Tooth and Torch
If nothing else, wicked bouts of writer's block have properly coincided with the beginnings of the fall—both in nature, and on television. Oak Mountain has been particularly brown, as has Cheaha, but it's still a change, and the air is starting to smell of dead leaves. Also, American Horror Story is back, and it's overlapping—coinciding—with one of my guiltiest and most tasteless of television pleasures: SyFy's Paranormal Witness.
Calling Paranormal Witness "reality TV" is a little like calling the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel "some painting". Paranormal Witness is what is left of reality TV after you take away the trappings of youth and vanity and clear-cut personal conflicts: talking heads by unhappy families over reenactments of the worst trauma they ever endured together. Often they will describe objects moving from place to place. Electrical problems. Bad smells. Dark figures in the night. Sounds in the walls.
At first glance, it's a natural outgrowth of the "ghost hunters" phenomenon. After all, there is no need to rely on chance and staging to spook audiences in the night. These stories have already happened. There is no need to get scared: these people have already been scared. This way, there is no greenlit nightvision jitterbugging. A story can reliably build to a 57th-minute climax, and the graphics can be handled by a relatively sophisticated cable network. This is TV you can count on—not necessarily for scares of any kind, at least nothing in the ghosts and goblins department, but for an investigation of family drama of a particularly repulsive and enticing brand: that coincidence of belief, fear, stress, relationship, and environment that is so subtly tuned that it can be mistaken for spirits in the night.
People, I'm saying this isn't a show about ghost stories. It's a series all about family tragedy, and it's as compelling as it is subjective. Okay, well, there may have been a poltergeist in that house—or the youngest child of a family with a working single mother might have been acting out for attention. The new house may have had a speckled past, but it's just as likely the "prankster" husband took a darker turn further away from the city, or the workaholic mother found new ways to occupy her time and imagination. Nearly every episode contains at its core some kernel of familial discord, some little true glimmer in all the retellings—and the work to find that glimmer is just as much the reason to watch as the ghost stories and jump scares.
Think about those stories you tell about your life. Do they ever capture accurately how that event took place? How the air tasted, why you wore that shirt, whether plums were in season and had you had one yet that year? Now think about how much more separated from reality a staged re-enactment would be, with added digital effects, by actors who don't know you, reading lines written by people who listened to a tape of your retelling? HHHHHHHHHAAAAAWP. Sorry, just had to gasp for breath. It's a meta minefield, and little sogo pomo David is having a field day. What is the truth? Whose truth? Which truth? Why truth?
I'll admit that reading Harry Hardiner and particularly his Rosewire series majorly hooked me on winnowing out the "true" story from the cosmic game of telephone we call history (though technically Hardiner would suggest they were all true), so Paranormal Witness plays right into my sensibilities. Viewers get to choose their own level of involvement, to borrow a phrase. How much of the talking head do you believe? None of it, if you want—examine what human truths the writers plumbed, and how they found people to relive false events in front of a camera. A few observable details? Okay, then what in that mess of strange facts can you assemble into a coherent picture of a real person? Is there something... uncanny about the whole thing? Something unexplainable? Something all too obvious? And don't get me started on the reenactments: embellishing the embellished, FX'd over and acted earnestly, and lit appropriately. It's almost art. Someone should write it a love letter.
Enter this season of American Horror Story.
It takes Paranormal Witness as what Harry Hardiner would have called its "wholecloth", supplanting the talking heads and the stories of human failure and the hideous reenactments of their hazier points. So far this season, we have seen a variation on the new house curse, the move to get away, the lost child, the troubled history, the lapsed addict, the home invasion, the backwards locals, the useless police, the videotaped research... Season Six of AHS so far has played out almost all the major motifs of Paranormal Witness, using its own format, and even reappropriating its bumper titles. And it adds its own tasty Ryan Murphy flair on top.
Look: like every season of AHS to date, Season Six already copes with a uniquely... well, a uniquely American horror story. This year, we're already occupied with plot points and character details which raise the gory specters of the prescription painkiller epidemic, police encounters ending in violence, random gang initiation, racial intolerance, and our very nation's own brutal and desperate settlement. Its reality format matches and undermines a national obsession that has escalated to the Presidential race. After all—what, in this story "inspired by true events", can possibly be considered true?
Now, a lot of attention has been paid to what will tie the seasons of American Horror Story together this year. And yes, there have been a lot of interesting theories and details to occupy ourselves with, if we're so inclined. Are all previous seasons actually "reenactments" of "true events"? Does the Piggyman from this season have anything to do with the one that murdered Cam in Season One? Pregnancy problems and using all your savings to start over are back from that season too. How about Kathy Bateman playing another bloodthirsty immortal, this one from around the same time as the plantation house from Season Three went up? How did the rift first open up between Tituba and the houes of Salem? Didn't Ryan Murphy say Dandy Mott's origins would be explored this season? If Queenie ended up visiting L.A. last season, where have the other survivors of Miss Robichaud's Academy wound up? The ghost rules ended up getting rewritten as well, halfway across town from Murder House.
It's a pop culture puzzle almost as endearing as Lost, and it's enough to make a fanboy giddy. There's even a theory tying the seasons of AHS to the circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno. Litpro David is all in a tizzy. What could the twist in episode 6 be? Cuba certainly got me asking. There are enough meta-directions it could take to drive a brother crazy. Are these the stories of dead people? Do the aliens of Season Two have a hankering for a very particular brand of reality show? Wait wait wait—is there a possible example of Explosionism playing out in front of us? There's good reason to wonder whether each of the first five episodes of Roanoke will be mortared versions of the first five seasons of AHS. A chance to write a future Explosionism post! What bliss.
But, be still my heart—the far more interesting question this season is, what will American Horror Story say about us?
Murder House looked inside the American home, and the horrors we imagine and hide there. Asylum dealt with the degredation of our press and the evolution of the American belief system. Coven told a Harry Potter generation that we are not a Wizard, Harry, and that adventures at Hogwarts sometimes involve the deaths of your friends, tacit racism, false lessons from faulty faculty, betrayal, and the terrors of mediocrity. Freakshow questioned celebrity and showbusiness and an enduring obsession with society's oddities. And the ghastly Hotel showed us a parade of professions that expose you to people on the worst days of their lives: policemen, physicians, hoteliers in a faded and shadowy location—tricks and dealers and runaways.
In Roanoke, Marcia Clarke is married to O.J. Simpson.
Not only that—we have good reason to believe that after last year's sprawl from vampire measles to postmortem serial killer parties to Rudy Valentino, that this year the narrative will be a little tighter. There is some evidence to suggest that might even be one of the aims of this season: focus and redirection. (Harry Hardiner would love the apparent simplicity if this season ends up being one of his fractals...) There are fewer episodes planned for this season, and the format, while fascinating and internally consistent so far, has the capacity for... hyperextension. The creators have also described a 3-act structure to the season—a first, as far as I can see, to be described that way in advance.
So what, in this tighter season, can we expect to see about a divided America, one afraid and distrustful of its police, one starting to live in fear of random attacks in our streets, one obsessed with security and the story of its own origins?
There have been some serious doubters out there (I'm looking at you, Slate), but this season could be the smartest and most-focused look that AHS has taken at America so far—and it has an impressive, if gaudy, track record. Looking at the stories of our hard-scrabble forerunners in a new, animalistic light, passed through the apparent safety of dramatic reenactment: our modern opiate of choice. This third episode with Lady Gaga as the goddess of a dead land reminds me of a line from Rise about the Risen America that has always stuck with me: "This is ancient land, this is dead land, and we have only begun to colonize it." Harry Hardiner was right. And, a decade and a half after he checked out, American Horror Story is putting together a season that would thrill him. Colonists and reality TV. If that's not America, I don't know what is.
It's exciting for all Harry Hunters to see a small nod to Mr Hardiner in episode 2: the unfinished (albeit spraypainted, not burned) word "MURDE" on the wall could end up being as integral to the plot as the Butcher in the woods. This should give "MESHARE" wonderers a happy diversion—even if "diversion" is exactly the right word, and "murder" is NOT what was meant to be on the wall after all.
In a continued toast to writer's block and the castoff slag of The Furnace, and in a hopefully not-premature tip of the hat to American Horror Story and its early-episode format, here is another disused chapter—this time from the first round of material from The Furnace, in a long chapter which imagines the unaired last episode of Rupert Smythe-Pryce's Stronger than Fiction reality show—the episode which cost the crew their lives, and that was to take them to Bookbright to recreate the success of his bestselling non-fiction novel Harry Hunters.
Anyone else ready for next Wednesday night?