Static Thoughts - American Horror Story: Hotel Premiere

So, American Horror Story started its fifth season this past week.  The new series, subtitled ‘Hotel,’ is a major change up for the show as it’s the first season that won’t feature the return of series regular Jessica Lange.  Since the show started in 2011 they’ve kept a very tight knit core group of actors from season to season in what’s been called a modern update of the classical concept of an actor’s company.  They’ve added to the group certainly, like Kathy Bates who joined the show in its 3^rd season Coven, but by enlarge the core group from season 1 hasn’t changed up to this season.  In an attempt to fill the hole Lange left in the production American Horror Story has brought in Lady Gaga to basically serve as their overacting and deadly series matriarch. 

Personally I’ve always had a complicated relationship with American Horror Story that I’ll get more into later in this review but Gaga’s involvement was entirely what brought me back for the fifth season.  I’ve always maintained that Lady Gaga has a unique and commanding screen presence and her history of elaborate and evocative music videos is right in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse.  If anyone could propel American Horror Story into the realms of compelling quality it would be her…it’s just too bad she didn’t do that.

Alright cards on the table upfront; I don’t exactly like American Horror Story.  I’ve got a lot of problems with the show and find it to be fundamentally broken on almost every conceivable technical level.  However, this article isn’t about trying to tear down the show as I actually maintain that its flaws are a big part of what makes it so incredibly unique and compelling.  If American Horror Story was simply “a bad show” I wouldn’t care about it nearly as much as I do.  No, American Horror Story transcends simple badness into a realm that defies all logic, a realm of surreal incompetence that would border on the legitimate genius if it were somehow intentional.  My point is, I’m not trying to “take down” this show or ruin it for anyone who likes it, I’m trying to simply get my head around the fact this show exists at all.  To me the existence of American Horror Story is one of those unaccountable mysteries that modern science will never have a satisfactory answer for, right up there with the mysteries of quantum physics and how consciousness works.  I’m still not unconvinced Ryan Murphy isn’t just an alien in a human suit that bluffed his way into making television shows only without any knowledge of how human interactions or storytelling works.  With all that in mind let’s talk about American Horror Story: Hotel.

This latest season of American Horror Story revolves around a fictional hotel in Los Angeles known as the Hotel Cortez.  The Cortez is based on the real life Hotel Cecil, which was the staying place of several notorious serial killers throughout American history.  That particular blend of macabre real life horror with classic noir and horror film iconography is the core of America Horror Story’s visual and aesthetic identity.  It’s an odd blend to say the least and part of what I find so vexing about the program. 

Part of why I’ve always been drawn to American Horror Story is that the title implies the idea of telling horror stories informed from a more explicitly and uniquely American identity and iconography.  The show has never really capitalized on this claim; instead the emphasis is less about nationalist or cultural identity and more about drawing on the actual horrors of American history to inform the content. 

Even after 5 seasons I’m still not totally convinced this idea works, especially given the show broke with elements of that formula during Coven, but credit where it’s due: drawing from American hotel tragedy makes more sense that just trying to ascribe hotels as an element of the American cultural identity.  In particular the season is allegedly planning to draw on the real life serial killing of Dr. H. H. Holmes, one of the first and most prolific American serial killers.  In 1893 Holmes constructed a special hotel of death designed with hidden room, a sound proof vault, and kiln as a means of trapping, murdering, and disposing of the bodies of his confirmed 27 victims.  It’s a creepy story and honestly the better suited for American Horror Story’s more manic stylings than the horrors of slavery or the American freak show tradition.

The fictional influences on this season are a bit more scattershot.  Obviously hotels and horror have a long and storied connection, I spent a week prior to the premiere going over hotel horror movies and there were still plenty more I didn’t get to talk about like the other Psycho sequels, Identity, Eaten Alive, and The Collection.  However, American Horror Story generally eschews the obvious parallels to Psycho and The Shining, save for a very cheeky shout in the carpet patterns in the hotel lobby.  The bigger influence this season seems to be vampires, which honestly shouldn’t be that big of a surprise given Lady Gaga’s character was listed as ‘The Countess Elizabeth’ in the promotional material. 

If you’re not up on your vampire lore the name is a pretty transparent reference to the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, another real life serial killer who was said to bath in the blood of young girls in an attempt to remain young forever.  Bathory ends up getting lumped in with vampire lore all the damn time to the point that she’s essentially the female equivalent of Vlad the Impaler.  Aside from that connection the show makes a lot of allusions to Nosferatu, with it even appearing briefly in an actually very well choreographed musical sequence that introduced the Countess.  There are also a lot of elements from the David Bowie/Susan Sarandon vampire erotic thriller The Hunger.   

This is part of what I mean when I say American Horror Story is divorced from most conventional forms of logic.  There is exactly no connection between vampire lore and hotels; there aren’t even any hotel centric vampire horror movies.  The combination is almost completely random, it’s not even like there’s any overlap between the historical inspirations.  It’s a combination so far to left field so as to come from an entirely different field all together, though I suspect part of the inspiration was someone in the writing room wanting to be clever about the old vampire rule that they can’t enter your house unless invited in. 

The thing is, just taken on its own as a basic concept the idea of a vampire run hotel as a sort of human ranch is a pretty great idea.  It goes well with the inherent falseness of hotels that puts us so on edge.  Hotel rooms tend to fall into that creepy realm where they try so hard to be inviting and friendly that we suspect they’re secretly out to get us, they’re basically the interior-decorating version of the Uncanny Valley. 

However, even the smartest core concepts can’t hold up to shoddy execution and American Horror Story: Hotel’s execution is all over the place.  There isn’t even a cohesive core narrative to this story so much as a confederation of loosely connected plot threads that vaguely intertwine.  There’s a police detective haunted by the kidnapping of his son and currently being targeted by the plot of what seems to be an entirely different show, one ripping off Se7en to a staggering degree.  It’s an incredibly weird tone shift not helped by the fact the police officer’s story has a completely contradictory visual tone and aesthetic as he seems to exist in the same kind of neo-noir universe as Gotham while the Hotel Cortez is built from a confused cultural malaise drawn from ‘20s art deco and ‘80s collapsed splendor.  The two plots have the closest thing to a direct connection but it’s a dumb connection that, while I won’t spoil, I will say makes exactly no sense and feels incredibly forced. 

The other key plotlines revolve around the hotel’s human concierge, played by Kathy Bates, growing disillusioned with her life of servitude there.  This is probably the best plot in the whole show as Bats is actually being utilized properly, much more so than her weird time-displaced slaver role in Coven or her bearded lady/circus manager part in Freak Show.  The show seems to have settled into the grove of her playing a maternal figure in some capacity but it’s a role she does well and it’s becoming increasingly clear she’s more suited to the role of reluctant villain rather than overt monster.

For her part Lady Gaga is easily the best part of the whole episode.  I’m still not sure if she has any talent for acting but she’s a natural and commanding screen presence and the episode doesn’t really call on her to do much in the way of line delivery.  Her main role is to look chic and creepily inhuman while indulging in as many painfully obvious references to Nosferatu as can be mustered and she does that quite well.  I actually prefer her to Jessica Lange if only because Lange’s performance always felt decidedly forced.  Lange plays her roles like a theater actor, everything is cartoonishly exaggerated and patently unreal, the same kind of problem tends to afflict James Franco’s performances a lot of the time.  It’s not a terrible approach to acting but it’s got a limited field of use and it can feel thoroughly out of place in American Horror Story and I don’t think would’ve worked at all for the role of The Countess.  It’s also nice to see Sarah Paulson in a more villainous role after two seasons of playing it nice, even if her costume design is cribbed pretty shamelessly from Bladerunner, most likely because that movie had a hotel in it. 

The hotel itself is an odd entity in the show as it seems to be both the domain of its evil vampiric owner and filled to the brim with ghostly inhuman monsters.  That latter part falls in with the omnipresent and deeply uncomfortable American Horror Story standard of extreme sexual repression and a deeply closeted approach to most LGBT elements.  This bizarre confluences of aversive fear and alluring attraction towards sex and homosexuality has always been a part of American Horror Story but its at its most prevalent this season as two of three major kills in this episode come from non-straight sex.  I don’t want to suggest anything about the creators here as I have no idea if this is just an unfortunate coincidence or actually intentional but its getting harder and harder to just turn and cough whenever this bizarre obsession pops up. 

I’m not sure I have a greater point to make about American Horror Story: Hotel other than that I’m still grappling with my complicated feelings of anger, respect, and obsession for the series.  I doubt the series will ever be what I want it to be but it’s gotten to a point where it’s become this bizarre kind of elaborate amalgamated riddle, like the Gordian knot of television.   The core concepts are genius and the vast, American Horror Story shared universe is a kind of amazing achievement but the story is so poorly written with so many basic storytelling failures.  But, at the end of the day I guess I’m still watching the show so…this round to you American Horror Story, you’re a worthy adversary. 


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