In October of 2018, U.S.-based journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. The CIA concluded that the assassination was carried out by Saudi operatives, on order of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The prince denied the accusations, although other U.S. intelligence agencies later made the same formal assessment.
Tuesday, President Trump showered the Saudi leader with praise during his first invitation to the White House since the killing. “We’ve been really good friends for a long period of time,” said Trump. “We’ve always been on the same side of every issue.”
Clearly. Their shared disdain — and fear — of a free press was evident, from downplaying the killing of Khashoggi to snapping at ABC News reporter Mary Bruce when she asked about his murder.
“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump said, then he proceeded to debase a journalist who wasn’t there to report on the event because he’d been silenced, forever. Referring to Khashoggi, he said, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”
Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Jamal Khashoggi.
(Associated Press / Tribune News Service)
Fender-benders happen. Spilled milk happens. But the orchestrated assassination of a journalist by a regime that he covers is not one of those “things” that just happen. It’s an orchestrated hit meant to silence critics, control the narrative and bury whatever corruption, human rights abuses or malfeasance that a healthy free press is meant to expose.
Bruce did what a competent reporter is supposed to do. She deviated from Tuesday’s up-with-Saudi-Arabia! agenda to ask the hard questions of powerful men not used to being questioned about anything, let alone murder. The meeting was meant to highlight the oil-rich country’s investment in the U.S. economy, and at Trump’s prompting, Prince Mohammed said those investments could total $1 trillion.
Prince Mohammed addressed the death of Khashoggi by saying his country hopes to do better in the future, whatever that means. “It’s painful and it’s a huge mistake, and we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.”
And just in case the two men hadn’t made clear how little they cared about the slain journalist, and how much they disdain the news media, Trump drove those points home when he referred to Bruce’s query as “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.” He suggesting that ABC should lose its broadcasting license.
Trump confirmed Tuesday that he intends to sell “top of the line” F-35 stealth fighter jets to Riyadh. It’s worth noting that the team of 15 Saudi agents allegedly involved in Khashoggi’s murder flew to Istanbul on government aircraft. The reporter was lured to the Saudi embassy to pick up documents that were needed for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman.
The prince knew nothing about it, said Trump on Tuesday, despite the findings of a 2021 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that cited “the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Mohammad bin Salman’s protective detail.” It concluded that it was “highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”
To no one’s surprise, the Saudi government had tried to dodge the issue before claiming Khashoggi had been killed by rogue officials, insisting that the slaying and dismemberment was not premeditated. They offered no explanation of how a bonesaw just happened to be available inside the embassy.
President Trump shakes hands with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House in 2018.
(MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Five men were sentenced to death, but one of Khashoggi’s sons later announced that the family had forgiven the killers, which, in accordance with Islamic law, spared them from execution.
The president’s castigation of ABC’s Bruce was the second time in a week that he has ripped into a female journalist when she asked a “tough” question (i.e. anything Newsmax won’t ask). Trump was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One last Friday when Bloomberg News’ Catherine Lucey asked him follow-up question about the Epstein files. The president replied, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”
Trump’s contempt for the press was clear, but so was something else he shares with the crown prince, Hungary’s Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin: The president doesn’t just hate the press. He fears it.
Forty years ago next month, Bruce Springsteen released what would become the album most entwined with his legacy and American culture writ large: Born in the U.S.A. In his new book, out Tuesday, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland, veteran rock critic Steven Hyden explores how it became what it did—and what it meant for Bruce, rock music, and the greater zeitgeist. In this exclusive excerpt, Hyden looks at the medium that introduced many people to the album: the music video.
Bruce Springsteen is not a great music video artist. I am certain that he would not be offended by this statement because I don’t think that being a great music video artist was ever a priority for him. During the Born in the U.S.A. era, music videos were a means to an end.
The most memorable image of Bruce from this era derives from the Born in the U.S.A. album cover shot by Andrea Klein and famed Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz, which was later recreated in the title song’s video. As Dave Marsh relates in his 1987 book Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, Leibovitz shot Springsteen over five or six sessions and amassed a series of photos that depicted him in various epic poses. One such picture—Bruce is dressed in a blue shirt, black leather jacket, and black pants and is captured airborne with his legs stuck at a 45-degree angle—was used for the cover of the “Dancing in the Dark” 12-inch single. Another shot of Bruce leaping in front of the American flag with his right arm frozen in a Pete Townshend–style windmill over his guitar was utilized for the cover of the Born in the U.S.A. tour program.
As for the photo that made the album cover, Leibovitz did not consider it her best work, referring to it dismissively as a “grab shot.” It’s true that, when compared with some of the Born in the U.S.A. outtakes, it’s not as artfully composed. But the photo proved to be a remarkably pliable image that conveyed several messages at once. The white work shirt and blue jeans were shorthand for the album’s working-class themes. The red and white stripes obviously represented America. The focus on Bruce’s ass had sexual overtones. The combined alchemy of these elements communicated the paradoxical idea that Bruce was an everyman and the man of his place and time.
That idea carried over to the first music video he made for Born in the U.S.A., “Dancing in the Dark.” I do not need to repeat the particulars of the “Dancing in the Dark” video because anyone who is remotely familiar with Bruce Springsteen can picture scenes from it in their mind. What’s important is that the video undeniably made him more famous in the short run, and it unquestionably made it easier to make fun of him in the long run. I have a friend who hates Bruce Springsteen, and when he wants to annoy me, he will text me GIFs of Bruce dancing in the “Dancing in the Dark” video because he knows I can’t defend it. That video personifies everything that is corny about Bruce Springsteen and almost nothing that is cool about him.
For a long time, I thought the strangest thing about the “Dancing in the Dark” video was that it was directed by one of my favorite filmmakers, Brian De Palma. A friend of Springsteen and Jon Landau, De Palma stepped in at the last minute after a previous attempt at making a video for the song failed. He was not an obvious choice. Very little about “Dancing in the Dark” aligns textually with De Palma’s cinematic output in any obvious way. A high-IQ pervert best known for making lushly choreographed and technically brilliant thrillers loaded with tawdry sex and graphic violence, De Palma’s work on “Dancing in the Dark” seems incongruously wholesome in comparison.
But subtextually, “Dancing in the Dark” shares at least two attributes with Body Double, the highly controversial and very entertaining Rear Window–Vertigo rip-off that De Palma also made in 1984. The first is that both films sexualize their protagonists. (“Dancing in the Dark” opens by lingering on Bruce’s crotch and butt; Body Double stars Melanie Griffith as a porn star.) The second is that De Palma deftly uses flashy and kinetic imagery to distract the audience from a ridiculous plot. (A rock star singing about his inescapable loneliness while smiling ear to ear with future Friends star Courteney Cox in “Dancing in the Dark” versus a dim-witted actor caught in a convoluted double cross that inexplicably frames him for murder in Body Double.)
Bruce had mixed feelings about the video’s slickness and feel-good pop presentation, though he could also recognize that “Dancing in the Dark” achieved exactly what it was supposed to. As he related to Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in 1984, “I was on the beach and this kid came up to me—I think his name was Mike, he was like seven or eight—and he says, ‘I saw you on MTV.’ And then he says, ‘I got your moves down.’ So I say, ‘Well, let me check ’em out.’ And he starts doin’, like, ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ And he was pretty good, you know?”
Any hardcore Boss-head who still harbors ill will toward “Dancing in the Dark” should go on YouTube and look up the original video that Bruce was forced to abandon. (The footage that leaked is supposedly a rehearsal take, but it provides an adequate approximation of the concept.)
Directed by Jeff Stein, one of the most important early music-video filmmakers and another personal friend of Bruce, this “Dancing in the Dark” presents Bruce Springsteen moving by himself on an all-black stage and against a black backdrop. The concept (I guess?) is that he is dancing near the dark. But that’s all that we see. In a single take, the camera zooms in and out while Bruce robotically tosses his arms and swings his hips. He is wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, tight black pants with black suspenders, and a black headband. His muscles are exposed. His armpit hair is glistening. He looks like a mime attending a Jazzercise class.
According to the excellent 2011 oral history I Want My MTV, Bruce knew in the moment how silly he looked. “He performed one time, we cut the camera, and he walked off the fucking set and didn’t come back,” says director of photography Daniel Pearl, who later shot iconic videos for U2’s “With or Without You” and Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.”
“We stood around for half an hour,” Pearl says. “People scoured the building looking for him, and we finally realized, ‘Oh my god, he’s gone.’”
For his next video, Bruce set out to make the gritty version of “Dancing in the Dark.” In the “Born in the U.S.A.” video, we see Bruce onstage with the E Street Band in Los Angeles in 1984. The clean-cut, happy-go-lucky guy from “Dancing in the Dark” has been replaced by a grizzled, screaming arena rocker clad in denim and leather. He is technically lip-syncing, but it’s obvious that the live footage has been aligned with the record in postproduction. We see him really singing—and feeling—this song.
When we don’t see Bruce, we see clips of the America that the song describes—people lined up outside of a check-cashing business, a one-eyed mustachioed guy drinking a beer, ROTC soldiers going through their paces, a military cemetery lined with endless headstones. The dissonance of the “Dancing in the Dark” video is that the tone, mood, and imagery contradict the lyrics and Bruce’s usual persona. (He doesn’t even play guitar in the video.) But “Born in the U.S.A.” is a literal depiction of the song and Bruce’s idea of himself. It’s as “honest” as his music videos get.
The personnel for “Born in the U.S.A.” was just as illustrious as the makers of “Dancing in the Dark.” Director John Sayles was celebrated for making authentic slice-of-life indie films like Return of the Secaucus 7 and Baby It’s You. (The latter film includes several Springsteen songs on the soundtrack.) Per Bruce’s instruction to make a down-and-dirty video, Sayles shot in 16 mm, a choice that belies the world-class cinematographers on the project: Ernest Dickerson (who later shot Do the Right Thing) and Michael Ballhaus (who subsequently filmed Goodfellas).
Bruce opted to use Sayles again for the next two videos, though the director took Springsteen’s video image in yet another direction. In “I’m on Fire” and “Glory Days,” Bruce acts. He’s playing the characters in the songs, though it really feels like one character. In “I’m on Fire,” he is a greasy mechanic who contemplates an affair with a flirtatious (and largely unseen) rich woman. In “Glory Days,” he is a construction worker and family man who fantasizes about pitching against the San Diego Padres. He is also the frontman of a bar band that happens to look exactly like the E Street Band.
“I’m on Fire” features Bruce’s best performance as an actor. He is tasked with looking lustful, then reticent, as he hops in the woman’s Cadillac and takes it on a late-night drive to her home in the Hollywood Hills. The clip’s most theatrical moment is a crane shot in Bruce’s bedroom, which lowers the camera into his face as he rouses himself from bed during a sleepless night. His sheets do not appear to be soaking wet, but the look on his face effectively conveys the feeling of a freight train running through the middle of his head. Of all the Born in the U.S.A. music videos, this seems the most like a short film. When Bruce reaches his moment of truth and decides to slip the keys into the mailbox rather than ring the woman’s doorbell, you can hear the clang of the keys in the box, emphasizing the video’s brief but coherent narrative.
“I’m on Fire” is the leanest of the Born in the U.S.A. videos, which was appropriate for the album’s leanest-sounding hit. The song was cooked up in the studio quickly and extemporaneously, with Bruce stroking out a rockabilly guitar figure against Max Weinberg’s metronomic beat. Upon hearing the chorus, Roy Bittan was inspired to compose a simple but expressive one-note synth intro.
On an album loaded with big-sounding rock songs, “I’m on Fire” is a departure point. It’s also the song that sounds the most like an ’80s pop hit, which might be why it’s the Born in the U.S.A. track that has been covered by the widest spectrum of artists from beyond Bruce’s usual rock wheelhouse. “I’m on Fire” has entered the worlds of indie electronic (Chromatics, Bat for Lashes), alternative pop (Tori Amos), mainstream country (Kenny Chesney), mainstream pop (John Mayer), British folk (Mumford & Sons), and many places between.
The tension of the “I’m on Fire” video is, of course, sexual in nature. Just as the song exudes desire, the video creates an instant patina of longing. And yet the story (like Bruce’s lyrics) is about not following through on what the protagonist wants. Positioning Bruce as a carnal creature who is ultimately chaste was yet another ingenious way to make him mean different things to different audiences. “I’m on Fire” invites the audience to envision Bruce as the kind of man who could indulge in a naughty night of passion with a married woman but chooses not to do so. The “I’m on Fire” video was like a prophylactic for the Boss’s libidinous side. He could be the stud and the virgin simultaneously.
In “Glory Days,” we see Bruce as a wannabe baseball player. He’s not observing this person, as he does in the song. He is portraying a father, with a wife and a young son, who still likes to pretend that he’s a major-league pitcher. Basically the opposite of the real Bruce Springsteen, but also a decent approximation of a “regular” guy in 1985, starting with the love of baseball, which could still be credibly called the national pastime. The five largest television audiences for the World Series ever occurred over consecutive years right before the release of Born in the U.S.A., with 1978 coming in at no. 1, followed by 1980, 1981, 1982, and 1979.
Aside from the flag, baseball was the most straightforward symbol of the American spirit to put in a music video in the mid-’80s. The game was still popular, but it also felt like a romantic remnant of the nation’s past. And that suited “Glory Days,” and not only because of the lyrical allusion to the sport. Like baseball, rock ’n’ roll was still a big deal in the mid-’80s mainstream, but it looked backward. And amid all the displays of technological know-how on the rest of Born in the U.S.A., “Glory Days” is a throwback to the garage-rock formalism of The River. The band sounds loose and jocular, Bittan’s synthesizer has been supplanted by Danny Federici’s organ, and the portending of personal/political doom that permeated the preceding singles is replaced by a feel-good party vibe. Even Bruce’s sidekick, Little Steven, is back in the fold again during the video’s bar-band sequences.
And at the center of it all was what we will call “the Bruce Springsteen Character,” a perfect leading man for MTV. In the videos for “I’m on Fire” and “Glory Days,” Bruce Springsteen is portrayed as soft-spoken, a little shy, hardworking, slightly dim, and fundamentally decent. If you were to make a list of “average working-class person” clichés and turn that list into a person, it would be the Bruce Springsteen Character from these videos.
This person was not the “real” Bruce Springsteen. And I don’t just mean that in the most obvious sense, which is that Bruce was a millionaire rock star and not a blue-collar laborer with a family. The real Bruce Springsteen liked old movies, books about American history, and above all his own company. He was a pensive loner with depressive tendencies. He was complicated.
You don’t get any of that from the simpleton you see in his videos. But the Bruce Springsteen Character overwhelmed reality. And that was helpful to the real Bruce Springsteen’s career—until it suddenly wasn’t.
The impact of MTV imprinting images permanently on an artist’s career would be more apparent after the ’80s, but at least one expert could recognize it in the moment. In 1985, a New York University professor named Neil Postman published a best-selling work of cultural criticism called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, a screed against the influence of television on contemporary life. The central argument of Amusing Ourselves to Death is that the transition from a print-based form of public conversation (which Postman argues reached its epoch during the mid-19th century, when Americans happily sat through seven-hour debates between presidential candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas) to a televisual one has made it impossible to properly convey substantive facts and thoughts.
A lasting concept from Amusing Ourselves to Death is the information-action ratio. The concept expresses the connection between what people hear and what it compels them to do. To put it in extremely simple terms: When people learn that fire will burn them, they will know not to touch it. Postman argues that modern media in the mid-’80s created so much unnecessary information that it amounted to disinformation, ultimately paralyzing and confusing consumers and taking them farther away from the truth, while ostensibly making them better informed.
Postman’s work has obvious resonance in the social media era, when the information-action ratio seems even more relevant than it did for television. But what Postman writes can also be applied to how MTV fixed musicians in fleeting images that gave false (or incomplete) impressions of their overall work, even while flooding the airwaves with that artist’s music.
The example people always give of this phenomenon is Cyndi Lauper, a talented singer-songwriter whose 1983 debut album, She’s So Unusual, moved 16 million units worldwide on the strength of a colorful NYC punk persona forwarded in videos like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Time After Time.” The common wisdom is that Lauper became so connected to her She’s So Unusual image—red hair, pawnshop clothes, a proclivity for hanging out with the wrestler Lou Albano—that it hampered her overall career.
An element of this argument rings true. When most people picture Cyndi Lauper, they conjure images almost exclusively from the videos she put out in 1983 and ’84. But the suggestion that those videos hurt her in the long run isn’t really accurate. One of the biggest songs of her career, “True Colors,” is the title track from her second record, released in 1986. Her third album, A Night to Remember, spawned another top-10 hit, “I Drove All Night,” in 1989. It’s true that none of her albums after that produced a hit song, but almost every pop star starts to fade by the fourth record. There’s no evidence that the ubiquity of She’s So Unusual hurt her overall. On the contrary, her career arc feels pretty typical.
In the case of Bruce Springsteen, however, the distorting effect of the Bruce Springsteen Character from those mid-’80s music videos truly has had far-reaching consequences. The most common criticism of Bruce Springsteen by people who don’t like Bruce Springsteen’s music is that he is not the person that he sings about in his songs. Springsteen’s critics find the fact that he is a rich man who sings about poor people to be inauthentic. Anytime these people want to criticize Bruce Springsteen about anything—the price of his concert tickets, his political stances, the preponderance of the word “factory” in his lyrics—this is what they go back to: He is a phony because he is not really the Bruce Springsteen Character.
Now, this also happens to be the laziest criticism of Bruce Springsteen. It’s like condemning Robert Downey Jr. for being a witty millionaire who is not actually Iron Man in real life. But it’s also understandable why the disconnect exists.
If Bruce had made a video for “Nebraska” in which he portrayed the song’s convicted-murderer narrator, nobody would think he was an actual murderer. (Though this would have been no more fanciful than presenting Bruce as a crane operator like the “Glory Days” video does.) But his public persona would have been darker and more disturbing. He would have come across as a less menacing Lou Reed. And he would have been expected to live up to that image. Any story about him being kind to children or a good tipper for waitresses would be commercially precarious.
This is the opposite scenario in which Bruce found himself during Born in the U.S.A. How do I know this is true? From Bruce Springsteen’s own actions. The way he reacted to his own fame shows that he has been locked in a decades-long fight against the Bruce Springsteen Character. On the cover of the follow-up to Born in the U.S.A., 1987’s Tunnel of Love, Bruce wears a dark suit, a white shirt, and a bolo tie, and leans against a white Cadillac, a deliberate departure from the blue-collar wardrobe of the previous album cycle. In the song “Better Days” from 1992’s Lucky Town, he sings derisively about being “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.” Many years later, in his career-spanning one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway, he opens with a confession: “I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life!” he says. “I’ve never done any hard labor. I’ve never worked 9-to-5. I’ve never worked five days a week. Until right now.”
It took a full workweek to fight against the Bruce Springsteen Character. And yet that character persists.
In “No Pain,” the third episode of Interview With the Vampire season two, Armand (Assad Zaman) shares the story of the Theatre des Vampires as Louis (Jacob Anderson) expresses reluctance to join—something that doesn’t stop Claudia (Delainey Hayles) from eagerly wanting to be a part of it.
Why Are Vampires Associated With Queerness?
This week we bite into the history of Paris’ vampire coven and Lestat’s (Sam Reid) role in its founding, as well as vampire rules, dark gifts, and more immortal romance. Levan Akin directs “No Pain” from a script by Heather Bellson in Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe of vampire lore, airing Sundays on AMC and AMC+.
Taking a break from the isolating room at Louis and Armand’s penthouse, Molloy (Eric Bogosian) gets a real meal at a posh sushi restaurant in Dubai. There he’s accosted by a man who goes by Raglan James (Justin Kirk), who represents another mysterious party tracking vampires that knows more than Molloy is being told by Louis and Armand. Book fans definitely geeked out a bit here at the character’s introduction and little foreshadowing lines from James thoughout (if you know you know). Molloy thinks he’s not exposed, but after James advises him to be open to communication, he ends up getting hacked by the mysterious figure anyway when he gets back into the penthouse. Talk about a poor firewall, friend! Daniel is immediately sent files of more vampire information that he ever imagined in relation to his interview subjects and himself.
Molloy tries to play it cool and hide James’ helpful info dump via chat box, as Armand arrives before Louis to share an on-the-record history lesson about the Paris Coven’s origins. The soft-spoken Armand is very old, despite his perpetually angelic-looking appearance: in 1556, the Roman Coven he was a part of sent him to Paris to head up its enclave, which lived in squalor deep in the shadows underground. They were run by sects driven through ancient religious laws and gods to keep them in eternal damnation mode under Satan. It got old very quickly for Armand; by the 18th century, when Lestat began to run amok in the city above, flaunting his alluring menace on the unsuspecting living, it drove most of the Paris Coven crazy to see such heretical behavior. But it intrigued Armand.
In order to exert dominance as the Paris Coven’s maitre, Armand reveals himself to the fledgling Lestat and informs him he’s his new master as he exists in their domain and must follow vampire law. So of course Lestat blows him off, with the swish of his cape and his blond bouncy hair, because he does not want to be an obedient, poor, peasant vampire. The rejection only makes the brat Frenchman more hot to Armand, who’s never faced a challenge. Naturally, the coven wants severe punishment for Lestat as they see him break so many more rules including taking a mortal lover. That’s the breaks for letting Lestat run his showman lifestyle—and Armand uses his ancient powers to literally drop his ass and drag him into cooperating with a show of power that switches Lestat’s view on Armand.
The boy wants power and he immediately plans to get it, so he shows up to the coven’s hovel with Christ on a cross (literally) to dismantle the old ways, which is what Armand wanted but knew he couldn’t get away with. He pisses on their rules and old god worship, because to Lestat they’re not there to stop them from being gods themselves. The coven breaks loose into the night; some end up taking to the sun to escape meaningless existence, while others jump into power. Knowing they need to be reeled in, because careless killing endangers all of them, Lestat encourages Armand to begin the coven anew through the Theatre des Vampires, a show where they perform their true identity and take their prey while the living laugh at the fiction they think they’re seeing.
Lestat’s reformation leads to a new age of the vampire, giving Armand the freedom he sought, and he tells Lestat he loves him while Lestat being Lestat only covets Armand’s dark gifts. As soon as he learns them from the maitre, Lestat abandons him and the coven but leaves them the means to continue without him. Lestat’s ghosting and lover melodrama is something Louis is aware of and helps provide insight on when he sits with Armand and Molloy. It would take Armand 150 years to tell someone else he loved them, and you can deduce it’s Louis—oh, the piping hot tea!
Molloy resumes Claudia’s Paris diaries, as she campaigns to join the coven that Louis wants no part of except to see her happy (and also he’s sweet on its maitre). She takes on the tasks of cleaning the theater house as she learns more about the coven, particularly Santiago. The acting troupe’s lead inspires her with his performances and dark gift of making people accept death before killing, and with her Daddy Lestat’s ambitious streak, she wants that power too. So Santiago takes her under his wing because he was also orphaned by a terrible maker, but of course he doesn’t know hers was Lestat—just some rando vamp named “Bruce.”
Lestat’s presence is also felt in Louis’ motivations; like his former lover, there’s an independent streak that prevents him from having any interest in the coven, and that makes him attractive to Armand. The Paris Coven resents that even though all Louis does is enjoy Parisian culture and take up photography, with sporadic human meals, Armand begins to join him on his late-night wandering throughout the city. They fall in love over discourse about good vs. evil and enjoying music at jazz clubs—even with the occasional mental projection of Lestat showing up in Louis’ mind. Last season’s “Come to Me” song reappears in a fun scene as a diss track with Lestat on piano singing to Louis, “You little whore, you only want him because you’re feeling blue,” which disrupts the romantic evening—and Armand reveals he knows his maker is Lestat. Foolishly, Louis tells Armand everything and the maitre reprimands him over breaking so many rules he needs to enforce punishments for. Honestly, the expectation that Lestat would even teach Louis any rules is ridiculous, so when he says Lestat told him “shit” the frustration is understandable. Thankfully, Armand is stupidly sprung on Louis too, so he doesn’t kill him or Claudia immediately as was probably expected.
Louis, of course, does not tell Claudia that his new boyfriend knows the truth; he continues to build a fake story around their history with “Bruce” and bond with her over their shared Lestat trauma. It really mirrors the complex PTSD that survivors of emotional and physical abuse can carry on from loved ones—even after making it out of the situation, it can haunt you, and in Louis’ case this presents as that manifestation of Lestat always following him. In anger, Louis kills a random person imagining them as Lestat and carelessly leaves the body behind. Within the coven, Santiago points out that his own maker was killed for less.
Tensions begin to rise as the coven wants Louis dealt with, even as they embrace Claudia. As they begin to induct her into the coven by reciting the rules every vampire should follow (not knowing she’s broken a few of them), Armand takes Louis through the sewers to finally kill him. Louis is ready for it and asks for Armand to take care of Claudia, but the maitre reveals her being in such a young body will break her in time. Louis doesn’t accept that and begs for the coven to give her a chance, but Armand insists he’s seen it before; over the centuries, vampires in children’s bodies are not able to evolve past their physical limitations. Louis defends her, insisting she’s strong and it wouldn’t break her—perhaps blinded by her love for her. Seeing the damage Lestat has caused, Armand asks if Lestat broke him and Louis says no, but he carries him. The trauma bonding brings them together as do the life and death stakes here. The tension is too much and they kiss, starting a tryst and avoiding all the punishment talk for now.
Earlier in the week, My Dad the Bounty Hunter creator Patrick Harpin and Yuhki Demers, a visual artist on Sony Animation’s Spider-Verse films, revealed their concept art for an animated Batman Beyond movie they’re trying to get made. They’re both fully aware nothing might come of this, and talks are still happening. But it didn’t stop said art from going viral, both because it looks really cool, and also because it’s Batman Beyond, a fan-favorite character who’s always felt like he’s within spitting distance of a big bat-break.
If you work in a creative field, you likely have to pitch something to your boss before actually starting on it. That’s particularly true in animation, and that’s doubtful to change anytime soon. But there’s something ugly, for lack of a better word, in seeing Harpin and Demers have to publicly rally for support to prove their project’s “worthy” in this way to WB. It wasn’t that long ago that we learned the studio’s executives, led by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, are likely going to cancel Coyote vs. Acmewithout really considering any of the deals offered to them, or having actually seen the film. The people in charge of WB seem very anti-art in a way that makes this all come off as rather cruel, especially when folks have been so vocal about their love for Batman Beyond over the years.
Legacy superheroes have become so widespread nowadays, but Terry McGinnis was an early example of that working to great success. Separate from their love of Batman: The Animated Series, fans have had an affection for 1999-2001 animated series BatmanBeyond and Terry’s exploits as the Batman of Neo-Gotham. It wasn’t just that the show was offering a new take on the Dark Knight, it was also really good and not just coasting off the novelty of a teenager in a high-tech Batsuit. And while he briefly showed up in Justice League Unlimited, DC didn’t make any active moves to continue Terry’s story, and largely closed the book on him after JLU revealed he was Bruce’s son.
Comics-wise, Terry’s actually been doing fairly well for himself in the past decade, where he was weaved into the prime DC universe. In his recent solo runs, he’s crossed paths with more recent Batman mainstays like Damian Wayne and the Court of Owls, and he’s now at the point where he’s on his own now that Bruce is dead. Yet even with that, WB has never tried to give him a bigger presence outside of the comics: a live-acton Batman Beyond movie was junked several years ago, much like an animated one rumored in 2019. He hasn’t been revived via the animated movies that WB likes to put out three or four of every year, and he doesn’t even have a video game presence beyond being costumes for Bruce in the Lego or Arkham games.
Outside of comics, WB has always handled Batman’s supporting cast oddly. Sometimes it puts embargoes on specific characters so there can’t be multiple versions; sometimes other characters can headline shows for about half a decade or be a supporting player in the story of another, bigger Batman character. The studio constantly overcomplicates itself for no real reason, and the same is true here—it loves Batman to death, and DC’s often been at its best when animated. Harpin and Demers’ hypothetical movie checks both those boxes, and gives audiences something they’ve never seen in theaters before: Batman being a detective in the cyberpunk future is a cool idea! And again, folks have been clamoring for more Terry for years.
Image: Warner Bros. Animation
In a sane universe, a Batman Beyond movie in a Spider-Verse art style would probably be out by now. But this WB is trying to burn money and stall for time ahead of a likely buyout, so we’re watching an interesting idea by a pair of creators more than eager to work on it be held hostage. Batman Beyond isn’t owed this just because Harpin and Demers asked, or even because he’s been around for 25 years. What he’s owed is a legitimate chance to have something with him move forward with people who care about the property at the helm. But the focus on the bottom line means WB will be making moves that are more dystopian than the actual dystopia of Gotham City 2049.
After the theft of hundreds of bronze plaques in the last few months across Los Angeles County, investigators say they are making progress in recovering some of the stolen plates that tell the history of the region.
On Tuesday, police recovered two stolen plaques during a traffic stop, the Los Angeles Port Police announced.
Since early December, bronze plaques commemorating the history of the ports have been ripped and pried off from several memorials, including the American Merchant Marine Veterans Memorial erected in 1989, law enforcement said in a news release.
A plaque stolen from Terminal Island in San Pedro honors members of the local Japanese American fishing community who were imprisoned during World War II.
Both those plaques remain lost.
After pulling over a vehicle during the traffic stop Tuesday, L.A. Port Police found a cemetery marker stolen from a site in Long Beach and a plaque taken from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Long Beach, Port Police Chief Thomas Gazsi said.
Police arrested Dionzay Tisby, 42; Brittany Draper, 37; and Deona Jackson, 28 on suspicion of grand theft, authorities announced.
The arrests are part of an ongoing investigation, and the suspects could face additional charges if police are able to connect them to other thefts.
“We all took it very seriously,” Gazsi said about the thefts. “We believe they are responsible for additional thefts. I’m appreciative of the lengthy investigation that involved significant field and forensic work from our investigators.”
Los Angeles City Councilmember Tim McOsker, who represents the district that includes the Harbor area, called the thefts “heartbreaking” and said the community views the whole situation as a “great disrespect to the fishermen, the industries who built the ports.”
There are plans to replace the plaques if they cannot be recovered, said McOsker, who is talking with port officials to help with the effort.
Los Angeles Port Police is the lead agency in the investigation, which extends outside their jurisdiction.
In January, more than 100 bronze plaques were stolen from Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery in Carson. About a week before, thieves toppled over gravestones and stole metal plaques from Woodlawn Memorial Park in Compton, according to volunteers at the cemeteries and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Perhaps the most egregious of the bronze plaque thefts happened in Manhattan Beach, where Los Angeles County returned a piece of land to the family of Willa Bruce, who sought to create a beach resort for a Black community in 1912.
The city rededicated the site last year with a new plaque that told the history of racism the family faced in Manhattan Beach. In late January, the large bronze plaque was pried off its base, according to the Manhattan Police Department.
Anyone with information about the thefts can contact Los Angeles Port Police detectives at (310) 732-3500.
Update 5/5/2023 1:30 p.m. ET: After just 24 hours, Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa’s Twitch channel has been reinstated, Dexerto reports. Don’t expect to watch previous livestreams, though, as all of her VODs have been nuked. All that’s left for now are clips clipped by her fans. Original story follows.
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Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa, one of Twitch’s top-performing and most popular female streamers, has been yeeted off the platform. She was hit with what appears to be a temporary ban on May 4, though the reason is unknown.
Amouranth is a household name on Amazon’s livestreaming platform. With over six million Twitch followers (and millions more across Instagram and YouTube), Amouranth is easily the purple streamer’s most recognizable female creator next to Imane “Pokimane” Anys. She’s been in hot water before, particularly for regularly streaming in skimpy bikinis, but that hasn’t stopped her from charting highly on Twitch. Despite receiving a few bans in the past that lasted no more than a couple of days, Amouranth consistently pulls in thousands of absolutely down-bad viewers. Yeah, she’s beautiful, but she’s also entertaining and wholesome, so it’s no wonder why folks create waiting rooms for and replays of her livestreams. Unfortunately, her main channel is currently unavailable on Twitch.
Amouranth’s Twitch ban seems temporary for now
As spotted by Dexerto, Amouranth is now banned for the first time since October 2021. As is customary when a creator gets booted off the platform, their channel displays the standard text: “This channel is temporarily unavailable due to a violation of Twitch’s Community Guidelines or Terms of Service.” Interestingly, she hasn’t streamed since at least May 1, suggesting that perhaps something in one of her videos-on-demand (VODs) led to the ban. However, because her channel has been nuked, you can’t view her content, so there’s no way to determine, at least for now, why Twitch decided to ban her.
At the time of this writing, Amouranth and Twitch haven’t publicly said anything on the matter. Kotaku has reached out to Amouranth for comment. A Twitch representative told Kotaku that it doesn’t comment on specific individual streamer bans.
Despite this lack of explanation, Dexerto posited an interesting theory that might explain the ban. The publication speculated that the burgeoning drama between Amouranth and fellow streamer Adriana Chechik, which escalatedon April 27 as Amouranth responded to Chechik’s calling her “a fucking cunt” by saying she wanted to fight her in a ring—most likely a reference to Creator Clash, an annual charity boxing event that started in May 2022—could be the reason for Amouranth’s latest Twitch ban.
According to Twitch’s community guidelines revolving around violence and threats, any violations of its rules on or off the platform could result in a temporary suspension or a permanent ban depending on the severity.
“Acts and threats of violence are counterproductive to promoting a safe, inclusive, and friendly community,” the guidelines read. “Violence on Twitch is taken seriously and is considered a zero-tolerance violation, and all accounts associated with such activities on Twitch will be indefinitely suspended.”
Amouranth isn’t the only big-name creator to have been yeeted off the platform recently. GTA streamer Bruce “BruceDropEmOff” Ray was banned three times this year, with his latest exile happening on May 3. Internet personality Dalauan “LowTierGod” Sparrow was banned at the tail end of April. And both Cloud9 streamer Hans “Forsen” Fors and Kai Cenat, the new King of Twitch, were temporarily banned last month before their channels got reinstated a week later. Twitch seems to be clapping tons of popular streamers right now.
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