Photo: Larry Horricks/AMC
Fives, fives, fives (out of five) across the board! Encore! Bravo! Does it get better than vampire follies and foibles in Paris? Or fake vampires played by real vampires (who themselves are technically fake vampires played by real actors)? It’s not just that it’s fun or that the production department is really in its bag … but the good scribes of the IWTV writers’ tomb and its crew at large had a tonne métrique of world-building to do this episode, and they did it with panache. Allons-y.
We begin in post-war Paris with Claudia and Louis perched atop a big statue like the cats at the end of Cats. These vamps are not-not feline — it was Jacob Anderson’s idea to do “a cat sound” when he bares his fangs — so it tracks. In voiceover, he says he felt something close to happiness in Paris, which is good news, because I like to see my man smile, particularly after how dark the last episode was. Armand butts in the narration for the first time, politely at first, until Daniel also butts in, and soon, the three of them are bickering about the merits of Paris in voiceover. (Daniel Molloy finding Paris overrated is maybe the least surprising detail ever.) It sets the tone for the rest of the episode, with both boys sharing their versions of events, like an elderly couple in When Harry Met Sally, and Daniel getting wigged out like the avoidant attachment-style poster child he is.
During those first five months in France, Louis lived the dream. He’s walking around in a skinny little scarf, taking up photography, renting a small apartment with Claudia above starving students and prostitutes, and disposing of bloodied corpses in the sewers … just like Emily in Paris! Only the two of them aren’t doing a great job at covering their tracks; Armand says he had to go into the sewers and clean up Lou and Claudia’s messes, and a couple of Parisian vampires dressed like extras in the new Wicked trailer call the Americans gauche for not introducing themselves to the local coven, as is custom. “We didn’t get that memo,” says Louis. He’s happily ignorant and loving this little faux-boho life he’s built for himself (he’s basically Mark Cohen in Rent is what I’m saying, just snapping pics on film instead of video).
Claudia’s not feeling the fantasy quite like Louis. She cuts through his bullshit as he telepathically rambles about photography while smoking at a sidewalk cafe one night. “Let a brother pimp a bit! Let me think I’m deeper than I am!” he says back. This is the most self-aware a vampire on this show has ever been. She wants to know who he’d be outside of her, what he’d want outside of her, but he deflects, self-mythologizing as “the reticent vampire of the 9th arrondissement.” It’s like, after spending something like 30 human years in NOLA and 30 more years still in his hometown living with his maker, he’s finally going through his late-adolescent self-discovery phase. But Claudia, whose whole life is one prolonged adolescent self-discovery phase, is having none of it. Neither is Daniel, who calls out his “too-delusional Left Bank dilettante vibe.” Louis and Armand think he’s projecting and drawing out some of Daniel’s painful memories of his own time in Paris with his ex.
Back in the ‘40s, we see Daniel and Armand’s meet-cute, the two of them narrating it back and forth. Wearing a fedora twice as big as his body, Armand approaches Louis cruising in the rambles and gives him his card: Directeur artistique of the Theatre des Vampires, which brings us to the centerpiece of the episode, the one that fans of the books have surely been waiting for this whole time. The the-ay-tah! [Stage direction: read in Matt Berry vampire voice.]
A mishmash of aesthetics, influences, impulses, and moods, The Theatre des Vampires sequence is everything fun and good and spooky about IWTV boiled down to its essence. The show, we learn from Armand, “had become amusingly passé amongst the theater community, and found a more receptive audience from our Anglican friends now invading post-war,” which (a) is a good dig at the low taste of the boorish Brits, and (b) explains why they’re performing in English. The audience is mostly human, but Louis and Claudia can feel the charge of vampires surrounding them. A ticket-taker in white face paint and fake fangs has conspicuous colored contacts: vampire eyes. The same goes for everyone working the house: There’s a vampire in the projection booth, a vampire working the lights, a vampire striking up the band, all of them in exaggerated fakey-fake vampire makeup.
The show begins, and I did have a “Wait, is this fucking play about us?” Euphoria moment at the shots of the human mega-fans in the audience, dressed up in their own vampire cosplay, mouthing along to the words and shouting out in call-and-response moments like some kind of protozoic Rocky Horror Picture Show. Like, that is absolutely a direct call-out at us rabid IWTV fans. And that’s nice. Because representation matters, you know? I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank N Furter was a reference-point for Ben Daniels, who plays Santiago, thee top-of-the-call-sheet in this merry band of overly theatrical vampires. Cabaret was surely another influence on this production because, as emcee, Daniels shifts between sensual, scary, mocking, conspiratorial, and condemning. “Welcome to the displacement of reason and the excretion of pathetic desires!” is how he starts his spiel. He attaches himself to a rope that sends him flying over the audience, Mary Martin-style, only Claudia points out that the line is slack; he’s actually flying, and the true illusion is convincing the audience that he’s only presenting an illusion of flying. Like the usher in overdone vampire makeup. “Repressions that need airing? You’ve come to the right place.” Again, Eddie Redmayne should be taking notes on this emcee performance. Either that, or they should hitch him to a rope and have him fly around the August Wilson while singing “Money.”
“Everything you are about to see is real. Remember that when you leave here tonight. You are all complicit. Repugnant. AND APPALLING! And I love you for it. And I welcome you, even as you disgust me,” Santiago vamps. What follows is a series of sketches seen in montage, blending elements of allegory play, French farce, German Expressionism (that’s that me Nosferatu), and Brecht. (“It was all a seduction to lure the cattle into a willing belief of disbelief,” Armand explains.) “The plays were weird,” says Louis in voiceover.
“They were timeless!” counters Armand.
“They were weird.”
Louis is correct, and Armand is wrong, by the way. These plays look cuckoo-bananas, like a Tim Burton wet dream. Under his cool composure and refined, minimalist taste in Dubai penthouse décor, Armand is absolutely a certified freak (I guess the Bacon triptych is a touch freaky). This is his design, and his design is fabulous and bonkers. Either way, it’s all leading up to the final play, which is staged like an “interruption” of a scene. A terrified human woman with her wrists tied and her shirt slipping off her shoulders runs out onstage, panicked and crying, trying to alert the audience that she’s been kidnapped and everyone onstage is a vampire for realsies-realsies. Santiago, dressed as the Grim Reaper, toys with her for a while, giving her a bit of hope before killing her in front of an audience that nervously titters before bursting into applause. It’s a genuinely upsetting, tense scene, particularly when it’s in close-up. Behind the curtain, there is a Prestige-style trap door for the body because this is how they end the show seven nights a week (no matinees, for obvious reasons).
Beneath the stage, Louis and Claudia are lightly hazed by the theater kid coven, who live in the theater — their coffins line the room — and Armand, we learn, is their maître. Santiago asks who their maker is, because one of the girl-vamps does star charts based on “the night you were given the gift, phase of the moon, name of the maker.” Of course these art school vampires are sitting around doing astrology. But Claudia tells a lie, says their maker’s name was Bruce and notes a portrait of a Lestat hanging on their wall. He was the troupe’s co-founder, and “the finest actor ever to walk our stage.” This sets Louis off, so he visits Lestat’s accountant to try and confirm that he’s really most sincerely dead. The accountant hasn’t heard from Lestat since the night of the costume ball in 1940, and gives Louis a box with a letter addressed to him, which is read aloud by none other than Ghost-Lestat. Ghost-Lestat has red tears in his eyes and a clench in his jaw, calling Louis “the only being I trust,” lining every phrase with double meaning that sounds like a threat to Louis’s guilty conscience. In the present day, Daniel interrupts the reverie with his usual sarcastic “yada, yada” thing, and Louis retaliates, digging into Daniel’s brain and torturing him with more painful memories of his then-pregnant ex. It’s sadistic and petty, which is a side of Louis we don’t see often, and it frightens and quiets Daniel.
The episode closes out with a VME (Vampire Motorbike Excursion) to a mansion outside of the city where the coven goes to terrorize the 1 percent. It’s a wacky and twisted end to a wacky and twisted episode: Santiago and his astrology girlfriend make out as he drives a motorcycle, neon lights pass by in that film noir montage way, Louis and Armand flirt near the parked bikes in the foreground over the sounds of shrieks and gore and silhouettes of humans trying to escape through windows. In the reverse-shot, a vampire cuts a guy’s head off as he runs, leaving the headless body upright while he throws the skull in the air like a football. “Pip’s a savage,” Santiago says to Claudia as they file out. Claudia is the happiest she’s ever been, and she is finally loving Paris now that it involves murdering in a pack. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been because, between the peroxide blond and saying “pip” in that accent, I realized, oh my god, this show has found its Spike.
• It’s so funny that the show excuses Jacob Anderson’s French by him just saying, ” Some rust on the old mother tongue!” when his name is literally Louis de Pointe du Lac. The guy should be Francophone as hell, like you know Maman had him and his siblings see French tutors.
• Is the score on this show distractingly loud for anyone else? It overwhelms the scenes sometimes, particularly when it’s this dang jazzy. It felt like I was watching Twin Peaks.
• Claudia has a Murphy bed that flips up to reveal a coffin. Nice.
• Louis buying baguettes to lure and eat pigeons: more Emily in Paris behavior.
• The historical documents in question are photos lovingly shot by Louis of young human dudes he used to hang out with in Paris … who Armand killed “for sport.”
• The animated film projections mixed with stage action is a cool effect, although when Armand said “the modern cinema had an enormous influence on my aesthetic” I had to laugh.
• One of the skits, “Garden of Satan,” was definitely a Little Shop of Horrors homage, right?
• Claudia reads the troupe’s minds and later tells Louis, ”Not one of them thought anything other than I wanna lick these two.” It’s giving hormonal cast after-party at Denny’s.
• I didn’t have subtitles handy but I’m pretty sure Claudia said, after reading Louis and Armand’s minds, “now I know what two blood-fat cocks slapping hands feels like, so thanks for that.” I … Je téléphone à la police.
• Per your feedback, I’m reading the first book, and I’ve made it as far as Claudia and Louis meeting coven members after the Theatre des Vampires performance. It’s cool to see how the IWTV production team got to create their own vision of the show but still incorporated the final snuff part fairly faithfully. I love that the show is such a big departure but is full of details for fans. Things as specific as Estelle throwing shade at Claudia wearing pastels. It’s the little things, non?
