AMC's Interview with the Vampire is a Postcolonial adaption

[angrybubbles]

So idk if I've ever like, functionally stated it, but one of the reasons the AMC IwtV adaption differs from the book so much is because Rolin and Hannah turned to the text and filtered it through a post-colonial lense.

Which, if you're not in academia, is a theory that started getting popular in the 1990s in the academic field because it asks questions about the marginalized characters in a text. Why are they depicted the way they are? Do they have rich inner lives? The margins are going to be identified with a whole bunch of other critical theories, like critical race theory, feminist theory, marxist theory, new Historical theory, ect, and utilize them as tools to challenge the assumptions the original text makes.

Why are Louis and Claudia Black? Because when you look into the margins of the story, you repeatedly see Black characters suffering at the hands of the white masters who own their bodies. Including -and especially- the owners of Lestat and Louis. However as book!Louis goes through the... interesting character arc of finding similarities between him and the slaves he owns, he uses that to frame his own relationship with Lestat.

AMC just decided to take this and close the gap. Instead of a slave owner finding comeraderie with the slaves he will continue to own and consume, the adaption made him (and Claudia) Black to really hammer home that message. It's not interperative anymore, they're saying it outright. The power inequality of the maker/fledgling relationship is one that will put those who are in more intersecting margins at risk.

This post-colonial lense also is why Claudia's arc is changed. In the book, it is positioned that her death is inevitable. The grief Louis goes through is Anne's own. However, that is now how Show!Claudia's death is framed. Show!Claudia is a victim of a system that feeds its own narrative of inevitability. Show!Claudia was let down by the men in power caught up in their own lives to change the system that led to her death. The only reason her death could be seen as "inevitable" is because of inaction. But actions could have been taken to resist by every Character.

Anne Rice's TVC tends to let us sit in inevitability. The philosophical exchanges of the characters allow them to consider what has happened. They are ghosts in the world, they can only drift with thoughts and musings, and feel the pain of feeding whenever they cause each other harm.

AMC uses the post-colonial lense to challenge that inevitability. The characters are suffering for actions they chose NOT to take. The characters are challenged if they let themselves become ghosts. The vampires are all victims of the circumstances of their turning - but that doesn't mean that they are without the ability to interact with the world. And there's complexities and contradictions in how someone who has been harmed in the margins has to seek power. There's intersections and systems at play to make struggles harder than others. There's time periods and historical contexts in which a vampire is made.

But AMC doesn't want us to say "oh well, the system happened, we can move on." Louis is angry and grieving over the violence that took Claudia. AMC is not letting her just be a dead daughter, she is the reason these systems need to be dismantled; or more Claudia's will be made, and suffer, and die. Only inaction lets that tragedy be inevitable- something has to change. Something has to burn.

TVC is all about inaction. AMC is challenging that notion.