The second episode of Interview with the Vampire, “After the Phantoms of Your Former Self,” asks the question: “Is it okay to kill people?” Louis says no. Lestat says yes.
The question of murder in this show is also a question of food, decadence, and pleasure. The entire episode is framed by food. Daniel, the interviewer, is served countless decedent courses, each beautifully plated and introduced with a nearly incomprehensible litany of fancy terminology. The question, Is it okay to kill people? is, of course, about food as well, since human blood is the main food source of vampires and drinking blood is, or least can be, an act of pleasurable intimacy, loving or violent or both.
The episode asks the question three times. The first time, Louis has just been turned into a vampire and he and Lestat lure home the most middle-American white bread man they can find. He’s a door-to-door salesman. He has a daughter. He’s going to buy her a pony. A great deal of time is dedicated to listening to him drone on about this pony. When Louis kills the man, it is of course a botched job. It’s Louis’ first time after all. Louis struggles to pin him down and Lesat has to give instruction on the basics of drinking blood. The encounter, and our first answer to our question, is a mess. Of course, we should be especially horrified by this victim. He’s innocent. He’s doughy. He has a daughter. But it’s hard to be horrified. It’s hard to feel it. Louis is still floundering, deeply influenced by Lestat’s confidence and too ungainly to make intentional choices about it, even as he is haunted by the killing, philosophically at least. It’s hard as the audience to climb up to the high ground that Louis has reached in the present. The murder is too mundane and Louise is too distracted by other things. At the end of the murder, we don’t linger; Louis is far more concerned about seeing his family, and that’s what’s framed as important.
And as I said, it’s hard to get away from Lestat. For Lestat, this question was settled decades if not centuries ago, and his confidence is hard to resist: Of course it’s okay. It’s beautiful. It’s also necessary. While Louis flails, Lestat gives instructions like he’s telling Louis how to prepare a cutlet. Louis even briefly takes Lestat’s side in the present, asking Daniel if he considers the rabbit before he eats it, if, as an apex predator, it’s ever weighed on his conscious. While Louis violently and bloodily kills a live animal, Daniel responds by taking a bite of his own cooked rabbit.
The second time the episode asks the question seems the most straightforward. During the meal, in the present, one of Louis’ servants, a burly and chiseled white man, a stereotypical Slavic-type, sits next to Louis and holds a pleasant and banal conversation with Daniel while Louis drinks just enough of his blood to be satiated. Louis, as he says, is in perfect control. So here it is. The moral high ground. The vegetarian vampire, as Twilight dubbed it.
It is also, I think, the most uncomfortable moment in the entire episode. Daniel, who has eaten his decedent meal as the servants wrapped the end of the table in saran wrap and brought out a blood bag, who didn’t flinch and continued to eat as Louis devoured a live animal, spurting blood over the table, for the first time Daniel looks queasy. For the first time, he can’t eat. And yet this is the cleanest blood-drinking in the episode. Louis doesn’t even get any blood on his chin.
Of course we might say that no matter how much Louis is in control, it’s still uncomfortable to watch. But I don’t think that’s it. I think Daniel recognizes that there’s something wrong with this moment. The drinking of blood between Louis and Lestat in the first episode is very clearly reminiscent of sex, and while Lestat’s other victims are more characterized by violence, the pleasurable nature still hangs over them; Lestat describes the last kill in the first episode as him ‘overindulging.’ Drinking blood isn’t a perfect allegory for sex – it’s not meant to be and it shouldn’t be read that way. But what Lestat understands and Louis doesn’t is that vampires, even though they’re dead, are inherently sensual beings of pleasure. To be dead, in fact, is to be overwhelmed by your senses, by sights and sounds and smells. To drink blood is to engage in being alive, to revel in the heat and wetness of the human body. I think we’re supposed to see how clinical drinking this Slavic man’s blood is, how detached and removed. Louis does not love this man. He does not connect with this man. This is the philosophical high ground. Of course, as humans ourselves, we have to agree with Louis: It’s not okay to kill people. But this scene makes it hard to feel that, because Louis feels nothing.
The third time the episode asks the questions, back in the past again, Louis is certain. He knows this is wrong, just as it was wrong when he killed the salesman. The death is also far more visceral. The horror and grief that we didn’t get before is present now. But Lestat is also at center stage. This is Lestat’s kill, and Lestat understands pleasure. At the opera, the one place where Lestat is really, truly content, where he revels in the music, the show’s tenor is not up to Lestat’s standards. So he lures the tenor home and humiliates him, making the tenor realize how imperfect his rendition of the opera was. Over the course of the evening, Lestat slowly drains him.
Louis is and is not seduced by this. He connects with the man, experiences the dying man’s final thoughts and visions of home. He describes it lovingly, nostalgically. It is seductive, begging him to join in with Lestat. But it’s also horrifying. The man is humiliated and killed over the course of hours. It’s horrible. Of course it’s horrible. It’s not okay to kill people. But now, as viewers, it’s hard to turn and run back to Louis’ earlier detached meal. Is that really better? To live your whole life going through the motions of pleasure but never really enjoying it?
At the end of the episode, in the present day, a final dessert is served, and Louis joins Daniel in eating it. Daniel, who is perpetually grumpy, is happy for a moment. He reminisces, speaks of how he last ate this after he proposed to his wife, even smiles a little. He enjoys the meal. Louis says the dessert tastes like paste. Louis enjoys nothing. Lestat, killing the tenor, revels. He understands how to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, and doing so requires him to connect with humans in a way that Louis, by the present, has forgotten how to do.
So, the show asks us, Is it okay to kill people? Of course not! Philosophically, how could you ever agree to that? Even here in the conclusion, as I am about to justify Lestat, I can’t let go of Louis’ moral high ground. But, the show tells us, if Louis is not wrong, he certainly isn’t right either. And if Lestat isn’t right, he’s also not wrong. Lestat understands that the joy of being a vampire is accessing pleasure and communing with the human body. For all that Louis has the moral high ground, for all that he claims to have done so out of a love or at least respect for humans, he has removed himself from them. Louis cannot commune with humans. Louis, as he says, is bored, and his attempts to be strictly moral have put him there.