American Horror Story returns with a garish, ghoulish peek inside the walls of The Cortez.
By Matt Fowler
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow…
With style and bravado to spare – including a post-punk/goth soundtrack featuring the likes of Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, and She Wants Revenge (whose one hit basically sounds like Joy Division) – America Horror Story returns to its Los Angeles haunted house roots with “Hotel” – a lavish and gory new season featuring an avalanche of unfortunate souls orbiting a perpetually cavernous art-deco inn called The Cortez.
It’s a world that comes with a rather high “buy in.” Viewers are to somehow believe that this type of instantly suspicious place full of freaks and could exist within the real world and somehow fly under the radar. Season 1’s “Murder House” also came with its own sordid, haunted past, but it had been outed and was actually part of a morbid murder tram tour for out-of-towners. The Cortez, as big and diabolical as it is, has somehow not made the papers in quite the same way.
Though we should also consider that back in Season 1, American Horror Story was trying to play things quasi-straight. There was more of an attempt to root the story in realism back then. Hotel is the outlandish end result of years of escalating madness and untethering. It also feels very very empty as a result. The epitome of style over substance. The only story so far that tries to ground the season in something resembling reality – that of Wes Bentley’s homicide detective John Lowe – still feels excessively heightened.
Bentley, while enjoyable, isn’t great at pulling off vanilla “normal.” His fierce eyes still feel like they’re masking a sociopath. Plus, Lowe himself is on the trail of (and is the target of) an extravagantly grotesque killer who creates tableaus featuring excessive mutilation and viagra. So how baseline can his life truly be?
And because Lowe’s tale, which also involves a wife played by Chloë Sevigny and a backstory involving a missing son (who we discover on the same episode is a creepy vampiric Shining-style ward of the hotel), doesn’t work to root the show in effective emotion, everything just feels disconnected and nuts.
And if that’s the true brand now, fine. If the idea is to just give us a procession of “WTF?” moments, then mission accomplished. The Cortez is a place where gross, evil things happen. It’s run by a vampire and her lover (Lady Gaga and Matt Bomer) who f*** and feed at night, occasionally collecting children and storing them in a hidden room filled with vintage video games and colorful candy. Sometimes people get sewn into mattresses. Other times they get violently sodomized by ghouls with drill-do strap-ons while trapped-in-limbo junkie ghost girls watch. Occasionally Kathy Bates’ front desk clerk and/or Denis O’Hare’s transvestite bellhop narrow their eyes at someone. There’s no cell service. It’s a nightmare.
Hotel is also notable for not having Jessica Lange among its ranks. And that’s not to say the show can’t continue on without her, or that she hadn’t in some way or another been playing variations of the same vain, glory-seeking character for years now, but her characters usually always came with a commanding presence. A leadership quality that helped excuse/explain the collection of miscreants and oddballs we’d come to meet. Hotel has no centerpiece. Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates could most certainly provide a nucleus for the series, but they’re pulling sideshow duty here.
Which brings me to Lady Gaga, who – essentially – is the crux of The Cortez. Though by the very nature of her terse, nocturnal character, she’s aloof. That’s not bad, and Gaga’s very good at being filmed and presented well, but there’s definitely a vacuum now. And instead of having at least a few sympathetic characters, we’re hit with an onslaught of absurd a***holes.
Lange isn’t the only thing absent from Hotel. Gone too are the musical numbers (for now?) that weakened both Freak Show and Coven, turning them into icky cross-promotional mudslides. In their place now though are extended song sequences, which are much easier to absorb. Yes, even if it does require listening to a full unedited song on a show that presently features arrogantly overlong episodes.
So what’s the deal with Room 64 and the significance of 2:25 in the morning? Who’s the killer on the loose? What’s with the dildo demon? Why don’t Swedish tourists just walk down to the sidewalk to use their cell phones? These are all the mysteries at hand for those willing to fill their fall TV season with gruesome, perverse campfire stories. One thing Hotel seems to bring with it is an sort of and anthology within the anthology. Which is to say, an old ghost-filled place like this might bring with it many separate tales and threads, spread throughout the decades.
AHS: Hotel kicked things off with an appropriate parade of provocative perversion and horror. There’s something about this time of year, close to Halloween, that allows for this show’s particular brand of lunacy, even as it grows more and more exhaustive and empty. What once was a full bucket of savory treats is now sort of a grab-bag of discount candy. But sweet empty calories nonetheless. There’s an abundance of mood and macabre visuals, but all weight and meaning is gone.
