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| FX |
Asylum opens
in Massachusetts in the year 1964, and we are thrust into a landscape where the
characters don’t only need to stay away from a single house in order to stay
safe and sane when the entire world is against certain types of characters.
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| FX |
We were presented with the image in the show’s marketing of Sister Jude (Jessica Lange) as a she-devil in a nun’s habit. The only thing that makes her devilish in this context is her commitment to an archaic set of beliefs and practices. Not to mention, her disdain for the patriarchy that prevents her from truly having all the power at Briarcliff. Power she only wants in order to actually help spiritually rehabilitate these people. That’s the big twist with Sister Jude is she’s not what everyone expected her to be all summer long from the ads and posters; it doesn’t mean she’s soft either as she had the chance to show her quickness to painful and humiliating forms of discipline throughout the episode. Just look at the way Sister Jude sashays into the common room flanked by intimidating orderlies wielding only a whistle—the inmates obey her like trained dogs because they know what will happen should they resist her guidance. For she is God’s authority on Earth and it is her personal mission to cure what ails the inmates at the asylum or as she puts it, ‘mental illness is the fashionable explanation for sin.’
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| FX |
Jude’s main opposition at Briarcliff is the head physician Dr. Arthur
Arden (James Cromwell) a man whose methodology skips right past arcane and
right into cold clinical sadism. He openly scoffs at Jude’s attempts to figure
out what he’s been up to with various patients—patients that later wound up
dead after being taken into his foreboding medical ward. It’s proof positive that
she may cane some asses but Jude doesn’t want to see true harm befall the
patients at the asylum. Arden is the man of science at odds with Jude’s ideal
of piety, but his interpretation of science is far more in line with a child
putting a spider into a jar without first puncturing any air holes in the lid.
Cruel inhumane experiments against living creatures that serve no true scientific
purpose, but they do provide the series with another blood-thirsty threat
outside of the mysterious figure that wears butchered skin on its face as a
mask. As well as feed into his massive God complex. It all fits with his
hostile indifference toward the tenets of the Church—why serve in Heaven when
you can rule in Hell? Especially when that Hell is created using the deadliest
tools Dr. Arden has at his personal disposal: capable hands and a wicked mind.
In the way that Jessica Lange’s performance brought so much
to the first season of American Horror
Story that is the position that Cromwell takes with his Dr. Arden. He
positively owns his scenes and plays this man with a disturbing lack of
compassion. Arden is deaf to all the pleas of the inmates at Briarcliff they’re
just an endless supply of meat for his butcher’s block. One flash of a secret
smile after he’s gotten away with another nefarious act and it’s clear he’s
evil and loving it. I’m curious to actually see what reason he has for creating
the Raspers (the name of the organ-munching creatures in the woods Sister
Eunice fed from her trusty buckets).
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| FX |
One of the new characters that very quickly finds himself
under Arden’s scalpel is the (possibly) wrongly accused former mechanic Kit
Walker (Evan Peters). The only crime this character has seemingly committed is simply
the 1960’s taboo of being in an interracial marriage with his African-American
wife, Alma (Britne Oldford). From what we can tell about Kit so far there are
three options in my mind about how his narrative will ultimately play out. The
first is that Kit is telling the truth and there are going to be actual aliens
in this season of AHS. The second is,
much like his season one character Tate Langdon, Kit Walker is full of shit or truly
mentally disturbed. He’s either aware that he did it, or there’s a mental
illness at work here such as a multiple personality that did the job for him—leaving
him confused and unaware, innocent in his own mind.
Personally, from the context of what we’ve seen already with
the not so subtle hostility from some of Kit’s peers during the opening scene that
something far darker could be the answer about what happened to Alma. There’s
an episode of the television series MASH
which deals with a similar notion that entered my mind the more I thought about
the alien scenes we witnessed. In the MASH
episode, Hawkeye goes through severe mental trauma as the result of being
directly involved with a woman ending the life of her baby in order to keep it
from being noisy and having their location revealed to the enemy troops nearby
on patrol. When Hawkeye remembers the story it’s a chicken that the woman
silenced not a baby thanks to the mind’s own powerful defense mechanisms
against having to reconcile the truly horrific acts we may witness in our
lifetimes.
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| FX |
If one chooses to think of Kit’s abduction as metaphorical
then a grisly scene could be going on in the latent areas of his memory—where the
truth of Alma’s demise resides. The assholes from the auto shop hinted that
they knew about his relationship with a colored girl and their hateful posse
might have shown up at Kit and Alma’s with awful intentions. The way the show
shoots his scenes at the asylum there’s this disorienting feeling that just
because Kit thinks of something one way, or we see something such as the scene
where Arden extracts something from him that would lend to the alien story it
doesn’t mean that’s how it truly happened. His mind could be blocking him from
the atrocities a lynch mob would enact on the young woman and himself as well
for being with her. It could all be a way to show the power of the mind over
all other things—a theme which would fit with the current outlook of the
series. Time will tell which way Kit Walker’s story goes. I doubt highly it
really has anything to do with the renowned serial killer Bloody Face other
than a panicked police force needing someone to answer for such heinous crimes
to the citizens of their town.
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| FX |
There’s a variety of inmates at
Briarcliff and it’s a nice balance between those who definitely aren’t fit to
be out in society versus the ones that society doesn’t want to have anything to
do with for various reasons. The first episode introduced us to new characters
Shelley (Chloe Sevigny), a nymphomaniac, and the enigmatic Grace (Lizzie
Brochere). Both characters were given an equal amount of time and as of right
now Grace is the more compelling of the two female inmates. She too is an
accused murderer and so the bond with Kit is instantaneous as well as the
personal chemistry between Brochere and Peters. I was a little underwhelmed
with what we’ve seen so far of Shelley. There’s just something about the
character that doesn’t make you want to know more at least not yet. The casting
department does get credit for the various background players however as they all
have instantly intriguing appearances that beg the chance to learn most of
their back-stories by the time the season is over with.
Casting is key
with a period piece and that’s one of the reasons why it works to have certain
actors from season one back again for Asylum.
You look at someone like Lily Rabe or Zachary Quinto and with the right
wardrobe they can fit into this sort of era quite easily. Some people just have
the right face for a certain time it’s why the same ten actors seem to be in
every British period movie. I was very impressed with pre-incarceration Kit
Walker. His speech patterns and costuming felt very authentic for the time
period and those sort of surface details are what lend to the suspension of
disbelief and the feeling that you’re truly inhabiting the world of these
characters every week.
What becomes immediately clear from the get-go with this
episode is the fact that this is going to be a much more grounded season than
the last one. Yes, there is a possible alien abduction, but that doesn’t change
the fact that we are delving into an era whose views and social mores create an
environment for many of the characters where it doesn’t matter if they’re
locked away in Briarcliff or not—for some people back then life meant constant fear
of being seen as different. This is an era where the Red Scare a decade before
ruined lives and families just because one nosy neighbor didn’t like you.
Similar fates await the characters of the series as it didn’t take much at all
for someone to sign on the dotted line and have a family member or friend
hauled off for any number of so-called crimes against society.
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| FX |
Take for example the storyline of journalist Lana Winters
(Sarah Paulson) and her lover schoolteacher Wendy Paisa. They are shacked up
together at a time when all it would take is for one person to out Wendy and
she’d lose her job. People like Jude use this fact under the guise of wishing
to ‘help’ a lost soul—albeit a lost soul wanting to prove herself as a real
journalist that stumbled onto one of the many grim secrets of Briarcliff Manor.
So she had to be silenced and in doing so Jude forced Wendy to betray the
person who meant the most to her. What’s truly frightening about Wendy and Lana’s
story is how it still applies today forty something years later where all the
time one can read about an out teacher being fired from their job simply for
being who they are and not having the ‘decency’ to conceal that for the sake of
the rest of world.
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| FX |
A season of dealing with the metaphorical monsters to be
found both in faith and in the darker corners of society is going to make for
some killer television. Next week Zachary Quinto enters the fray as a
Halloween-themed episode brings with it a story of demonic possession. I can’t
wait to see Sister Jude dance with the devil in the pale moonlight as she
clearly has some secrets tucked into that saucy red lingerie of hers that hint at yearnings that are anything but pure.
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