the greatest works of Canadian filmmaking about the blurring of autobiographical truth and lies, and mythmaking, and imperfections of memory, and how these flaws are all inherent to filmmaking (see also: Sarah Polley\u2019s Stories We Tell<\/a>, Nathan Fielder\u2019s The Rehearsal<\/a>, Sophy Romvari\u2019s Blue Heron<\/a>, Matt Johnson\u2019s whole deal<\/a>.) This season is filmed in Toronto, and it\u2019s awesome to see some local influence seep in and complement this theme of the show so well. Southern Ontario is, famously, where the vampires hang out<\/a>.<\/p>\n Louis and Daniel\u2019s first face-off since Daniel went ahead and published Louis\u2019s burn book is less explosive than I would have wanted; Louis says he and Lestat had been \u201cfinding our way back again when the book dropped,\u201d and Daniel confesses that he has zero cool vampire powers, only a vampire curse where the world drops away and he senses Armand. Babe, that\u2019s not a power, that\u2019s a crush. Things take a turn for the fun when rambunctious ragamuffin Raglan James pops up out of nowhere like Gene Parmesan (anyone can be Gene Parmesan if you scream with enough delight for him<\/a>), and he\u2019s brought Real Rashid with him; Real Rashid was a Talamasca agent the whole time! Seeing as Louis massacred a whole vampire theater troupe in Paris and took out 31 vamps in Dubai, the Talamasca wants him to help them take out a troublesome Detroit vamp cluster led by a guy named Killa, who once went by Bruce; he\u2019s the biker vamp who assaulted Claudia in season one, so Louis the Vampire Slayer is activated.<\/p>\n Across town, Lestat\u2019s on a dinner date at a checkered tablecloth Italian joint with his Mamma Mia, having eaten the diners and waitstaff like a regular rabid Cujo<\/a> and the Tramp<\/a>. He serenades her on piano with one of his Baudelaire songs, and she\u2019s a bit salty about his French. \u201cYour father\u2019s tongue,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cMy tongue,\u201d he asserts. We see flashes of memories: of his turning her into a vampire on her deathbed, and the two of them fulfilling his fantasy of killing his father and brothers, her own sons, set to him singing the words to \u201cLa Fontaine de Sang\u201d (\u201cThe Fountain of Blood.\u201d) Like the other flashbacks this episode, it would have been nice to see these scenes play out in full, but this is how memories come to Lestat, unbidden and jarring. He tries to justify, in voiceover, his situation with his mother, with something about how Noah and his family on the ark propagated all of mankind. He can\u2019t even justify it to himself, not really. \u201cFuck it. It\u2019s different for vampires. That\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Thank you so kindly for sharing your thoughts in the recaps! I appreciate you all pointing out that Louis\u2019s foot or part of his leg is straight up gone at the auction. Not only is the screener site dark, but there aren\u2019t subtitles either, so everything I\u2019m picking up on is based on pure vampire-hearing. I thought her name was Baby Jinx!<\/p>\n