What I said earlier in the season about American Horror Story: Hotel being driven by decisions made under the duress of blinding desire and desperation comes to a major head in this episode.
Let’s just say that Dr Alex Lowe fails epically in her desire to protect children. This episode also marks the point at which the season turns pivotally, where the show begins to sew the tantalizing threads unspooled in the first quarter of the season, together into a gruesomely bold, surprising pattern. One should always expect that nothing happens accidentally in this series.
That rich kid with the measles has been resistant to antibiotics and his pneumonia has turned to untreatable staphylococcus in his lungs. There’s a nice use of sound to open the show with this scene: the camera zooms in on the side of Alex’ head as the sound of a heartbeat grows louder in conjunction with the growing closeness of our visual proximity to her ear. We hear what she hears, and the newly infected Dr Lowe is physically withdrawn, so much so she can hear her food pumping through the bodies of those around her. After feasting on the stockroom of donated blood, she donates some of her own to measles boy, in order to impart her virus of immortality and save him (a moment of satiation that brings Alex thrillingly to life for the first time in the series).
The concept of the vampire state being the symptom of a viral infection mutates, as viruses do, when Alex injects hers to commingle with her patient’s new and untreatable mutation of measles. She sends the miraculously healed boy back home with mama Madchen Amick, who’s relieved at her son’s miraculous return from the brink of death, but noticeably unsettled by Dr Lowe’s cold response (literally: girl has 75.5 degrees fahrenheit body heat).
Cut to the oldest vampire child (if we are terming any vampire a child by their amount of time as a vampire) as Donovan drags his shivering withdrawn mother Iris, newly transformed, to Angela Bassett’s house to offer her as the inside man they need to destroy the Countess(/Patient Zero of the Cortez?). Luckily when dumped back at the hotel, Liz Taylor recognizes the vampire shakes, and offers her a cocktail of triple sec and the Countess’ finest stock of plasma in a crystal decanter. Bates confirms the notion I have been expounding on here and in the podcast I Scream You Scream-that each of the undead are preserved in their state at death. Healed though they may be, their living condition at the time of death continues in undeath. Iris unloads on her own bad luck to have been preserved forever at her lowest point emotionally and physically-she will always be unattractive and invisible to the world around her (the same way Sally is preserved as a depressed, sobbing heroine addict). But Liz won’t have Iris believing that of herself (“Just try some violet eye-shadow, it works for me everytime”). And so begins a bond forged amidst the macabre life they lead together: now procuring and disposing of their victims from the same side of the infected veil.
Best of all, this leads to a flashback (tedious though they may be to some) giving us Liz’ life pre-Cortez. Liz was a sad suburban man with a terrible existence, and clothes, and comb-over, and a wife he married for her wardrobe and identical body-shape. He clearly has no love for her or his child, whom he criticizes for drawing the wrong plane as a going-away present before he flies off (“That’s a 707, I’m flying on a 757 to LA, it only has two engines.”). The whole domestically disturbed Americana scene is eerie in a way that looks like it was shot by Cindy Sherman, with the bright colors and freakish characterization. He travels to the Cortez on business, with suitcases of women’s clothing. The Countess appears to him, telling him she’s observed him, and makes him one of her children not by vampirism, but by encouraging him to be the person he is inside (which she noticed by the smell of the blood). As if he was one of Gaga’s “little monsters,” she makes him over to bring out the woman, whom she dubs Liz Taylor (from the Oscar-winning Butterfield 8-era sultriness). And the Countess eagerly defends her new charge from the homophobic aggressiveness of Liz’ coworkers when they catch her in mink coat, makeup and slip. Except in Murphy’s absorption of Gaga’s career and work into this story and aesthetic, she kills the homophobes by slicing open their mouths and throats instead of devoting a song to the victim. It is here that we see another angle of combining media sensations and violence, in Gaga’s brave willingness to offer her persona as a basis of murder and sickness within the context of AHS. As she tells Liz- we have two selves, the one we show the world around us and the one we harbor within that requires a different sustenance, but which cannot be ignored if we are to truly live. She’s kind of like a modern horror version of Auntie Mame, and Liz was little Patrick. Liz clearly got better room service than some other guests here.
Not all stories turn out so warm and fuzzy. Alex Lowe knows she may have done something dangerous, but for a doctor she should have had SOME idea of just how horribly this would spiral out of control. The most chilling moment: the inter-story cut to an overhead pan gliding past a fresh uneaten breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast with jam, on the kitchen table… past spilled milk beneath an overturned chair, then a businessman on the floor bleeding from the neck…then to a still conscious, horrified Amick struck by dawning comprehension as she’s feasted on by her son in his pirate costume for Halloween. Then at the call of a horn, he wipes his mouth and heads out the door to board the bus to school. The first thought is that he will feast on the other kids on the bus. But it’s much worse than that. He infects his whole class by going to school sick, in a manner of speaking, and spreading a treacherous Morbillivampirus.
He first turns a girl by seducing her in the closet, and she seems to develop red sores as well. When the boy was turned, the vampire virus healed his symptoms but didn’t kill his measles. The teacher takes his fake sword but doesn’t see his knife-a fatal mistake. He casually slits his her throat for the girl to feed, and the measles now seem to clear up. Another unfortunate school official wanders in (visualized like Scarlet O’Hara wandering through the endless field of broken bodies in Gone With the Wind) to find a whole classroom of sore-covered, shivering withdrawn children. He is obviously the next meal, but he somehow escapes to get the rest of the school on lockdown before he bleeds out. The police arrive and release the kids from the school, including the new victimizers who have learned how to pretend they haven’t done anything as their new leader of the Children of the Corn offers has already coached them on their cover-story (a man in all black with a mask) for the police and the news. The rapidly expanding consequences of Alex’ decision become instantly clearer-she’s given a disease that causes perpetual hunger fed by violence. And she’s given it to children-who are, by nature, insatiable beings with no impulse control or enough socialization to manage such a state, and who do not feel guilt for satisfying their appetites. And now it comes with a nasty case of the measles.
The mix of media sensation around killing continues from last week’s celebrity serial killer’s banquet with this incorporation of real-life school massacres into its blood, as well as a film inspired by them (We Need To Talk About Kevin). The media pours in to consume the fresh horror of what Alex unintentionally created: a sociopathic child monster who has now terrorized his school, only he’s not just killed people. He’s passed on the virus that makes him kill (as well as deadly to the touch) to other kids who spread out from the epicenter of the infectious web and into the community through their families, to do who knows what damage to come.
We know death surely awaits the paper-thin archetype of the snooty hipster couple (Darren Criss finally makes it onto the show!) who show up for a room at the hotel to avoid the Halloween rush. They requests Iris give them an “Influencer” discount because one of them is a photographer that Will Drake, their idol, likes on Instagram, incessantly insult her, then order the titular room service we were waiting for. They want artisanal cheese and grilled romaine lettuce (“Superyum!” as the moronic friend describes it) with paté. They are so one-dimensionally irritating with their requests and attitude (though San Francisco is filled with jerks like these) you really cheer Iris on to make them her first meal, which of course she does while railing against the youth culture who has no idea of what suffering and sacrifice are. After her and Liz Taylor served them cat food in place of paté. Message=Ryan Murphy really hates hipsters.
Hotel may be tied to Murder House, but it has unmistakable echoes of all the seasons of AHS. Angela Bassett reprises her role as dive HBIC rival to the shows grand dame (Gaga in place of Jessica Lange), a woman resisting the resurgence of humanity creeping back into her life. And the fallout of the measles mixed with viral vampirism creating blood-hungry children riddled with festering sores all over them brings us back to the inmate injected with multiple viruses in Asylum. She mutates into a hideous, infected, monstrous form of her human self (that frightens children in her escape from the twisted doctor who tortured/experimented on her), played by the same actress who here begins the creation and release of an uncontrollable viral mutation threatening everyone.
As she begins to accept her role in Gaga’s kingdom of the Cortez, the episode ends with Alex donning a high-collared Gaga gown and her hair in an upswept matronly ‘do, looking like a Victorian spinster. This coupled with her new job as “governess” to the vampire children, unmistakably recalls Deborah Kerr in The Innocents. And things didn’t go so well for the governess in Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Holden, in his emotionless way, seems thrilled that his Mom is “just like me” which leads us to wonder what else Alex will do to please her son going forward. As the Countess warns us, we all have two selves…
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