American Horror Story Sucks: Horror in American Cinema, Part 1

I have a bit of a habit of getting into big-name TV shows later than everyone else -- I'm recalling a girlfriend who more or less forcibly sat me down in front of Game of Thrones. There are a few reasons for this, the big one being that unlike most of us, I am more or less incapable of binge-watching.

But I eventually come around, and years after I should have, I finally watched season 1 of American Horror Story. And it shouldn't surprise me that I couldn't stand it.

I hated the way that every character was completely unlikable -- not in and of itself, a sin, but an unlikable character has to at least be interesting enough that the viewer cares about their fates, and the Harmon family at the center of the story (the smarmy shrink husband, the self-righteous wife who can't stop calling the cops) was so insufferable that I just wanted the ghosts of the house to off them as soon as possible. I hated the way that high production values were used to gloss over the limp plot and complete lack of emotional involvement. I hated the off-kilter psychological-thriller camera angles that have been tired ever since David Fincher deployed them back in the '90s (and, hot take, Se7en kinda sucked), and which were used to create a false and adolescent sense of the "disturbing" in lieu of actually building an environment of dread.

 

 

But most of all, I hated the writing. Because horror, moreso than any other genre, is dependent on good writing. And this flabby mess of a script completely failed to horrify.

To provide true horror, something has to get under the skin. And when everything seems recycled from other media -- the mysterious and sinister wealthy next-door neighbor, the brooding teen heartthrob with a dark past, the kid-ghosts pretty much copied whole cloth from The Shining -- all you get is pastiche. Sure, there's plenty of gore to go around, but there's nothing visceral about it, and it would be more at home in a second-year theater student's Halloween costume than in the grisly body horror of The Thing or Videodrome.

One could argue that this was not the goal of showrunner Ryan Murphy and his cohorts, and that he self-consciously wanted to allude to the whole history of horror cinema (after all, the show is called American Horror Story). But there are any number of films that both knowingly incorporate these sort of midnight-movie tropes, and, if they don't just turn them into comedy (Cabin in the Woods-style), manage to find ways to celebrate and elevate them. House of the Devil comes to mind as one recent example, which very deliberately apes the style of '80s teen horror, but at the same time manages to be genuinely creepy through slow development of atmospherics. And similarly, in Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro managed to transcend the cliches of Gothic horror and English country-house fiction through his signature visual style and elements of the truly weird.

But when season 1 of American Horror Story just throws these tropes at the audience, subplot upon subplot, ragged end after ragged end, with the hope that a few would stick, with no regard to world-building, none of them made an impact. And because this was television and not independent cinema, the showrunners couldn't just throw world-building out the window and do a full-on freakout, like was masterfully done in Midsommar.

Here's the rub, though. Even if Ryan Murphy and his attendant media machine have completely failed to establish any kind of investment in the characters, the writing, or the imagined world, he has still managed to create a product that received both a large viewership and a relatively positive critical response. How is this?

The answer lies in this very maximalism.

A TV show is not supposed to have a drum-tight and coherent storyline in the same way a classically narrative film should. It is supposed to keep viewers on the hook. Therefore, each episode had to be reduced to a series of easily digestible themes, with enough memorable moments that could generate buzz from episode to episode, that could keep the Netflix viewers in a state of televisual bulimia.

And American Horror Story did just that. It didn't matter that the plot was a mess, that the characters were unlikable. The images were sharp and memorable, the scenery was beautifully composed, pointlessly jarring events occurred to fulfill the requirement of novelty "unpredictability," the actors themselves were photogenic and their emotional touchstones were easily relatable, if skewed enough to be deemed "artistic" (Murphy can't resist dropping in an emotionally volatile twink...). That's enough to both ensure that enough prestige tropes are hit to ensure both critical plaudits and ROI for the show's financiers.

Now would be a good time to give credit to Ryan Murphy where credit is due -- he also played a major role in the development of the sister series, American Crime Story, where his over-the-top impulses served him well. The two seasons cover sensational tabloid cases -- those of O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan -- where the reality was, if anything, more maximalist and absurd and hyperreal than the shows themselves. If you're writing about O.J. threatening to off himself in Kim Kardashian's bedroom, you really are better served by going big.

But it just doesn't work for horror.

So what is good horror? That, I fear, would merit another essay. And for that, part 2 will be coming soon.

The Klosterman Memos

The books that, without a doubt, make me think the most are not the ones I adore, nor the ones I hate, nor the ones that I have neutral feelings towards (obvs). They are the ones where I understand the perspective, but something is just... off. Like the gloomy, bug-eyed pianist Theodor Adorno said, the splinter in your eye is the sharpest magnifying glass.

So it was when I recently read Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself in Order to Live, his... travelogue, I guess?... about driving around America to places where various rockstars had met their makers, Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Jeff Buckley on an ill-advised swim in Memphis, half of Lynyrd Skynyrd falling to earth in the Mississippi woods, Kurt Cobain by suicide... OR WAS IT?!... on Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle, and the rest.

The deaths are incidental -- in fact, it's pretty fucking shoddy as a framing narrative for a ramble about his cultural obsessions and his fading youth and a series of very self-consciously ill-advised relationships with women he puts on pedestals.

When I was in college, Chuck Klosterman's star was much higher. Back in the halcyon days of warbly, Bush-era new sincerity, as the slacker generation failed to reckon with the fanged horrors of the dawning 21st Century (see attached documents: the film The Station Agent, the discography of Death Cab for Cutie), his self-described "low-culture manifesto" and landmark essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was a major cultural set-piece, to the point where if I was a filmmaker setting a movie in 2002, I would use a copy of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs as a linchpin in the male and female leads' meet-cute.

So what is it? Aside from being the most goddamn Gen-X a title as one can imagine (and while we're talking about Gen-X markers, he is of the youngest possible age to still call weed "pot"), it is a series of essays about Star Wars, the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, The Sims, and shit like that. In other words, it's the same cultural perspective as the aimless conversations in Clerks. This style reached its most refined and mind-expanding form in the essays of David Foster Wallace, and its most egregious and twee form in the oeuvre of Dave Eggers. The Cocoa Puffs book is somewhere in between. In fact, I remember being charmed at points as a 20 year old, even if I did kind of envision Klosterman giggling to himself through his oblong black plastic glasses as he typed out his missives in the cold glow of his laptop.

And so it was when I read Killing Yourself in Order to Live, although the moments of charmedness were far sparser. The more I read, the more annoyed I became at someone who was very aware of the fact that he was being called "self-indulgent" or "masturbatory," and who would inevitably address the self-indulgence of his own self-indulgence and metaphorical or literal masturbation in an infinite series of recursive backflips, all ending in some elaborate analogy to the cover art for Appetite for Destruction or the always-a-bridesmaid status of the Jim Kelly-era Buffalo Bills. 

Perhaps this is a difference of age. Perhaps it's the fact that when I first read Klosterman, I was in my early 20s, and far more easily wowed by pyrotechnical meta-melanges than I am now. After all, I was doing a lot of questioning of grand narratives back then, and metashit seemed to be at least an honest answer for how to create art in the era of late-stage capitalism. And while Klosterman seemed to be... well, a dork... he at least had a wit about him and the sort of goofy charm that I always associate with people raised in the painfully earnest Upper Midwest.

Perhaps it's that I am now, at 34, the aimless metropolitan fast approaching middle age that Klosterman embodied. Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about fading youth and ill-advised relationships? Yep. That was once a lifestyle I looked up to. Now that I seem to be in that whirlwind, I have little use for a guy who seems to be even worse at navigating that than I am. And maybe it's the fact that I didn't grow up an end-of-history Gen-X'er, but retreating into an infinite mirror maze of self-reference, repetition, and simulacrum doesn't seem a valid option anymore (nor does any kind of mealymouthed sincerity, but that's a conversation for a different day).

But here's the weird thing, and one that remarkably few people seem aware of -- Klosterman is capable of so much more. I would strongly advise picking up his debut novel, Downtown Owl, the story of a few people living in a small North Dakota town in the early '80s, which is nothing like his essays. Sure, there are plenty of pop culture references, and I'm remembering the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup providing a major plot point, but they are by no means front and center. Instead, it's a chilly, sparse novel of human yearning, centered around the intersecting lives of a high school football player, an old curmudgeon at the diner, and a recently transplanted schoolteacher, with more in common with the dead-dream landscapes of The Last Picture Show or the stories of Sherwood Anderson or Raymond Carver than the Tarantinized ennui of the man's nonfiction.

So is there hope for his work?

He's since gone on to publish sets of cards in black Helvetica on a white background, making them look an awful lot like Cards Against Humanity, the funny-the-first-time-you-play game which bills itself as the "card game for awful people" but which is in reality the "card game for giggly pudgy edgelords."

The use of Helvetica is telling -- it would have been a standard choice a decade or so ago, and it made its appearance on every sign on Seattle's Capitol Hill when I traipsed her streets in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but has since ceased to be the typography of choice for the literary caste.

And so I'm convinced that Klosterman's essays slot in along with the first two Shins albums -- a reminder of a time and place, not without its charms, but something I can comfortably move on from.