American Horror Story is indeed cursed, but not in the same way as Rosemary’s Baby. Roman Polanski’s celebrated 1968 horror film — whose influence on this season of AHS becomes part of the story line in a howler of a cold open — is one of a handful of films whose dark subject matter seems to have seeped into the lives of the people who made it. I’ll let this Vanity Fair article explain the details, but suffice it to say: The infamous murder of Sharon Tate on August 8, 1969, isn’t the only premature death linked to that film.
American Horror Story, meanwhile, is cursed by lousy writing — mild by comparison, sure, but still fatal. “Little Gold Man†helpfully identifies every one of the characters in its flashback to “Manhattan, 1967,†including Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra, Tate (who allegedly said “The devil is beautiful,†just not in the random context presented here), and Polanski, portrayed here as a weird little man with no regard for his actors’ comfort or safety. You could have figured out who everyone was by the wigs alone, but that would be too subtle for this show.
Mia Farrow must have failed Siobhan somehow because she was not nominated for an Oscar for Rosemary’s Baby. Given the reckless way that AHS: Delicate is blending reality and fiction, maybe she’ll win one on the show? The idea of Kim Kardashian (again, the line between the real person and Siobhan, the character is thin to nonexistent here) meeting Mia Farrow is hilarious. But the real sidesplitters come once we return to the present day and to Anna Victoria Alcott, who was missing from last week’s episode.
Anna’s dreams are all coming true: She’s been nominated for an Oscar, a fact she learns when she wakes up in the hospital next to an empty bed previously occupied by Ms. Preecher, whose drag-queen-style, painted-on eyebrows look especially dramatic in close-up. (One detail among many that bothered me this week: No one was looking for Anna on Oscar nominations morning?) But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, we must attend Virginia Harding’s funeral, which seems to be an obligation for everyone but especially for Dex, who stops just short of calling his dead mom a bitch in her eulogy.
Dex Sr. is emboldened by his ex-wife’s death as well, cracking jokes about alimony and telling Anna she’s “big as a house†as the pregnant soon-to-be-Oscar nominee rushes out of the service to go find Ms. Preecher — heavily sedated, as multiple characters state in hilarious matter-of fact-ways — and see what she knows about what’s happening to Anna. The answer: not much.
To find out more, we must embark on Los Angeles and the gifting suite, where Cora (who’s a nurse at the fertility clinic, in case you are still confused after all that expositional bludgeoning) confesses to Anna that she’s the one who’s been stalking her for the past seven episodes. In classic psycho-bitch fashion, it’s a thick stew of lies, sexual intrigue, and breaking and entering, fueled by Cora’s confusion over whether she wants to kill Anna or be Anna. (One thing she is clear on is that she’s got student loans to pay.) I suspect that an affair with “a literal zygote,†as Siobhan puts it in the limo on the way to the Oscars ceremony, won’t be the end of Dex’s betrayals.
For the moment, however, he’s out of the picture — all the better for Sibohan to worm her way into Anna’s confidence, and soon enough her womb. Kardashian delivers some real gems in “Little Gold Man,†many of them related to bodily fluids: Her ode to Harvey Weinstein’s ejaculate (the whole potted-plant incident did actually happen, by the way). The moment she becomes Anna’s poop coach, she exhorts Anna to “squeeze that motherfucker out ASAP, it’s go time, bitch!†(I actually had to pause the show to LOL at this one). Her very wise advice to never trust a man with blond highlights. Her satanic career-doula moment at the ceremony itself. And those claw gloves, my Lord!
Oh yeah, and Anna’s legs turn into snakes or crocodile skin or maybe spiders, given the spider imagery in the marketing materials for AHS: Delicate. That’s all fine and whatever, but Kim Kardashian is out here being flippant about sexual assault allegations (Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski in one episode, yikes) and baiting the tabloids with an onscreen kiss that the ever-reliable Daily Mail has already described as “steamy.†This bitch knows what she’s doing. Does American Horror Story? We’ll find out next week, as the season ends with a plop like that little pile of goo Anna leaves on the Oscars stage.