Too Much TV Two: Asylum

Ryan Murphy and I have a contentious relationship. When he is on point, he's one of our strongest and most important television writers, surpassing even Joss Whedon, New Queer's patron saint of quirky ass-kicking.  American Horror Story and Nip/Tuck both contain some of the best television moments out there; the writing is often sharp and mercilessly smart. And, ok fine, Glee is an important show, even if the writing is questionable and the fanbase is increasingly obnoxious. Unfortunately, Ryan Murphy is unpredictable, almost as good at missing the mark as he is at hitting it. He's also produced some of the worst television out there, very often in the same series that's just dazzled us. Sometimes even in the same episode.

It's worth mentioning that in spite of Glee's queer legacy, Ryan Murphy's worlds are wildly homophobic and especially transphobic, in an overtly violent way. Just ask Nip/Tuck's Cherry Peck (played by Willam, one of my favorite Drag Race contenders). Before Glee, queer characters had almost never done right by Ryan Murphy. Nevertheless, this season of American Horror Story is turning out to be surprisingly worth the investment. After last year's sudden decrease in quality, I was ready to declare American Horror Story a wash.

In a sequel to one of New Queer's greatest hits, I'm taking another moment to revisit/rewatch American Horror Story. Spoiler Alert: I spoil stuff. Read at your own risk. Most of my writing should probably have this disclaimer in front of it.

This season, subtitled "Asylum," takes place in a criminal asylum (duh) run by a religious order and headed by a terrifying nun named Sister Jude. It follows the adventures and foibles of nuns, doctors, and inmates, some of which are clearly crazy, some less obviously so. There's some thematic overlap between this season and the first, with a few important differences. This first is that with the exception of a demonic possession (I'm not convinced we can assume this possession is really happening), there is nothing truly paranormal occurring. This year, America's horrors are all home-grown. Serial killers, medical experimentation, and terrifying pseudo-treatments abound, but the inmates aren't actually haunted, except by each other and the downright weird narratives they've invented to account for their various crimes. American Horror Story: Asylum's monsters are products of mid-century American culture and are all the more terrifying for it. These monsters are real, kiddies.

The second strangeness of this season is that its plot has absolutely nothing to do with season one. Many of season one's actors are back in new configurations, playing entirely different roles. If I'm being generous in my thinking (and why wouldn't I be?), maybe Ryan Murphy is playing with the kinds of continuity that we take for granted in television, disrupting the concentric episode/season/series temporalities of development that are so familiar to TV viewers. Jessica Lange has described the phenomenon as very much like belonging to a theatre troop, and maybe she's onto something. Does the refusal of continuity and development expand the scope of Murphy's horror story? There may be precedence for this, but I can't think of any because I'm an inadequate TV scholar unless it involves Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Real World.

Storytelling, a particular focus of the first season, takes center-stage in the second. Murphy asks us even more explicitly to think about the stories we tell, the narratives we invent which enable us in certain ways, and the places where these revisions start to break down. There's a wonderful line from one of the inmates about stories, but I'm afraid my mind isn't what it used to be and I'm not in the position to re-watch AHS in the middle of the day, so this is becoming an increasingly less helpful paragraph. I was reminded of a line from Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, though: "We become the stories we tell about ourselves." Again, not a particularly helpful detour.

Asylum tackles storytelling at the institutional level, positioning Sister Jude's forced religious fervor alongside Dr. Thredson's faith in downright monstrous psychology and the fantastic narratives the patients invent to excuse their crimes. Where/how does (horror) story become faith, become dogma, become institution? What are the limitations of these distinctions and why do we insist on them? Though these overlapping modes of storytelling achieve different levels of plausibility and cultural legitimacy, at one point or another they all falter. Much like Dr. Arden's Frankenstein-like monsters, the narratives begin to fail their inventors, mutating unpredictably. Sister Jude's religion, once the source of her authority within the asylum, quickly becomes a source of torment as another nun threatens to expose her past indiscretions. What happens to us when our narratives fail us, take on life we'd never imagined, and become monsters beyond our control? Murphy uses the individual psyche as a framework for understanding organized memory and cultural amnesia (a parallel that holds up better in some places than others).  Asylum tangles with the instability of memory, the impulse to pathologize, and the slipperiness of sanity in importantly historical ways, an examination that is especially relevant in the wake of this summer's string of violent shootings that people continue to insist are individual exceptions rather than cultural products.

Timely television from Ryan Murphy?!?! I'm as surprised as you are.

Asylum feels all the more American precisely because it deals in real histories. Where season one set its sights on the family, Asylum sinks its claws into America's questionable history of institutionalization and diagnosis. Murphy reminds us that much of our self-evident faith in modern psychology has roots in terrifying medical practices that begin increasingly to resemble contemporary ones. One character's lobotomy (which turns her into the perfect 1950s housewife) reminds us that the history of the nuclear family and the mythology of post-war America is always one of medicalization and always brushes up against the technologies of pathology and identity-formation that are central to 21st century America. Involuntary ECT feels clearly wrong when applied to a fictional lesbian character, but remains a significant treatment for severe depression, often applied involuntarily for the same "criminal" reasons present in American Horror Story. An overwhelming percentage of ECT patients are women, by the way. Ryan Murphy holds us accountable for the gritty history of pathology in 'Merca. The show suggests that though asylums have revised their criterion for entry (slightly), the fundamental narrative framework that creates the need for asylums and that emerges through the inside/outside tension of normalization remains in place. In many ways, Asylum's American horror story is still unfolding.

Give it a watch, readers. Though it still feels like it's missing some of season one's strange intelligence, American Horror Story: Asylum continues to unfold in downright compelling ways. Of course, now that I've vouched for it, Murphy will almost certainly turn off his brain, make Kit Walker's alien story real, and have the aliens blow up the asylum, a la Independence Day. If the aliens turn out to be real, I will break my TV. I SWEAR IT.

Be good, folks.

Watching Way Too Much TV: An American Horror Story

Over the past few days, I've had a nearly unprecedented amount of deadlineless time to read, write, and think, which has been really fantastic. Riding this new calm, I've also taken the opportunity (of course) to gulp down a new show, and I'll go ahead and say that everything you've heard about American Horror Story is true. The Ryan Murphy that birthed Nip/Tuck is back. Hallelujah. I've been itching to blog about Nip/Tuck for a while, and Ryan Murphy articulates similar thought patterns in both shows. Glee aside (sorry Glee fans), and despite his flair for absurdity/borderline homophobia, I really think Murphy is one of the most important (or at least interesting) writers on television.

As I prepare to think through the first couple episodes,  I suppose I'll start with a spoiler alert, though I'm having a hard time thinking about this show in spoiled/unspoiled terms. Sure, if you're a reader who hasn't seen it, I'm going to be forced to bring you up to speed. I'm not particularly worried about this, though, because American Horror Story doesn't strike me as a show that is particularly concerned with revelation. Unlike a lot of the other lame shows I watch (Lost, Heroes, Supernatural), the show's primary tension is not "what's going to happen?!?" Your viewing may even be enhanced by the knowledge that Adelaide (my favorite character) dies in the fourth episode, with no word yet on whether or not she is going to haunt the house.  Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, Jack Halberstam has me reconsidering the ways in which we extract/create meaning from cultural texts, but I'll set that aside for the moment.


American Horror Story follows the exploits of three family members who have just moved into one of LA's most haunted houses as they encounter a bizarre cast of characters, including a creepy maid (who is simultaneously dead, young, and old), a toddlers-and-tiaras-type next door neighbor, her daughter Adelaide, and a teenage sociopath named Tate. Five episodes into the series, and I'm not totally convinced I've met a single living character. Ghosts are everywhere in this fucking show and they are by far its least interesting feature. 

In trying to write this, I'm chasing all kinds of different intellectual threads. We might, for example, talk about Ryan Murphy's American Dream, the source material for his Horror Story. It's quite lovely (if unsatisfying tidy) that the terrifying American family, and not the terrifying American ghost, is what most haunts the audience. I would, at some point, like to think about the way in which several of the show's characters (mother, daughter, ghost-maid) are animated by horror. Fear alternately defeats and energizes the story's characters, and I wonder if these fears (the fear of adultery, the fear of being discovered as a liar, the fear of home invasion) make the family most legible as a unit. Do the characters make most sense as a family when they are scared, and what other kinds of legibility does fear enable?

Because I've just finished reading Robert McRuer's Crip Theory, and because she's awesome/terrifying, I want to start with Adelaide. Addie, who has Down's syndrome, is portrayed as a kind of oracle-figure insofar as she knows just about everything about the house and has befriended most of the ghosts. Physically disabled as she is, Addie provides an interesting figure through which to read the events of the show. More than anything, Addie longs to be a "pretty girl" (the vague irony being that almost all of the show's pretty girls die violent deaths). I wonder if we might read Addie as a surprisingly complex intersection of disability, desire, and violence (her abuse is also obliquely informed by her mother's sexuality). The fact that Addie is disabled enables certain kinds of previously inaccessible knowledge, so that even if Addie can't understand that it isn't ok to break into someone's house, she can understand that there are ghosts in the house when the family cannot. Addie's physical difference reorganizes her world and differently structures her capacity for knowledge. Addie's understanding of the house's secrets and, more importantly, her total lack of fear emerges through her disability. Given the fact that Addie occupies such a fascinating position within the show, what do we make of her sudden, unearned death (other than just being pissed about it)?

In closing, I'm sort of curious as to what it means to call something an American Horror Story. As I've said earlier, a simplistic reading of the show casts the nuclear family and accompanying American Dream as the real heart of the show's horror. The family's desperate desire to reassemble and insist on itself inspires terror that has nothing to do with ghosts, but I think this reading is sort of uninspired. Instead, I wonder what it means to think about ghosts (and their accompanying cultural baggage) in distinctly American terms. To my mind, telling a haunted house story indicates, on some level, a desire to claim that people matter (before and after she dies, the father's mistress insists over and over again that "she matters"). Ghost stories present the possibility that people can, for better and worse, impress themselves on a location. As unromantically as I can think it, ghost stories reflect a desire for permanence and a desperate need to matter. Is wanting to matter particularly American? Are the narratives which people attach being American all that different than a ghost hunt?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, American Horror Story is a ghost story that is most compelling when totally evacuated of the supernatural. It leaves me wondering (somewhat redundantly/obnoxiously) about the ways the living haunt one another, the stories we tell ourselves, and the way we impress ourselves upon locations and bodies. Welcome back, Ryan Murphy, and thanks for a TV show that is unafraid to be absolutely terrifying.

This got a little more scattered than I meant. In my defense, twenty-four hours ago, I hadn't seen a single episode of the show. And blogging means never having to say you're sorry. For the tl;dr among us, I offer this much smarter comic and this infinitely more funny other comic. And then I beg you to lengthen your attention spans. Have a good week, folks.