I also will confess now that I only watched three episodes of Hotel. In the span of those three episodes my soul died. I cannot think of another TV series with a season as unwatchable as AHS: Hotel. It was like watching an obscene, badly acted kaleidoscope that never stopped turning. The best thing I could possibly say about it is that when I'm 90, and have legit run out of things to do in life, then I might finish watching it.
So it is with immense relief and satisfaction that I now review season six, Roanoke. Some spoilers ahead.
The true conceit behind American Horror Story is that the show's creators must work with uniquely American tropes, and naturally a country as young, in the global landscape, as this one has much less history to work with. We have one ghost story - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. So I commend Murphy & Falchuk for tuning in to the institutions that have been uniquely horrific - or just chill-inducing - in the last four hundred or so years. The haunted house; the insane asylum; witch hunts; freak shows; fucked up hotels; cults. The legendary lost colony of Roanoke, while kind of easily explainable when you think about it, still has plenty of potential because there's no definitive answer as to what happened. Season six uses this as an intensely engaging backdrop.
The remarkably different tone of the show compared to all other seasons is immediately noticeable, for two reasons. First, it is presented as a television show about a haunting in North Carolina, so we cut back and forth between the 'real' people relaying their story (including mainstay Lily Rabe as yoga instructor Shelby) and the actors portraying them (Cuba Gooding, Jr. as her traveling salesman husband). Second, after a brief backstory set in L.A., we follow Shelby and Matt Miller to eastern North Carolina where they buy a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the middle of absolute nowhere. The burnished golden hues of the southern countryside and the clean yet vintage interior of the stunning farmhouse are unlike anything AHS has presented us with before. It is perfectly Gothic and dare I say beautiful.
This is also the most pure 'ghost story' the series has ever filmed, and that includes Murder House. It is strange that it took six seasons for a show about horror to go full-on scary movie, but at least they sculpted the perfect setting for it. Matt and Shelby are, from almost their first night, bothered by strange happenings: the wails of nocturnal beasts; knives misplacing themselves; a hailstorm of teeth. Though things get intense more quickly than your usual scary story, Roanoke makes as much use of the unknown as Murder House did of the completely known.
In typical AHS fashion each episode is stuffed with plot (though, some with their pinkies in the air would remind us, not always with story), to the point where what you thought was going to be the main idea only turns out to be the driving force of the first two hours, tops. In a good way, this keeps the viewer interested, on the hook; the writers are Scheherazade grasping for one more night, then one more night. Where can this possibly go next?
We learn that the land is haunted by the ghost of Thomasin White, wife of the original governor of Roanoke and known generally as The Butcher. (We'll ignore that the centuries-old female name Thomasin is en vogue now thanks to 2015's The Witch) She stalks the woods along with the trapped souls of her fellow colonists (torches abound, natch), reenacting old blasphemies (putting a boar's head on a criminal(?) and roasting him on a pyre) and seeking to create new ones in order to cleanse the land with the blood of trespassers. In reliably frequent flashbacks (dramatic re-enactments, we are reminded) we learn how she was turned against, sent to the woods to die, saved by an actual witch (Lady Gaga), and returned to reclaim her rightful place in the colony. Her son, Ambrose, is kind of a factor but, kind of not. He's a pushover, basically.
The colony of Roanoke then supposedly became 'lost' when Thomasin demanded they move further inland, where food was abundant. There they lived quite well until the witch needed a public sacrifice and Thomasin chose a little girl named Priscilla. The colonists turned against her again, so this time, she pretended to agree, repented, invoked the name of Jesus like a virtuous woman, and then poisoned them all, finished them off with a butcher's knife, and had the witch slit her throat so they could all haunt the land forever. Classic Thomasin!
During the blood moon each October, these ghosts go from being pesky nuisances to actual killers, and it is this fate that Matt and Shelby spend genuinely all of the first five episodes trying to evade. Matt's sister, Lee, a divorced, painkiller-addicted ex-cop with minimal parental rights, comes to stay with Shelby while Matt does his salesman thing out of town, and there is a whole subplot involving her daughter Flora that is, really, pretty annoying all the way through.
While intriguing, gorgeously shot, and much more coherent than any season since Asylum, Roanoke still must fall prey to the usual haunted house pitfalls. Why don't they just leave? Yes, they sunk their combined life savings (er, $40,000) into the house at an auction, but they can't just stay in a motel till the blood moon ends? They can't go live with Lee at her house, instead of bringing her here? They can't lock the front door? Conveniently the police are no help, and the idea that nearby hillbillies are staging elaborate scenes to simply 'scare off' the interracial couple is given credence for far too long.
You would think that these re-enactments intercut with present-day narration by the real Matt, Shelby and Lee would reduce the impact of the internal story, but I found that it both relieved me of too much tension in the most dire circumstances, and led me to believe that there would be much more to this season than just the fictional show "My Roanoke Nightmare." Once again Sara Paulson is back, as the actress portraying Shelby, and much less eye-rolling than she ever was as Cordelia in Coven; also back for more is Wes Bentley as The Butcher's son (initially just a flash of eye candy at the end of the first episode, to keep us on the hook) and Kathy Bates as The Butcher herself. She is in prime form, again affecting a strange accent but very convincing as the unapologetic, bloodthirsty keeper of the woods. I think there is more gore in this season than in the others simply for the fact that the camera refuses to turn away, whether someone's getting their head split by a cleaver, or getting their entrails steadily pulled out, or being drawn and quartered in quick fashion. This violence, however one might feel about it, allows The Butcher to be truly menacing - she doesn't just say she's gonna kill you and then slink around for a while; she says it and she fucking does it.
Rounding out the cast of returns is Angela Bassett as the portrayed Lee, Dennis O'Hare (my personal favorite) as a former owner of the farmhouse, and Evan Peters as the wealthy 18th century art lover, Edward Mott, who originally built the house. Though his arc was brief, it was worth the wait, as Peters is capable of being just absolutely ridiculous and still somehow completely likable, no matter what role he's in. Major props to the special effects team who allowed us brief glimpses of his true, skeletal visage in the flickering torchlight. And as mentioned above, Lady Gaga returns, but in a role that fits her personal brand of weirdness much, much better, as an English stowaway to the New World who survives on ancient Druidic magic and wears a super-weird tiara of antlers. Though her Italian accent doesn't make any sense, and though we literally never see her perform any of the deeply evil magic she is reportedly master of, she is just underused enough to leave a lasting impression. So much better than whatever she thought she was doing on Hotel.
Matt, Shelby, Lee, and Flora barely escape the clutches of hillbillies and dead colonists, and the second half of AHS: Roanoke begins.
***
As I had hoped, "My Roanoke Nightmare" ended and was revealed to be the sleeper TV hit of 2016, garnering bigger ratings than the Superbowl and The Walking Dead (haha). We learn that Matt and Shelby have separated, and we get to meet the actors as they really are: Sarah Paulson's Audrey is actually British and has since married Rory, the millennial actor who portrayed Edward Mott (fun fact: Ed Mott is an ancestor to Dandy Mott, the wasted potential from Freak Show). Monet Timisiimu claims that portraying and getting inside the head of alleged killer Lee is what has driven her to drink. And oh yeah, Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s Dominic Banks had a weekend fling with the real Shelby which lead to her separation from Matt. Even in fiction it's kind of messed up to have an affair with the man who only played your husband on TV.
And Cheyenne Jackson plays Sidney, the creator of MRN who is now plotting a second season featuring the true Matt (Andre Holland), Shelby and Lee (Adina Porter) with the actors who portrayed them, stuck together in the farmhouse during the blood moon. A reality TV show, only meant to play off the spectacular ratings potential the first season created; no one except the people who actually lived there believes in the ghosts. (Honestly, I'd been hoping since the first episode that the 'real' and 'fake' characters would share screen time, so - yay!)
Though Agnes, the actress who played The Butcher, was the fan favorite of the show, she was not allowed back, and this was revealed to her in a scene that was more vicious than any of the Roanoke killings. Sadly she had had some sort of psychotic break, having gotten too far into the role of The Butcher, and she was banned for logical safety reasons. Still, Sidney hoped this would just drive her to crash the production anyway, which, of course, she did.
The vast majority of the second half of Roanoke is presented through found footage, and I was surprised at how all-in Murphy and Falchuk went at what even then, in 2016, was the end of the found footage era. That doesn't mean it isn't fun to watch - it is. And though the scares this time around are more over the top, we still get some legitimate chills, as when Audrey, Monet and Lee encounter the real Edward Mott in the underground tunnels. That was some good stuff.
And in that vein I think the show somehow brilliantly pulled off the difference between life and show business. For the most part the main characters were given balanced portrayals in MRN, but when confronted with the true colonists we see how they were given a gloss and a sheen for TV. The most striking example is when Agnes, having gone mad yet again and having actually butchered actual people in her actual costume from the show, comes face to face with the real Butcher. This may be one of my favorite TV moments in recent memory. The camera angle calmly cuts to the visage of a silent, motionless, frighteningly regal, bewigged woman in Elizabethan garb, and in that moment you are jolted back to reality - a strange thing when watching something that is entirely unreal. In the show the Butcher wore old-timey clothes but they didn't match what the real Thomasin White would have worn in the late 1500s, and Agnes's interpretation was extremely wordy, lots of proclamations about her land and about being the tree and the lightning and what not; the real Butcher didn't say a single word, ever. Fucking brilliant.
This continued with the real nurses, who were gray and filthy and nothing like the vibrant young women portrayed on the show; the real Mott, who when angry at trespassers became a roaring, spectral fright; and even the real Priscilla, whose face was no longer that of a cherub. The only real, obvious misstep of the season is the way they treated the Japanese residents who died at the house in the 1970s. I don't care how many horror conventions Ryan Murphy wants to use, it is completely ridiculous to have their ghosts scuttling around like J-horror onryu just because they're Japanese. As one fan on a comment board wryly noted (and I paraphrase), "I guess if one of the victims had been Jewish, they would have seen a Golem."
The second half of Roanoke is perhaps the entire series' most unconventional (I can't speak for Hotel though!) not only for the use of found footage but in the structure of the season finale. It's like they said "We haven't parodied true crime documentaries, or CNN, or ghost hunting shows, so let's get writing, people!!" So the end of the story, focusing on the sole survivor of the predictably murderous three nights at the farmhouse, is told through a variety of 'reality' formats. It totally works if you like your American Horror Story a little* batshit crazy. Which I do. (Fan bonus: it links this season directly to the world of Asylum)
Overall this was the most enjoyable season of the show since Asylum. It didn't quite match how over-the-top Murder House was, but that's a good thing. The show found a way to be original within its own format and constrained by its own limitations (like the endless returning of actors, none more so than Paulson and Peters), though the narrative could still have been tighter - and hinging everything on Lee's love for her daughter was, though not unbelievable, still awkward, which is what we have come to expect after six seasons.
Time to tentatively press the play button on Cult, I guess.
*massively
No comments:
Post a Comment