This is one of the reasons why I, as a Black person, will never be able to trust Hollywood.

Hollywood operates as a kind of propaganda rooted in justifying the acts and terrors of the American empire—that is, when it isn’t outright encouraging those things. From Birth of a Nation to now, Hollywood has worked to reinforce a hierarchy based on race, gender, sexuality, etc. and has convinced generations of Americans that this way of thinking and being is not only right, but is etched into the fabric of reality itself.

I bring all of this up because of the Interview With the Vampire television series. A well-acted, well-crafted series that airs on AMC, Vampire was one of the most egregious baits and switches I’ve ever seen Hollywood pull. It begins with us bearing witness to the life and testimony of Louis de Pointe (played sublimely by Jacob Anderson, who has miraculously not won any of the so-called major awards for playing this role even though his performance has put everyone else acting on TV to complete and total shame), a man who is stalked and turned into a creature of the night by a white vampire named Lestat de Lioncourt (played to great acclaim by Sam Reid, though I find his performance a little bit over the top).

Anyway, Louis tells us his harrowing and heartbreaking story of love and abuse at the hands of Lestat over two seasons. But when we get to the end, we discover that Louis and this other vampire, Armand (played quite exquisitely by Assad Zaman) had been lying the whole time and poor Lestat—poor, sweet, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, chisel-jawed, billionaire, raping, murdering, psychopathic Lestat—was just the hapless victim of the conniving n*gger and sand n*gger all along. And now, season 3 “will shift to Lestat’s point of view, as Reid’s character becomes a rock star and tries to reclaim his story from the way Louis told it.” In other words, Lestat will tell his story the right (white) way. One of the most vital components of whiteness is its false, but viciously defended, claim to innocence.

This is completely connected to what is going on politically in the United States right now, with Trump/Vance/Musk/MAGA attempting to erase history and replace it with the fairy tales required to keep white supremacist capitalist patriarchy functioning at peak efficiency. Empire operates on the blood, sweat, and tears of those it crushes, yes. But the first fuel it needs is bullshit. That’s the one that allows it to see people as crushable to begin with. That’s the one that allows it to construct the church/cult of might makes right and forfeit its humanity in favor of domination.

And Hollywood does its part as the public relations (brainwashing) arm of this enterprise, having us, as James Baldwin once put it, rooting for Gary Cooper over the Indians, when the Indians are us!

That white imagination is something else, yo. Sickening. But peep game: