Charlotte Shane, Harron Walker, et Moi

; or, Interview with a Vampire, Three Ways

A little news :) I’m excited to launch Objects of Affection, an occasional series of conversations with friends, writers, and loved ones on the cultural objects that are currently revving us up. It seems to me a way to make more frequent substacking sustainable, to offer tangible “content” (ugh, I know) to paid subscribers, and to just generally have more fun with the project—to bring in a more expansive, impromptu set of voices.

I’m over the moon that two of my all-time favorite women—the two women of my group chat (which is really more of a 24/7 three-way phone call-via-voice memos)—have agreed to be my first guests. Harron Walker is a writer and gal about town, and the author of the forthcoming essay collection, Aggregated Discontent. Charlotte Shane is the co-founder of TigerBee Press, as well as the author of Prostitute Laundry (just out in the UK!) and An Honest Woman, a forthcoming memoir. You can and should find Charlotte’s own brilliant substack, “Meant for You,” here.

Because it was “spooky” “season,” we agreed to re-read Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire together, and to correspond over email for the strict span of a single week—on the novel, the 1994 Neil Jordan film, and the 2022 AMC series-length adaptation. Spoilers abound for all three. Part one of the transcript follows below; the second half of our conversation will go live next week. It’s been edited and condensed for length.

xo

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Interview with a Vampire, AMC (2022)

Jamie Hood: Good afternoon women. I’d been thinking we could approach Interview through three broad frames, but, like a dummy, I only thought of two: SEX and NARRATIVE. A pair of brief observations, one on each—

First: I love the way both book and series make homo-sociality/eroticism the ideal relational origin—an origin interrupted by the presence of women, first by a forgotten character from the novel, Babette Freniere, and later, by the child-vampire Claudia. We should talk too, obviously, about the radical indeterminacy of Claudia’s “woman”-hood. What to make of her impossible desire? (We might also discuss the decision by both film and series to age the character up—in the novel I think she’s five?) Heterosexuality, in any case, is a dissolving agent in the Gay Guy Vampire World Order. I’m thinking of the more usual psychoanalytic set up, where desire between men becomes made acceptable and assimilable through the normative conduit of a woman’s body. The higher the hetero the closer to god, or whatever Eve Sedgwick said.¹

The second thing: what do we make of the AMC series’s storytelling scaffold? The idea is that Louis didn’t tell the tale straight the first go round; that is, we get not a reboot (the more obvious and usual approach in our cultural moment) but a deliberate, meta-narratological revision. This version, moreover, contests the legitimacy or, I guess, stability of a single, unified mode of address. We hear snippets of the old interview tapes (the ones, we’re led to believe, that make up the content of the ‘94 film), receive Daniel’s recollections—which are rendered unreliable because of his admission that he was an addict at the time—, and the textual incorporation of Claudia’s diaries, which are, for reasons I hope we’ll dive into, partly redacted by Louis in the present timeline.

(We also have a troublesome dynamic in which the vampire Armand is the censorious overseer of the 2022 interview...)

Anyway. Just wanting to drum up some energy. So excited!

love you both forever, -j

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Charlotte Shane: I’m so excited to talk about this with you both. Here’s some of what I’ve been thinking—mostly about the book—that we can feel free to take or leave.

Why is there no sex in the book until they go to Paris? You could argue it wasn't relevant to Louis's story, so he wasn't sharing it, but does that choice feel significant in and of itself? When Claudia asks Louis what making love was like and he barely has anything to say, the implication is that he hasn't been having sex as a vampire. Do we think that's true?—that vampires, like Gen Z, are not having enough sex? Are vampires prudes? But seriously: do you think he was "making love" with men or women pre-transition/transformation? Or both? Does he lie to Claudia about sex, to minimize its pleasures, or is he telling the truth when he describes it as something disappointing (for him)?

I am OBSESSED with this idea of Claudia as a sexually mature being trapped in a sexually immature body because it's predicated on the idea that the mind can evolve (in all variety of ways, but especially sexually) without puberty, without hormones, without maturation of sexual organs and secondary characteristics and all that—that time alone turns us into sexual beings, independent of the physical form. Would only a woman (girl) vampire be capable of this? Can we imagine a boy vampire in the same sort of existential agony about never coming to sexual maturity? (I can't; I would say for a woman—not in an essentialist way, but in a social and cultural way—it's more integral to being loved, and realizing love, which Claudia seems drawn to do despite being so cold-blooded? Is it just FOMO? Or does she want that type of union with Louis, or is it a way to keep him tied to her?)