Queen of the Damned; Claire Denis
Aaliyah appears in Queen of the Damned like the girl next door dressed up for Halloween. But if the girl next door sauntered across your vision the way Aaliyah does, you'd tell her mother. (Or maybe not.) Coming a half hour into the movie, Aaliyah makes the kind of entrance people remember, like Marlene Dietrich in the white tuxedo of Blonde Venus?glamorous and half-camp. Aaliyah wears a headdress, breast-plate armor and her full lips part to expose cute mini-fangs, but it's her exposed midriff?her elongated torso undulating to some internal rhythm as she moves from screen right to left?that makes her a bronze thrill. (Bronze Thrills was the name of an old "race" magazine that used to specialize in romantic pulp for black readers. Aaliyah's showcase here recalls that specialization yet reaches out to an even larger audience.) Playing Akasha, a centuries-old vampire awakened into the modern pop era, Aaliyah is, simply, the sexiest, funniest girl on the screen today.
This isn't an appreciation I ever expected to confer. Like some of Aaliyah's music fans, I questioned the sense of her appearing in Queen of the Damned as a paragon of evil?especially knowing, after her accidental death in a plane crash last summer, that it would be her final screen role, competing with the legacy of her records. But Aaliyah radiates something greater than the Anne Rice source novel's infatuation with the occult. She has a giddy-kiddie, Halloween playfulness that makes it possible for one to enjoy her performance as a put-on. This informs the parodistic showbiz plot that plays out the ways performers (singers, vampires) feed off their audiences.
Lestat (Stuart Townsend) is a vampire with a marketably youthful appearance. Bored by eternal night stalking, he opts for rock 'n' roll stardom to broadcast his disaffection. Lestat uses his pop stardom to rally gullible fans (and other, envious vampires) to a concert in Death Valley. His fame is based on exactly the same demonic shtick that worked for Alice Cooper in the 70s (memorably parodied in De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise) and most recently used by Marilyn Manson. Wearing light-iris contact lenses similar to Marilyn Manson's, Aaliyah flips the script?in fact, a wittier screenplay would have made more use of Aaliyah (Akasha duetting with Lestat?) to salvage the tawdry storyline as camp.
Director Michael Rymer's less literal approach to the Anne Rice material is smoothly entertaining, as if Rymer learned from the errors of Interview with the Vampire. The credit sequence, featuring Lestat's death-metal music video, quotes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Townsend asserts dark disaffection like Brandon Lee in The Crow. Even the central homosex gimmick of Rice's Vampire Chronicles?Lestat's relationship to his vampire mentor Marius (Vincent Perez)?works suggestively, because nobody portrays pansex more intensely than Perez.
But it all just seems like hugger-mugger next to Aaliyah. Aaliyah's stardom has more immediate appeal than the nonsense about blood and evil. The pop audience rightly feels implicated in the spectacle of her sexy display, which better positions them to reflect on the Lestat story as a satire of how the music biz works. That Death Valley concert exposes an industry that willingly sells death to the masses. A news reporter says, "The City of Lost Angels has already fed on the blood of youth." And movie-minded viewers may recall how Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (more than 30 years ago) depicted a Death Valley orgy to show pop culture's corruption of youth. Although Aaliyah's not on screen for more than 20 minutes, her guest star appearance in Queen of the Damned dominates the film. It is a commentary on how to read fame. As a result, the Lestat story feels like a subplot. Lestat's petulant personal dilemma ("There comes a time for every vampire when the idea of eternal life seems unbearable") and the storyline involving Jesse (Marguerite Moreau), a student of paranormal science seeking to know more about Lestat and her own vampire heritage, both seem contrived to make up for the unfortunate absence of the film's genuine star.
In real-life contrast to Lestat, Aaliyah recalls that famous conundrum in Godard's Breathless, where an artist wishes "To become immortal and then to die." She seems ageless, her girlish smile suggesting something more palatable than the hackneyed Dracula antics. The gifted Neil Jordan couldn't dispel the boredom of vampire existentialism in the 1994 film of Rice's Interview with the Vampire, but Aaliyah transcends it by demonstrating the thrill of pop exhibitionism. When Akasha destroys a vampire coven, setting fire to mundane fiends with just a perturbed, malicious glance, her long-waisted Shiva-like stride through the flames have "psychedelic grace"?the memorable term Pauline Kael ascribed to Sissy Spacek in Carrie.
Strangest irony of Aaliyah's career is that none of the music videos she made contain a steady, memorable portrait of her; she's always in costume or in motion. Last summer's We Need a Resolution video showed Aaliyah lying entwined with a snake as if to make her sexuality fit a typical licentiousness. And before that, Aaliyah's videos (Are You That Somebody?, One in a Million) were mostly medium shots of her dancing or wearing sunglasses in an attempt at some kind of enigmatic persona. Aaliyah's image-making acquiesced to music industry trends so consistently we have no idea who Aaliyah was any more than 50s audiences knew the real James Dean. But despite her superb, underrated final album?featuring the revelatory song "We Need a Resolution"?Aaliyah extended r&b feminism into new terms: hiphop made unexpectedly sinuous and elegant, more so than the Mary J. Blige standard. Aaliyah seemed a malleable sex symbol, yet in Queen of the Damned her eagerness to please?even as Akasha, the most malign woman in history?comes across as playful.
Queen of the Damned will only be remembered for Aaliyah's apparent titillation with playing the bad girl?a naivete that she shared with a pro like Tina Turner, who eagerly portrayed the Acid Queen in Tommy and Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Akasha is first depicted as an alabaster Egyptian ruin, yet the last image is as cast-iron statuary. The white/black symbolism confirms the range of Aaliyah's appeal. Both images are a monument to the elusive fact that a female pop star's public ambition is often mingled with personal fantasy.