TV: American Horror Story 3.1 - Bitchcraft

[seraphcelene]

I really do love American Horror Story. I opted out of most of last season because it went wahoonie shape pretty quickly. Coming in mid-season to watch Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) undergo Homosexuality Aversion Therapy at the hands of Zachary Quinto's Dr. Oliver Thredson didn't encourage me to change my mind. I have heard, however, that the show was better than it started out as. I may yet give Season 2 another pass. Season 3 was on my list of much watch pretty quickly because I wanted to see what they were going to be up to. Uncomfortable as it is, American Horror Story always goes there with style, with panache, and with a lot of nerve.


American Horror Story: Coven is a big ball of inappropriate wacky. Gender, sex, race, (inevitably, even if it's just in subtext) and religion all wound up into a gorgeous, crazy wacky ball of Tim Minear produced awesomeness. Three girls attending Miss Somebody or Other's Academy for Exceptional Girls is joined by Zoe Benson (Tarissa Farmiga) after an unfortunate incident with her boyfriend. Basically, during sex Zoe discovers that she is afflicted with a metaphorical vagina dentata. While her snatch doesn't have teeth, it is dead dangerous and basically she can fuck guys to death. Zoe's mother lets her in on a little secret: the family is afflicted with witchcraft, although it doesn't show up in every generation or in every girl. Zoe just happened to have won the genetic jackpot. No sooner does her mother announce that Zoe is being shuffled off to witch boarding school, then bam three African American albino men (I kid you not) swoop in and hustle her off to the train station and neatly deposit her at the front gate of The Academy.

The other girls at the school include a telekinetic (Emma Roberts's Madison), a "human voodoo doll" (Gabourey Sidibe's Queenie), and a clairvoyant (Jamie Brewer's Nan). Sarah Paulson plays Cordelia Foxx, the headmistress and Jessica Lange is her mother, Fiona Goode, the most powerful witch of her generation. Jessica Lange is divine ("Don't make me drop a house on you," she tells her uptight daughter) and the show is as tongue-in-cheek and fun as it is dark, creepy, and uncomfortable. The night after Emma Robert's character is slipped a roofie at a frat party and gang raped, Lange lays into the junior witches for basically wasting away in Hogwarts and then takes them on a "field trip" into the Quarter, insisting that they all wear something black.

As for the fat boys, well, they got their comeuppance as Roberts follows Farmiga's Zoe into the street where the other girl had tried to chase down a bus containing the guys. Roberts takes a deep breath, focuses, and with a flick of her wrist the bus flips. Seven of the nine passengers are killed. Zoe takes care of one of the remaining two at the hospital at the end of the episode. She's a girl pushed in too many directions and facing too much tragedy all at once. Farmiga has her sister's (actresses Vera Farmiga) acting sensibilities and hers is a cool, subtle performance. Everything happens in the eyes.

So, women, empowered as they are, in this narrative are still vulnerable and they take vengeance with the tools and skills that they have. Although, Roberts plays it off as no big deal the next morning, we see her curled up in the bath tub crying at the episode's end. Revenge may be sweet, but its never really been known to actually fix a problem. Meanwhile, among all of that, Jessica Lange baits her daughter and then goes to dig up a sadistic madwoman from the 1830's who made a habit of torturing her slaves and, a la the Countess of Bathory, smears her face every night with a mixture made of their pancreas. She meets her end at the hands of Marie Leveau, but doesn't actually end. Come to find out, she's been bound and buried in the courtyard across the street for the last 100+ years. Hasn't aged a day.

There is alot of talent joining Ms. Lange in wandering these halls: Kathy Bates, Angela Basset as Marie Leveau, Tarissa Farmiga, Patty LuPone, Gabourey Sidibe and Mare Winningham. It's going to be an interesting, possibly awesome, season.

Check out Slate for an awesome, and far more coherent, review:
What Sensitive Subject Is Left for American Horror Story to Treat With Wonderful Disrespect? Oh, Right.

Comments

[darlas-mom.livejournal.com]

"Asylum" was actually a lot better than I thought it would be. Mind, it largely accomplishes this by going so far over the top that it crashes into another planet, tunnels through its core, and then colonizes a whole new top out there in space. Plus, you have to be willing to overlook its determination to immerse the audience in every uncomfortable thing it possibly can. (Just once, just this one time, I hoped "AHS" would manage to go a whole season without someone being raped. Twenty minutes, I think "Coven" managed? Dang it. And now they've graduated to gang rape, it's like they're actively trying to make each rape measurably worse in some way than the last.)

I'm gonna keep watching, because once I start, I can't seem to stop (I watched "Murder House" in a weekend, and "Asylum" in a single night), but I'm going to be super-squeamish about it.

Random aside: did you know Madame LaLaurie (Kathy Bates' character) was actually a real person who really did at least some of those things? And Nicholas Cage actually really did own her house for a while? (My mother called me up to geek out about it after she saw the "Coven" premiere because she went on the museum tour of Madame LaLaurie's house last time she was in NOLA.)

[seraphcelene]

LOL! That's an awesome description of the cray that was happening on Asylum. I need to go back and finish it. I know I do. I'm actually on the fence about the gang rape scene. It was horrific, that is without question. It's meant to shock and discomfit, that is also terribly obvious. Depending on where they go from here and how they deal with it, will determine for me the value and clarify the intent in including that scene. I say this because the behavior enacted has become a terrible reality in recent years. I feel like people ignore the behavior or they blame the victim and shame the girl. Girls are committing suicide because of this, being assaulted, having the assault filmed, and then circulated like its some kind of joke. It's a MAJOR problem, but because minors are involved, the details get swept under the rug or glossed over. How is it that these things get swept under the rug? How is it that this is still not something that is dealt with with more transparency?

So, I see that scene in two ways. I cringe that it was included. It horrifies me that this is a behavior that has become so prevalent that it's been included in drama which is reflective of the time that we live in. Again, how the makers of the show move forward with it will determine alot. Emma Roberts crying in the bottom of the tub is one step. Zoe's revenge is another. Those are moments that acknowledge the horror, but if Madison waving her hand and overturning a bus is the end of it, I will be very, very angry. Maybe I'm expecting too much. I don't know. We'll see. Slavery and the torturous dehumanization of slaves is one of my hair triggers, and both the opening scene of the show, and the rape scene were effective in pulling that trigger. How the unleashing of those emotions are dealt with will determine this season for me.

I don't know. I'm rambling a little bit. My feelings are in a wad about those two scenes. I'm disturbed that I've read more about that rape scene than about the caged people tortured and missing body parts.