The first episode of “American Horror Story: Freak Show” is an audacious, if not slightly tenuous attempt to arouse and shock. While it relies heavily on platitudes and the inherent fear the average individual feels when confronted with the unfamiliar, it’s stylistically gorgeous like a tasty blood-soaked lollypop. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk are experts at drawing an audience with unique and relentless thrill ride pilot episodes and ‘Monsters Among Us’ is no exception to this rule.
“Freak Show” follows a rare carnival of human oddities—a dying breed of entertainment in 1950s America. Set up on the outskirts of town, the Big Top hides a variety of “monsters,” “freaks,” “::insert any of the several adjectives used in the 62-minute pilot here::” from the “stuffy” inhabitants of quaint Juniper, Florida. The freak show is spearheaded, governed, and shepherded by Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange), a collector of unusual and extraordinary humans. But the show is floundering—kept alive only by Mars’ delusion that she’s meant to be a star. A delusion that propels her to lie and manipulate her way into the lives of “new freaks,” namely the conjoined twins Dot and Bette Tattler (Sarah Paulson), who will invariably draw a roaring audience and save the day.
‘Monsters Among Us’ is a considerably tame spectacle of horror, lacking any real terror, but I think many of us gave up on feeling fear over AHS years ago. The only solid attempt at scares (that’s not bloated with ballyhoo) is the killer clown and wait…where have we seen that before? Oh, everywhere. Not to say any of this is necessarily a bad thing. If the show is done well, I can live without the horror element. But at some point it’ll need to stop doing the screaming for us. That’s the type of smoke and mirrors I don’t want to see at the carnival. Their attempt at tricking us into being scared by “telling not showing” will inevitably become tiresome.
One of my growing concerns over the last two seasons of AHS is that it continues to be described as “psychosexual horror,” when really the first season was the only one to truly fit that bill. The effort that Falchuk and Murphy put into making this season sexually graphic comes off desperate over organic. See: Lange asking wildly out-of-context questions of Dot and Bette like, “Do you at least pleasure yourself?” And Jimmy Darling’s (Evan Peters) Home and Garden-style lobster-claw sex parties. Not to mention the unspeakably rapey, behind the scenes, gonzo freak show orgy (seriously, I’m no pearl-grabber, but what the hell?). The key to psychosexual horror is seamlessly blending the sex and fear until you’ve confused your viewer into feeling aroused when they should feel dread. It’s not simply stitching together dichotomous scenes.
Here’s what the episode does right: Paulson’s portrayal of the diversely natured conjoined twins, Dot and Bette, serve up some fascinating meta food for thought. There are those of us who look upon horror with enthusiasm and delight. We see it as something “pink and wrapped in silk,” and there are those of us who recoil and shun it, seeing it as the “depths of despair.” Dot and Bette function as a fictional representation of the two types of “Freak Show” viewers: the ones who see this as some sort of fresh hell and the ones who see it as an exquisite excitement.
And again, the creators have completely nailed the stylistic nuances of a hyper-colorful, vulgar 1950s-on-crack, kitschy carnival scene that immediately pulls the viewer into its clutch. And it’s loaded with incredible performances from the expected: Lange, Peters, and Kathy Bates… to the not so expected: John Carroll Lynch, Finn Wittrock, and Grace Gummer (who unfortunately doesn’t appear to have a recurring role).
My guess is that if this fourth installment in the ‘AHS’ anthology does well, it’s because we’re generally so eager to grasp onto the absurd, which Murphy and Falchuk do with panache and always have. And frankly, I think the carnival theme, as potentially tiresome as it may be, will prove to be one of the more fluid concepts of all the seasons.
What did you think of “AHS: Freak Show” Monsters Among Us? (And please, feel free to voice-off on Lange’s anachronistic performance of Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’)