American Horror Story has always been messy. Every season is filled with unnecessarily bitchy characters, overly sexualized imagery, obscure pop-culture callbacks — camp for the sake of camp. That is the joy of the show: Above all, it feels like an avenue for play. This is, moreover, what makes the show true to its name. It is a story, filled with rich literary devices that can be picked apart or not. More crucially, though, it is American, constantly questioning the long tradition of shaping what that actually means. Throughout the show, for example, we’ve explored suburban paranoia, fantasies of domestic bliss, the legacy of slavery and terror upon the racialized body, disciplinary institutions and madness, among many other themes. There is often no narrative cohesion to all this, because there is often no narrative cohesion to the history itself.
That said, the show often shows its hand too quickly. We’re given a powerful first episode, one containing all the crucial elements for an impactful horror-drama. But, as mentioned in the previous recap regarding the previous season (Red Tide, specifically), these elements are either left dangling or razed to nothing. Now, four episodes into the 11th season, I feel some mild confidence in the fact that there is no sense of the show falling apart just yet. Instead, there is the rare sense that we are truly just getting started.
The murders and the illness are the driving mysteries of this season, but we’re also repeatedly reminded of an overarching, even more sinister problem: that all of this is being perpetuated by a governmental force. The illness may have been intentionally created and distributed by Nazi scientists for the U.S. government in Operation Paperclip (which yes, was a real operation and also mentioned as the background of Dr. Arden in Asylum), but whether that is the truth and how exactly the illness is being perpetuated now remains unknown. With the murders, it’s clear that the police are homophobically unwilling to properly investigate the case. In these latest two episodes, however, we become increasingly suspicious that Detective Patrick, who has seemed invested in solving the case, may be wrapped up in this, too.
We also currently have three villains, a figure that seems destined to increase. In “Smoke Signals†and “Black Out,†Zachary Quinto’s Sam was presented more as a sexual predator and sadist rather than a killer, though he still could be murderous. Big Daddy was once again suggested to be both a ghost-like harbinger of death and the perpetrator of death himself. He stands by silently as Sam’s dungeon slave escapes, yet he is definitely the one who set fire to the very lovely gay bar and who attacked Detective Patrick in Central Park. Meanwhile, there’s no question that Jeff Hiller’s Mr. Whitley is the Mai-Tai Killer. His inspirations for killing may be the usual serial killer perversions and the thrill of the kill, but as he says over the phone to Detective Patrick, he is leading a “reckoning.†There is some sense of duty, sacrifice and maybe even the desire to bring attention to the gay community that makes Whitley a truly compelling serial killer.
With a bit more focus on Whitley, there’s also more of the horror that the previous two episodes lacked. First, Whitley tied up Gino inside of a morgue locker in a horribly claustrophobic scene reminiscent of the nailed-shut coffins in Cult. While one would expect it to take a bit more time for Gino to be rescued, Patrick finds him within, like, half an hour. Later, at the end of episode four, two of the men involved in the artsy gay scene of Theo end up stuck in an elevator with Whitley during a blackout. Claustrophobia heightens the sense of horror here as well, but darkness is a more prominent tool throughout the episode. The darkness is literal, a reference to the actual Manhattan blackout of 1977, but of course it’s figurative, too. This season is heavily utilizing noir elements, particularly as they reappeared in pulpy ’80s crime thrillers.
This darkness might represent a variety of things, but thus far it’s suggestive of the recurring fear that “something is coming†and a general sense of moral decay and decline. The pursuit of both pleasure and pain via sex and drugs among this specific set of the NYC gay community serve as the scapegoat for this sense, something that characters like Gino and Adam are actively trying to combat. Meanwhile, both Sam and Patrick may see themselves falling into an increasingly dark place where the lines of morality become blurred. Notably, this is another reference to the 1980 film Cruising, which follows a detective investigating murders in the late ’70s leather scene who finds himself increasingly enthralled with the subculture.
This season is borrowing a lot from Cruising, as has been discussed on the AHS subreddit, in my previous recap, and in the comments. Some use this as criticism — evidence of the lack of creativity of the show. By my view, however, this is precisely what we have come to expect from AHS. Every season has incorporated plots of both real life and film, taking from the scariest bits of American culture to draw the story together. Repetition has always been part of the AHS ethos. That’s why the show is ever scary at all: It’s because it’s familiar.
Body Count
• Finally, we hear from Patti LuPone as Kathy. It turns out, she’s not just the gay bathhouse singer, but the owner of the establishment. I have to assume that bathhouses have great acoustics?
• This season is driven by masculinity, as both noirs and crime thrillers tend to be. That said, the women of the show are among the most intriguing. Barbara, Hannah, Fran, Kathy, the homeless lady on the subway — they have much left to offer! I also pray we see Dunaway again.
• It may be wrong to critique the mime-clown-artist after his death, but I just have to say it: Nobody goes down to a subway platform at night, hears a glass bottle get knocked over and says “Hello?†You would simply mind your own business. Furthermore, if a homeless woman said “something is coming†and then went down the platform into the track tunnels, I wouldn’t follow her. But that’s just me!