This Immortal Coil

This Immortal Coil

Vampires…there was a time when the pop culture zeitgeist wasn't overloaded with them. They have had a long, LONG history in our fiction, from European folklore all the way to True Blood. But it wasn't until the 1970s that they became, possibly for the first time, protagonists in the stories depicting them. It's always good to shake up the conventions of a tradition, and with the publication of "Interview With The Vampire," Anne Rice did just that.

It's easy to forget that the current sensibilities of vampiric lore were not always there. Before Rice's novel, we had "Nosferatu," "Dracula," we had "Salem's Lot," and, well, "Love At First Bite." And that's about it. In all of these incarnations, the vampires were malevolent, sketches of characters, and any emotional and metaphorical heft was largely the duty of the audience.

And then Rice's novel was released. The main character was Louis de Pointe du Lac, and this was a vampire of a different blood type. Louis was a mortal man in an existential funk after the loss of his family, and he wanted death for himself as an end to his suffering. In his turmoil, he was seduced by and succumbed to the offer of a different kind of life by Lestat, a charismatic and manipulative brat of a vampire.

Louis drank from Lestat and his body died, and was reborn a vampire. This new life did little to offset his angst in life - he now had the turmoil of needing human blood but guilt ridden at the taking of any life. The prospect of immortality, one with no sunlight, and nothing but darkness and death, was a burden of a different kind, but Louis remained, in immortal life, just as he had in mortal life, at odds with himself and the world at large.

Vampires with soul. Vampires with depression. Vampires discussing God and philosophy. Vampires as a metaphor for the fringes of our society, the lost boys, the punk, the Goth, and even an allegory to gay life in the late twentieth century was ascribed to Rice's novel. It's easy to discount these sensibilities now with all the recent entries to Vampire lore, but this novel was arguably the first time vampires were central protagonists and had character beyond malevolence. I discovered the novel in 1990, just as I was struggling with coming out of the closet, and these characters, forced to hide in the shadows from the humanity around them, spoke to me on that level. The existential depression of Louis was also something I related to, and still do.

Louis is always searching, always longing for something, but never satisfying that need, and always longing for light, uncomfortable with the heaviness of his soul and the pervading darkness of his vampiric life.

I didn't set out to do an homage to Louis and "Interview," but once I found this shot of model Gilberto Mendez, probably an outtake with his eyes in mid blink, it stuck me as a deathly pose. Wanting to do an overhead perspective, I added an earthly bed, and once that was in place, Louis was the only person this could be for me. I didn't want it to be overtly exclusive to the novel or vampires in general, so I added a few items to give it some depth, some hint of metaphorical implication. The butterflies were there to serve as a symbol of the transformation of Louis, but also they are drawn to the off-camera light source above him, the "eternal flame" of a grave, just as Louis was drawn to the light of Lestat's words and promise of another kind of life. I added a little architecture underneath him to suggest a well-worn grave marker, being consumed by the earth itself. A little trace of blood, the draught of vampire blood from Lestat running from his lips as it does it's work bringing on corporeal death, and the shedding of Louis' humanity.

One could look at this and draw from it what they will. There are no fangs, no other hallmarks exclusive to vampires. But if you choose to read this, hopefully you enjoyed the text and the homage this became to "Interview With the Vampire" and its troubled, all-too-human vampire protagonist.

My title is a play on "This Mortal Coil," itself a reference from Shakespeare, with "coil" referring to complications, trouble, noise and chaos. Louis may have shuffled off the mortal coil, but he now has an immortal one to deal with.

A Before and After version of this image can be seen on my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography

Model: Gilberto Mendez