Runways and models and vampires oh my! This episode of American Horror Story: Hotel had everything and somehow managed to find time to work in some exposition, and gives us more keys to unlocking some but not all of the mystery, just the way it should be!
There’s a lot of talk about the safety of children in this episode-vampire kids eating and providing blood for The Countess, an unvaccinated kid in west L.A., Bentley’s Detective John Lowe remembering a case of children dying from carbon monoxide poisoning in a tragic mistake by their father, Lowe’s daughter Scarlett witnessing a violent fashion show (after happening upon disemboweled murder victims in episode 1) and wandering off by herself to the hotel discovering her long lost brother whom she was told was dead (I think you’re both right guys).
And there’s also a lot of backstory on our corporeal ghosts and goblins of the dead and living worlds. The Countess’ origin story, the depth of Lowe’s guilt, the hotel’s original builder/owner, and a glimpse of insight into Mare Winningham’s devoted/demented laundress Miss Evers. We get so much information and incident it’s no wonder this episode was the length of a feature film. I recall every year that AHS doesn’t really restrict itself in terms of running time. A growing trend in high production value, grown-up “quality” television, AHS routinely flouts the usually rigid time expectations of broadcast TV, symptomatic of its tendency to spill over any boundaries that prove pesky. It’s operating in a place of such creative freedom that the show’s creators don’t even limit this episode to traditional running time breakdowns-the broadcast clocked in at 1 hour, 42 minutes with commercials (an hour and twelve minutes without)!
Chutes and ladders- right away we get the double meaning of this title as the children’s game refers both to the cherubic vampire children drinking the last Swedish tourist’s blood until she dies. Then she’s dumped down a long chute to a hidden basement (an image Murphy must love, as it’s repeated on his Fox series Scream Queens‘ horrific/humorous nod to Silence of the Lambs). Her body, after a long tumble, reaches a bloody soiled mattress in the cavernous basement chamber littered with other decaying corpses (including the batboy junkie man who emerged from the tourists’ bed when they checked in).
Speaking of beds, we now know how people get inside them here at the Cortez. Sally puts her share of the hotel’s victims there when she’s done toying with them, and sews them shut inside (so batboy was one of Sally’s victim too?). Max Greenfield is still alive and she stuffs him in anyway, angry that he’s “cheat[ed] death.” Since I swear I saw him on a gurney arriving to an ER in the teaser clips of the season that they showed at the end of the premiere, I think he somehow survives this too.
And now, some continuity maintenance with the depiction of Dr. Lowe (Sevigny) from episode 1, as we see her at a house call, for a sick well-to-do child. When Dr. Lowe says he has the measles, his worried mother (who believes vaccinations create autism) actually breathes a sigh of relief and says “oh good, I thought it was something serious.” Guess we needn’t engrave her name on the “Mother of the Year” trophy. She seems genuinely surprised when Dr. Lowe tells her it is serious and that, no there is no treatment other than rest, hydration and fever-reducers. More grist for Dr Lowe’s parents-who-don’t-vaccinate-their-kids mill. Following the scene of the vampire children sucking blood from the Swedish tourist, her admonishments feel just a bit more valid, especially to guest star Madchen Amick (a precursor to the next season of Twin Peaks?) who plays the mother who takes medical/parenting tips from Jenny McCarthy.
That we should at least protect our children from the harm we can actually prevent, when there are so many other dangers that we can’t, is not insanity. However, it does feel like Ryan Murphy is turning into a curmudgeonly grandpa warning youngsters about the stupidity of the world as it’s become. I’m curious if there’s more than just cruel irony that Murphy and co. have in store for her down the road.
Side note: This hotel doesn’t look like a dump but people keep referring to it like it was a Motel 6. Points taken on the mattresses, but we keep hearing it from characters while they’re in the lobby-the most fabulous part of the building-before they’ve experienced the horrors of renting a room here. If they saw it without it having been cleaned up first, it would look like the title sequence. I’d say the cesspool looks rather clean (for a cesspool) even though we never see the cleaning staff aside from the laundress.
There’s a package waiting for Det. Lowe at the station. Bentley calls the bomb squad-who promptly tell him it’s not a bomb but an Oscar statuette which the squad jokingly offers to detonate if he wants. Pseudo-Will Graham sends it to the crime lab instead, and of course it was the murder weapon of a writer who had won it. They sure don’t make us wait to get to further SE7EN references, with the box filmed as it is from low angles and high shadows, so the contents are never seen clearly. I half-expected Lowe to cry out “What’s in the box??!!” Once our detective learns of the history of the hotel, he picks up on the 10 commandments themes to the murders, connecting them to the hotel’s previous victims many decades earlier-someone is continuing the work presumably started by the hotel‘s original owner.
Back at the Cortez, where the new owner is throwing a huge fashion bash with a runway show. Dennis O’Hare kills it again with just a few lines and seconds of screen time. Dripping with contempt he exclaims, when questioned as to what he’s doing by Cheyenne Jackson’s fashion designer Will Drake, “Just teaching these kids from Vogue how to vogue, the irony,” followed up by a read of guest star Naomi Campbell “Skinny jeans are out, Fringe is in, and ponchos are forever. Make a note of it.” She says she’s staying the whole week, so let’s hope there’s more Naomi to come, and more cutting insults.
Det. Lowe planned a day with his daughter Scarlett, who’s come to meet him at his new home, but she wants to stay for the show. Sally is rejected from the party, right as John Lowe and his daughter are given special invitations. Sally, still looking hurt, catches a view of Scarlett and a tinge of quizzical fear washes over her face, as if she recognizes her and that said recognition bears ill tidings. My guess is she recognizes Scarlett’s resemblance to her brother, who is now one of Gaga’s baby blood banks, but we shall see as the season progresses.
The designer’s son Lochlan is Scarlett’s safety buddy, which is a poor choice since he’s already ventured off alone with Gaga and seen drill-bit dildo white rubber-clad man through frosted glass doors last week. He takes her to a lair where the vampire kids sleep in glass coffins-this gurl is on a collision course to finding her brother. Despite all the talk of protecting children – Scarlett is not very well protected by anyone. She wanders off alone with a boy she just met to find some children in coffins then travels by herself via bus to the hotel again later on, where she finds her brother and speaks to him.
His first words are “what took you so long?” and he notices she has changed. More troubling, she notices that he hasn’t… other than his wardrobe change to British boarding school attire. He is obviously trapped in time in the white room-evidenced by the fact that he’s playing “Space Invaders.” No games past the mid 80s exist in this room. But who am I to talk, I still love Super Mario Bros 2. Little Holden announces he doesn’t want to go home because he is home. She tries to take a selfie with him… and then he tries to bite her neck. Of course she comes home to frantic parents and Sevigny is particularly perturbed considering the speech she gave at the beginning of the episode.
Vibes of The Hunger are getting stronger, as The Countess and her progeny Donovan (Bomer) are apparently drifting apart. He wants to stay home and bingewatch House of Cards. She’s the older one yet she’s not that devoid of life and wants to go hunting at an art opening. She drifts between time, as she gives him a meaningful glance and caress of his face that portends something ominous rather than romantic, and into the art show she goes to after. Obvi she is going to discard him like Catherine Deneuve did to Bowie in the inspiration, but Finn Whitrock’s trashy coke-addict model “Tristan Duffy” is the Susan Sarandon in this scenario (and his hairdo looks far worse). Tristan is a mess of a supermodel whose rage and violent runway antics bemuse Naomi Campbell and The Countess equally in the Cortez. Gaga in particular is intoxicated: “he’s full of rage.. I can still smell it” as she takes an audible, sexualized inhalation of that “copper,” as if hoping to snort up the last remnants of him from a mirror.
Before the show is over he blows off modeling for good after his tussle on the runway, sealing the deal by cutting his face open with a knife in the dressing room, then trying to track down the scent of cocaine in the hotel (that could lead him anywhere here). He doesn’t care because he’s “going to be in a Lars von trier movie!”
And naturally his obnoxious self-absorption makes him the ideal candidate to bring out the ghost of the hotel’s original owner, played by Evan Peters as a wannabe Errol Flynn with a mid-Atlantic accent, only more sadistic (according to stories of Flynn’s off-camera persona).
Peters appeals to a much darker core in Tristan, telling him he sees what he truly desires, and shows it to him by getting high on the killing of a defenseless woman. The ghost of Miss Evers the laundress is even turned on, excited at the prospect of a challenge (“What a glorious stain!”).
Gaga’s backstory is the most fun, as she shares the secret of her vampirism with Tristan-it’s a virus that fortifies the immune system, and the sun saps them of vitality but doesn’t kill them. “The only thing that can end you is your own recklessness” she warns him. Immortality is not guaranteed but a reward for not being stupid and avoiding “the diseased and feeble.” She tosses over Bomer to teach him that “it’s the heartbreaks” that make them special, not the virus. She gets off on that big time and claims her new charge as her greatest sexual experience. Ouch. So Bomer will get more interesting now according to her, but where will he go? According to the preview for next week, it’s not looking good.
Also, my favorite moment in the whole episode had to be Gaga declaring her disco queen days as her favorite decadent era (which happens every decade she says, sounding similar to Sally Bowles tapping into her “ancient instincts”) and riding like Lady Godiva, half-naked, into Studio 54 on a white horse. “We were all vampires then.” Does that make her Lady Gaga-diva? All this = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4uwFNth2F0
And back comes Det. Lowe, understandably heated after the day he’s had, to demand the truth of what’s going on in this hotel. Kathy Bates then gets to tell us the meaty story of the hotel’s creator: a “self-made man” named James Patrick March, a new money millionaire from oil and coal, snubbed by the old money elites of the east coast. He came to Los Angeles (“where pedigree means nothing” if you have enough money) in the 20s to build the Cortez “a monument to excess and opulence where he could satisfy his own peculiar appetites.” James Patrick March (not so subtly the same initials as JP Morgan) was a self-taught Art Deco “design freak” who designed a most peculiar space.
As I noted last week, the Cortez is basically H.H. Holmes’ castle transplanted metaphorically to the City of Angels, a huge “torture chamber” built by Peters’ millionaire with a maniacal aversion to religion, (we glean he was the target of child abuse by way of his devout father). The building was outfitted with greased chutes (concealed in rooms) that led to chambers in a hidden basement, secret passageways, confusing hallways with no exits, asbestos in the walls to “mute the screams” and no rooms behind some doors. JPM kills off contractors who notice the peculiarities. He lures people in to use for torture, rape and dismemberment-and then dispose of, with the help of Miss Evers… And a wife whose face we don’t see, and who likely will turn out to be Lady Gaga’s Countess.
In one interesting moment, Bates’ narration (“He forced his wife to watch”) doesn’t match the visual of her story, showing either that these scenes depict things as they actually happened and she is omitting a part of the story for a devious purpose, or she does not know the whole story after all. We know the wife enjoyed his torture of others since we hear the breathy voice saying “No, I like it” as a woman’s hand reaches into the frame to ungag one of the victims. When JPM is finally caught he’s pouring hydrochloric acid over a fresh corpse in a bathtub, but the wife is nowhere to be seen. His devoted Miss Evers goes down with him, and chooses the pistol he offers, but desires to be his last victim. Then he slits his own throat, (the very method that Chad Radwell claims was a strange way to kill oneself on Scream Queens).
Save for the complicit wife, these details are practically verbatim from any book about the notorious H.H. Holmes, (most famous among them Devil in the White City) one of the first recognized serial killers of the U.S.. There’s no doubt for anyone now that HHH and his Chicago “castle” is a direct source of inspiration for JPM and the Cortez.
The added touch is that March proclaims his message to the world: to murder God (and angrily demands the bibles removed from every room when one of his construction workers/victims prays as he’s murdered and insists he is better for his faith). And thus the commandments connection tot he deaths begins to add up. So compulsive self-absorbed pleasure seekers all wind up here, and the hotel has always encouraged this vibe like a biological imperative to procure sustenance for its undead overlords. And another revelation-Room 64 used to be JPM’s office. As Kathy Bates very plainly and colorfully suggests, “if this place has a heart, it’s as black as the ace o’ spades. And you’re sleeping in it.”
To close out this 2 hour tour of the Cortez, our newest vampire Tristan uses Grindr to find his first meal. No one will miss this walking hipster zombie, complete with lumberjack beard, suspenders, man bun, and cuffed skinny jeans, so he makes a perfect victim (is that a read Ryan?).
Perhaps I’m in the minority, but I don’t want this show streamlined or forced to fit a mold. It has its flaws, but even with them it proves more interesting than all the other horror shows on TV. I find that horror entertainment is more effective when you don’t have everything that scares you explained and demystified, as opposed to depending on a fear of zombies eating you, or characters behaving in a manner designed to drag out the same cheap thrills, over and over again. I just hope this horror isn’t an exercise in petty moralism. In closing, we’ve met Evan Peters’ and Finn Whitrock’s characters, but when is Darren Criss dropping and where’s Angela Bassett??
Best scare/gross-out:
When Sally grabs Scarlett’s arm and grinds her teeth down to bloody chunks to terrify her and muses “kids are the best” when she gets the running/screaming response she was looking for. That’ll teach you to get invited to a party I wanted to go to!
http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/american-horror-story/episodes
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