In a classic case of what’s known as choosing from shit sandwich or shit cereal, wealthy plantation owner Louis (Brad Pitt, at his 1994 peak) is preyed upon by a vampire named Lestat (Tom Cruise, in a role not often enough appreciated) in his state of extreme depression after his wife and child die while she’s in labor (riches can’t always buy favorable circumstances). Seeing that he invites death welcomingly, Lestat tries to put his desires for the afterlife to the test, biting him near the docks of New Orleans and then asking him if what he really wants is to die, or if Lestat ought to spare him, make him live again (“I’m going to give you the choice I never had…”). Louis, in the inherent state that comes with human beings feeling they ought to survive at all costs, declares, “Yes,” to life, not yet fully cognizant that it means life eternal, far crueler than being “cut down in one’s prime” (or rather, cut with fangs).
Louis quickly becomes aware of this as he grapples with his new vampire nature (which Lestat insists he’ll have to give in to eventually) and his human capacity for empathy. In many ways, like Sabrina Spellman, it is this residual connection to his humanity that makes him both weak and strong. This mixture coming to fruition when Lestat forces Louis to finish what he started in biting a young girl named Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) while in a fit of uncontrollable hunger that no amount of feasting on rats could contain (for yes, he drinks from rats instead of humans out of his sense of moral responsibility). Lestat sees this as another opportunity to trap him into a situation, knowing his humanity will force him to choose sparing the girl’s life even if it means making it last forever.
To Louis’ surprise, the three live in relative harmony for about thirty years, seeing the changes that come with the Industrial Revolution that prompt Lestat to lament, “This filthy modern tide! What I wouldn’t give for a drop of old-fashioned Creole blood.” And it is at that moment that they spot a nude woman bathing in the shower, prompting Lestat to note, “Now that is pure Creole.” Rather than lusting for her blood as she usually would with Lestat, Claudia, instead, remarks that she doesn’t want her, but wants to be her, alluding to the fact that her body hasn’t changed or developed in all of these decades. Louis, sensing the dissatisfaction with this eternal life that has all at once washed over her, intuits the storm brewing. One that intensifies when Lestat gives her another doll, inciting her to demand, “You always give me a doll on the same night of the year. Is this my birthday?” Lestat doesn’t answer the question, allowing Claudia to begin a tirade that unveils she has made the Creole woman one of her living dead dolls buried beneath the barrage of other ones Lestat has given her.
Claudia rages, “Do you want me to be a doll forever? Can’t I change?” She then makes the signature gesture of a female driven to madness by chopping off her locks only to find, with extreme horror, that they grow back instantaneously.
Feeling no sympathy at her concrete revelation about what she is and what she never will be, Lestat sneers, “Be glad I made you what you are. You’d be dead now if I hadn’t.” Yet, like Louis, Claudia is aware that there is no fate worse that not being able to die, to be forced to roam the planet forever with not so much as a single simple pleasure (like tasting food or alcohol). She despises Lestat just as Louis did at the outset (mitigated by his contrasting feelings of attachment as a result of being “born” of Lestat). But toward Louis, the one who bit her in the first place, she declares, “I can’t hate you, Louis. I was mortal till you gave me your immortal kiss. You became my mother and my father. And so I’m yours forever.”
That said, she still wants to claim vengeance on Lestat and get rid of him once and for all, employing a quick tip he himself gave her about never feeding on the blood of the dead. Though Louis is more reluctant than she to help with the plan, he stands at her side as they give him an improper burial at sea. And as they learn how to live “as orphans” without Lestat, they decide to book passage to the “Old World,” with Claudia insistent upon finding out if there are more of “their kind” over there. Lestat’s reemergence as a heinous-looking corpse from the Mississippi is well-timed to their departure, with the two barely making the boat after their house is set ablaze with Lestat in it. Even so, Louis still fears he will come for them.
But lo and behold, they make it across the Atlantic without further incident, their search feeling futile as Louis narrates to his modern day interviewer, Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), “I began to believe we were the only ones. There was a strange comfort in that thought. For what could the damned really have to say to the damned?” As it turns out, plenty. For when Louis finally is cornered by a vampire in one of the tunnels by the Seine, he realizes just how many questions he still has and how much Lestat never answered, or perhaps never even knew.
The appearance of Santiago (Stephen Rea) is quickly followed by the “ringleader” of the vampires in Paris, Armand (Antonio Banderas), who invites him to see a “performance” him and his “troupe” are putting on. As Louis and Claudia soon learn, it’s no performance at all, with Claudia quipping in the audience, “Vampires who pretend to be humans pretending to be vampires. How avant-garde,” just before they feast on a human sacrifice that the viewers assume is all part of the play.
As Louis becomes glamored by Armand, fulfilling the homoerotic dynamic he shared with Lestat, Claudia grows weary and worried that she will lose him, her only companion and protector, making Louis once more feel the pains of his immoral choice in having taken part in turning her in the first place, in comprehending the reason why vampires have an unspoken age limit when it comes to being turned. And as Armand warns Louis of Santiago’s ill intentions toward both him and Claudia–having read Louis’ thoughts inferring some sort of wrong-doing toward one of his own kind, Lestat–he adds, “Do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality? How quickly they perish of their own will. The world changes. We do not.” Therein lies the great mercy of mortality. Sparing us from remaining forever irrelevant in a world that no longer wants us, as is generally the case when it comes to growing old. One is tolerated, if they’re lucky, respected, but never “embraced” or heralded as germane. The same goes for vampires relegated to the periphery of existence.
This is precisely what Louis tries to get across to Daniel as he gives him his “man on the street” interview. But in the end, Daniel is allured by the perceived “benefits” of immortality, of all that Louis has been able to see change over hundreds of years–most notably with the advent of film, when Louis was finally able to see once more, even if only secondhand, the sun rising thanks to the “mechanical wonder” of cinema. Exiting the theater in New Orleans from a showing of Tequila Sunrise (putting us at 1988), Louis is drawn invariably to the cemetery, something inside pulling at him to venture in. The scent of “old death. A scent too faint for mortals to detect.”
As he concludes his tale to Daniel with his encounter in that cemetery with a still weakened Lestat, he resolves, “I’m a spirit of preternatural flesh. Detached. Unchangeable. Empty.” Minus the preternatural part, this describes most humans the older they get, making death the only viable solution for escaping from this feeling. Daniel, however, predictably misses the point, begging to be made into one of Louis’ kind. In reply Louis sighingly but stoically says, “God, I’ve failed again.” For failure, too, becomes less profound the longer you stick around.
Despite the material first being written by Anne Rice in 1976, the resonance of Louis’ Gen X/millennial sense of displacement is at full force with his comment to Armand, “I’m at odds with everything. I always have been.” Armand assures, “That is the very spirit of your age. The heart of it. Your fall from grace has been the fall of a century.” In this way, maybe all born at any point after ’76 can at least enjoy emotionally evergreen immortality.
