Welcome to the Briarcliff Insane Asylum, where a team of dedicated, gentle caregivers want nothing more than to help their charges recover. Or, wait, it’s the opposite of that.
Ryan Murphy certainly loves his freaks.
Just look at his track record – from Glee to The New Normal to Nip/Tuck – and the pattern of inventing characters living life on the fringes of society becomes perfectly clear.
With the second season of his polarizing horror anthology series American Horror Story (now subtitled Asylum), Murphy couldn’t have picked a better setting for his thematic calling card: The Briarcliff Manor, an asylum for the criminally insane in Massachusetts circa 1964, filled to the brim with psychos, nymphomaniacs and nuns, many of them enjoying such period faux-pas as interracial sex, homosexuality and evolutionary science.
It’s the perfect setting: a massive melting pot of taboos just waiting to be broken.
But is it scary?
Tonight’s premiere works much in the same way the previous season did. The mix of bizarre characters, claustrophobic cinematography and unbridled sex (and death) creates a viewing experience unlike anything else on TV: Sometimes laughable, mostly weird and uncomfortable, but always totally entrancing.
Before we know anything about this season’s storyline, we already know that show is going to be a joy to watch – by which I mean, specifically, to look at.
Indeed, the cinematography is once again incredible to behold. Although it may not be as meaningful as the metaphorical beauty of Breaking Bad, it certainly finds a way to be more experimental than most things on television.
When mechanic – and accused serial killer – Kit Walker’s (Evan Peters, returning from last season) house is turned topsy-turvy by what appears to be some otherworldly physics engine, it sure is a sight to behold.
Stylistically, Asylum is very similar to last season, but the most striking thing about it is the apparent lack of narrative connection to the original storyline. When Murphy said the series was to be an anthology, he truly meant it.
Many were tentative about seeing actors from the previous season in totally different roles – especially after Jessica Lange’s Emmy-winning turn as Constance Langdon – but, inexplicably, the whole set-up just works.
The episode begins with a present-day couple – played by Maroon 5’s Adam Levine and Jenna Dewan-Tatum – entering the now abandoned Briarcliff asylum as part of a honeymoon exploring (and having sex inside of) the most haunted places in America.
Only known as The Lovers, their tale frames the entire episode. It really is the most boring portion of the show, with Levine having his arm ripped off and Dewan-Tatum presumably meeting her doom at the end of the episode when she runs into this season’s featured killer, Bloody Face.
These cliché-heavy sections of American Horror Story have never been its most frightening bits and usually generate more laughs than anything. Don’t be dissuaded, however – Asylum has plenty more to offer.
Fans of the first season know that the characters tend to battle personal demons more than ghouls and Asylum continues that trend. The premiere goes in a ton of different emotional directions, dabbling in tired tropes while sprinting freely into unexplored territory (for basic cable, mind you).
Lame framing device aside, we’re introduced to a ton of different characters, each deviant in their own way. Lange’s Sister Jude is the nun running the titular asylum. While mostly coming across as a villainous overlord, flashes of her repressed lust and obsession with divine justice make her the character to watch.
Perhaps the most unsettling moment of the entire episode occurs when Sister Jude is having dinner with her boss, Monsignor Timothy Howard and we see her go through an almost ritualistic preparation for a sexual act – a fantasy – that the old nun has likely never had the gumption to go through with.
Elsewhere, we have Lana Winters and Kit, both of whom appear to be this season’s protagonists. Their stories are similar – Lana and Kit both begin the episode living in socially unacceptable (for the time) relationships, Lana in a lesbian partnership and Kit in an interracial one. Over the course of the episode, both become inmates at Briarcliff under false pretenses, but not before experiencing a wealth of peculiar scenarios.
Kit, accused of being Bloody Face, contends that he was captured and probed by aliens (and we see this happen repeatedly, no less). Lana, while breaking into Briarcliff to get some quotes from Kit, witness some sort of creature on the grounds before being knocked unconscious and quickly interred at the asylum by Sister Jude, who hopes to cure the reporter of her impurities (homosexuality).
We are also introduced to Dr. Arthur Arden, the resident mad scientist. As with everyone else in the nuthouse, we aren’t sure yet what his motives are, but they seem to clearly involve feeding dead inmates to some creature he’s harboring on the grounds, and, well, cutting people open without anesthesia.
Rounding out the crazy this week is Shelley the nymphomaniac (played by the great Chloë Sevigny), who touches people’s butts, performs fellatio on the white shirts and argues for a minute with Sister Jude.
By the end of the episode, all the crazy starts to make you wonder – what, if anything, is the point of all of this?
I’m not going to deny that Asylum, as with the original series, feels like a watching a teenager toss blood and cum on a wall like a demented Jackson Pollack, but it’s also hard to deny that this unbridled insanity isn’t a blast to watch.
But Murphy and co-creator Brad Falchuk have more in mind for their freaks than it seems. The first season’s haunted house was a pretty strong metaphor for the housing crisis and even though the show’s more juvenile tendencies got in the way of the message, it didn’t make the idea any less clever.
On Asylum’s premier, we’ve already been introduced to carnivorous creatures, mad scientist, serial killers and aliens, but the freaks are out to prove something.
There’s a feud brewing here, just below the surface. It’s s feud between Kit and his beliefs, between Lana and her desires, between Sister Jude and Dr. Arden, between godless creatures and pious men.
Religion and science, at war.
Asylum may be over the top, but Murphy and Falchuk aren’t throwing all these ridiculous scenarios at us without an endgame in mind. And what’s a better place for Murphy’s war than inside a Catholic mental asylum?
diversions@umdbk.com
