It will shock you to learn that most of my friends in college were pop culture nerds. Not all, though. During our freshman year, our friend Jill admitted that she had never seen Casablanca. Horrified, we insisted on renting a copy from the nearest video store — only to be even more horrified when she sat through the whole film, unmoved, complaining, "This is all so cliché." Our arguments that this movie had invented all of those clichés didn't sway her in the slightest. We sighed, and resolved to not try to show Jill another pre-Eighties film.
I thought about this a lot while recently bingeing the first season of AMC's Interview with the Vampire series. Adapted by Rolin Jones from Anne Rice's first novel about the charismatic vampire Lestat (played on the show by Sam Reid) and his ultra-complicated relationship with his lover Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson), the series had a lot to admire upfront. Anderson was palpably raw as Louis recounted the story of his life as a human and his messy afterlife as a vampire. Sam Reid burned up the screen as Lestat. And Eric Bogosian deftly offered relief from the turmoil of their relationship as Daniel Molloy, the sarcastic journalist conducting the titular interview. Jones and his collaborators built a rich world around their central couple with their portrait of New Orleans in the first half of the 20th century.
And yet... a part of me couldn't help turning into Jill whenever Lestat was around. It's been 50 years since Rice's first book in the series was published, and more than 30 since Neil Jordan made a movie of it, starring Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis. While Rice herself hadn't invented the idea of a sexy, cruel, manipulative vampire, it felt like she had codified something specific about it that pop culture would spend the next five decades imitating and refining. So when the AMC show dwelled on Lestat's emotional abuse of both Louis and their surrogate daughter Claudia — cursed to forever look like a 14-year-old(*) because that's the age at which she was bitten — a part of me felt like I had been there and done that, even though I knew it wasn't fair, and that Jones and the actors were doing a good job reinterpreting what was now a familiar trope.
(*) Claudia was played in the first season by Bailey Bass, and in the second by Delainey Hayes. Neither looked nearly as young as the character was meant to be. (In the book, Claudia is only 6; in the movie, a 10-year-old Kirsten Dunst played her, in the performance that made her a star.)