Trump as springboard to fright
Anxieties and phobias of liberal America run into twisted pack of clowns
President Donald Trump’s election last year immediately sent audiences and critics on a hunt for political themes in current TV shows, movies, literature and songs.
Now, we have what amounts to our first big drama that explicitly addresses the only person we ever talk about anymore. It’s American Horror Story: Cult, the seventh iteration of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s FX anthology series of sicko, scary tales that aim to both celebrate and subvert the horror genre. This time the horror is the president.
Deploying their perfected weaponry (camp, irony and gore, along with a sado-masochistic mandate that nothing is ever truly taboo), Murphy, Falchuk and company deliver a premise that’s blunt, but also satirically sly in the way it holds a mirror up to the double standards on either extreme of the political spectrum.
The first episode of Cult (which debuted Sept. 5), wastes no time setting itself up: It’s the night of Nov. 8, 2016, and a group of friends has gathered to watch election returns at the tastefully yuppified small-town Michigan home of Ally and Ivy Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson and Alison Pill), a nice lesbian couple. Stoked for a Hillary Clinton victory, the women and their friends are instead subjected to the live nightmare of Trump’s triumph.
Because they live in a district in which Clinton crucially lost by a mere 10,000 votes, one of their party guests blames his wife for surfing Pinterest all day instead of voting. Even worse, (slight spoiler alert), it turns out that someone in the Mayfair-Richards household didn’t pull the lever for Clinton.
The outcome sends Ally, who has struggled with phobias and anxiety for years, on a downward spiral. Remember in 2016 when Americans were briefly gripped by a spate of coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), and started seeing and reporting creepy clowns stalking their communities? American Horror Story certainly remembers. Not only have they brought back Twisty the Clown (a memorably murderous character from a previous season), but they’ve also sent in all the clowns, who act as a kind of Manson family, leaving smiley faces painted in blood at their crime scenes. Ally starts seeing them everywhere, even in her grocery store, with a gloating cashier in his red Make America Great Again baseball cap.
Across town, the Trump victory has electrified Kai Anderson (Evan Peters), a twisted young man who exalts in the moment, smearing his face with orange Cheeto dust and styling his dyed-blue hair into a Trumpian pompadour. Kai begins to menacingly assert his power as one of the president-elect’s “forgotten” Americans — free to taunt his community with politically incorrect remarks and aggressive behaviour while he campaigns to fill a newly vacant city council seat. Ally is one of Kai’s favourite lefties to intimidate. Her increasing desperation leads her down a path of extremism that she so recently deplored in others. Before she knows it, she’s a gun owner being accused of white privilege.
A weird and brash couple (Billy Eichner and Leslie Grossman), moves in across the street, saying and doing things that seem designed to further provoke Ally’s anxieties.
The most notable aspect of Cult is how it seems to mock Ally’s constant state of panic, as if sending a message to anti-Trump worrywarts relentlessly crying those sweet liberal tears: Get a grip already and stop freaking out over every last Trump tweet and executive order. At the same time, the show gives a compelling, visionary shape to the monstrous aspect of American discourse in 2017 — a literal manifestation of the bubbling, roiling evils of racism, homophobia, xenophobia and hate.
It would be nice to be able to declare all of this to be a brilliant and timely effort to process our world, but Cult brings with it many of the problems that have plagued past seasons of American Horror Story. The show has never been known for its restraint, favouring a fire-ready-aim approach to storytelling that causes a typical season to swerve from episodes that are disturbingly wonderful to episodes that seem like time-consuming detours.
The unfortunate truth is this American Horror Story is just another slasher tale that features a bunch of bad clowns.