Late Night With The Devil: Illusionists

Not that anyone (I don’t think) actually believes that television and film are actually magic, but they get described in those terms often enough. And I get it, you’re talking about signals sent through the air (or as pulses down cables) that captivate us, make us laugh and cry and scream. Film and television show us the impossible from thin air. How is that not magic?

But of course it’s not. It’s technology, it’s editing, it’s special effects. It’s the illusion of continuity and motion, of images reproduced from little blobs or blocks of color, of meaning created through camera angles and lighting and music and more besides. The whole point of illusion is to show us things that aren’t there, or that aren’t what they appear to be.

Late Night With The Devil is, for the most part, a well-crafted story about illusion; it’s a story about what seems to be versus what is, and the price paid for success.

It’s 1977, and Jack Delroy is one of the most successful late-night talk show hosts on the air. Every night, his show “Night Owls” brings viewers the mix of sketch comedy, banter, and celebrity interviews one would expect from the genre, consistently at the top of the ratings without ever quite managing to dethrone late-night powerhouse Johnny Carson. But Delroy’s suffered a number of setbacks of late, including the untimely death of his wife Madeleine from cancer. Ratings are slipping, and forays into more sensationalistic waters haven’t really turned things around. His contract is up for renewal, and so Jack Delroy has one last chance to keep his show on the air. It’s Halloween night, and he has a very special line-up of guests ready to go. There’s the celebrated spirit medium Christou, a former magician-turned-skeptic named Carmichael Haig, and a young psychologist named June Ross-Mitchell. Dr. Ross-Mitchell has written a book about her work with a young girl named Lilly, who seems to suffer all of the symptoms of demonic possession.

It's Halloween night, 1977, and Jack Delroy is hoping for an audience with the devil.

What we’re watching is ostensibly the unedited master tape of the night’s broadcast, which in a way really sets up this idea that what we’re watching is a carefully crafted illusion. Delroy’s talk show is a television show that presents an appearance of bonhomie onstage while behind the scenes is carefully controlled chaos, naked ambition, people letting down their masks to reveal the cowardice, venality and desperation underneath. The smiles snap back into place once they come back from commercial. And the guests on the show itself are a conversation between reality and illusion. For all of his theatrics, Christou is really just cold-reading and being fed information by his assistant, Haig points out the ways that showmanship masquerades as the supernatural at every turn (in as pompous a fashion as you’d expect), culminating in a sequence about hypnosis that draws a sharp line between what is experienced and what is reality while suggesting that television itself might be a form of hypnosis. It’s not really a film where you can’t be certain of what you’re seeing (it’s pretty clear-cut on what’s going on), but it plays with these ideas of perception and artifice well.

In terms of artifice, period pieces are always risky, but this film does a nice job of capturing the 70s zeitgeist – the clothes, the color palette, the corny jokes, the cultural references, the sexism – and brings together a number of historical and pop cultural moments in a pleasing way. You’ve got the emergent religious cult weirdness of the late 60s/early 70s with allusions to  the Bohemian Grove, the Church of Satan, the Process Church, and anachronistically a little bit of the Branch Davidians. On top of that you’ve got the nascent interest in demonic possession sparked both by films like The Exorcist and interest in parapsychology, both of which set the stage for the recovered-memory Satanic panic of the 1980s. The film opens with lots of footage from riots and protests and sensational crimes like the Manson murders, setting the stage as a U.S. in turmoil, feeling like everything is falling apart. Delroy’s show is the kind of place people come to for pleasant refuge in a world where maybe…just maybe…the devil is real. This film has a very good idea of what its sandbox is, and it’s patient about building its world, laying detail in carefully, and (with one annoying exception) does a good job of not overexplaining things, leaving the audience to piece things together as everything comes to a head. The performances are a little on the stagey side, and although that makes sense for television, it’s the case even in the moments that are supposed to be behind the scenes; the exception to this being the actress playing Lilly, who is just fantastic – extremely unnerving but with a lot more restraint that I usually see from someone asked to play her role.

And this speaks to the film’s biggest problem, and it’s an appropriate one – verisimilitude. The conceit is that we’re watching the master tape of a live television broadcast that ended horribly, and when the focus is on the television show, it works really well. But there are these interstitial moments that are supposed to be what’s going on while they’re on commercial break, and they’re shot as fairly clean black-and-white handheld footage. What television network would have cameramen roaming around backstage filming confidential conversations? It doesn’t need the found-footage conceit to work, and it just ends up getting in the way. Worse, it dispels the illusion, and for a story where willingness to believe leads all kinds of bad places, it’s an irritating misstep in an otherwise well-made film.

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Okay, Fine, American Horror Story. You Win.

As shocking and disturbing and upsetting as American Horror Story has been this season, it took a musical number in the day room at Briarcliff to really unsettle me. There have been a lot "oh shit!" moments, a lot of "did they just say/do/show that?" moments, but Sister Jude's rendition of "The Name Game", complete with impromptu dance party, is what should be a moment of sunshine in an otherwise bleak existence, except since it's all going on in Jude's head, instead it feels weird and manic and brittle in a way that isn't shocking, per se, just deeply uneasy. I continue to be impressed.

Holy Shit, American Horror Story YET AGAIN

I'll be honest, I thought that "The Origins of Monstrosity" was a bit of a let-down after both parts of "I Am Anne Frank." I don't know what I was expecting - well, no, that's not true...

Holy Shit, American Horror Story

So I'm beginning to think I was wrong about the new season of American Horror Story - it's not as good as the first season, it's better. If nothing else, the two-part episode "I Am Anne Frank" stands as one of the bravest, scariest things I've seen as original television programming. In a story about Nazi war atrocities and Lizzie Borden-style patricide, the most uncomfortable thing in part 1 was Lana's aversion/conversion therapy session - stimuli presented calmly and clinically, with a kind, soft voice as Lana submits to awful, dehumanizing treatment - and this shit totally used to happen. They didn't need to make this up. And the critique in part 2 continues with Anne's husband and his expectations for married life, shown in the stagy colors and lightings of period film stock. It ends with people getting what they wanted - Lana getting out, and Anne returned to her happy family, but at awful, awful costs. Yeah, pretty sure the show's creator was thinking "oh, so we got the green light based on last season? Well, you motherfuckers ain't yet seen a thing."

American Horror Story - Asylum: Monster Hospital

The first season of American Horror Story was a thorough kick in the ass - sharp, nervy, lurid, and completely batshit insane. Almost every episode had at least one "did that just happen?" moment to it, either in a turn of the story, a particular shot, or a jab at one television taboo or another. Ghosts in rubber fetish suits, fathers crying while they masturbate, girls with Down Syndrome telling little boys "you're going to die in there" - and that was just the fucking pilot episode.

All of this garnered the show a  lot of interest, but I think it sort of missed what was really good about the show - the freedom to stomp on taboos wasn't the point, it was a necessary byproduct of the show's thesis: American horrors.  The first season was a tour through all of our nightmares - ghosts and monsters, sure, but also failing at your job, letting down your family, losing your spouse, being stuck with an unsellable house, infidelity, school shootings, bullying unsuitable boyfriends, abortion, blackmail, impotence, and the whole secret history of the Los Angeles in which it was set - starlets come to make their way in Hollywood only to die ugly anonymous deaths, furtive homosexual assignations ending in stabbings by rough trade, crazed serial killers and their family-like devotees, it's all there, all of our American horror. The stories we tell to keep the darkness manageable, the darkness we're trying to manage, and the darkness too deep to even get a story of its own.

Lucky for all of us, they got another season.

The first thing announced would be that it would be an entirely new story, with some cast members from the first season returning in new roles. That is awesome. It means not getting too bogged down in increasingly complex tangles of story continuity, it means exploring new ideas without shoehorning them in to an existing format, and it means that the story can actually end instead of lingering for seasons and seasons with scant payoff at the end. So this new season has started and it looks like it's going to be as crazed as the first.

The first episode introduces the new location - Briarcliff Hospital, a former tuberculosis ward turned asylum for the criminally insane. In the present day, it's in ruins and carries the reputation of being one of the most haunted places in America. A couple - young, in love, and seriously committed to getting their freak on - has made it their mission to visit each of the most haunted places in America and screw their brains out in each one of them. Which sort of sums up the American Horror Story ethos up to this point - people having really weird sex in haunted houses.

As the couple moves through the house, we flash back to the mid-60s, in the middle of Briarcliff's asylum days, It's run by a Catholic order, and the head nun has some interestingly draconian ideas about mental illness (it's sin, pure and simple) and treatment (purification, via her impressive collection of canes, crops, and flogs). She's also carrying a torch - well, "torch" is too mild a word, more like a cauldron of molten lava - for the monsignor who administers the place. So there's this whole lust/punishment thing going on with her about which say no more. And as much as she yearns for the monsignor, she loathes the doctor enlisted by the monsignor to treat the patients. And by "treat", I mean "on which he performs bizarre experiments in a secret lab on the hospital grounds." He's enlisted the help of one of the junior nuns, who feeds raw meat to half-glimpsed feral things in the woods outside the hospital, and he scrubs down long-disused shower rooms down with disinfectant, fresh scratches scarring the walls. The patients he treats have no family. Nobody will miss them.

Outside the walls of the asylum, mid-60s America has nightmares of its own. Two young couples in love, careful to hide it from the eyes of the world. A young black woman, a young white man, married and quick to close the shades before they kiss. Two young women, a journalist and a schoolteacher, the love that dare not speak its name setting up housekeeping. The horrors of the 1960s weren't ghosts and werewolves and vampires and zombies They were repression, fear, what you wanted crashing up against what society said you could have, the cold, impersonal administration of science and institutional medicine acting as a rough corrective to deviance. There are some flashes of the bizarre - what might be an alien abduction, the beasts in the woods, science gone awry - but these are the terrors of a world not yet ready to burst into massive social change. If the first season of American Horror Story was the hot reds of desire run amok, this season is the cold blues and greys of repression, of desire sealed up and in danger of becoming something misshapen and strange. There are nods to the appropriate horror models - A Clockwork Orange, Shutter Island, The Silence of the Lambs - making this as much a survey of horror in art as horror in life in culture.

Most importantly, it's just as utterly berserk as the first. The first episode is a barrage of images, scenes, dialogue, flashbacks, reveries, nightmares and hallucinations thrown at the viewer just a little faster than what we can process, slightly hysteric in presentation (which given the dominant subject matter is wholly appropriate). Threads start to weave together in the last fourth or so of the episode, and by the time the credits roll, everyone is where they're going to be, their fates decided, all in preparation for the storm to come. I anticipate that this is going to be some seriously good shit and appointment television, straight up.

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American Horror Story, Episode 3: The Man of the House

In my post about the first episode, I talked about this show as being an honest-to-goodness American horror story - a disintegrating marriage, a traumatic stillbirth, a rebellious daughter, and now a costly, unsellable home. That's the American nightmare right there. The third episode focuses the nightmare a little more, though, on American nightmares specific to men. Apart from everything else we learn, this is Ben's episode, Ben's nightmare.

It opens in 1983, and a vivacious young Moira is being pressured into sex by the man of the house. This is apparently based in precedent, a bad decision Moira chalks up to being lonely. The man's not hearing it, though, and things start turning to rape pretty quick. In comes the wife - oh shit! It's Constance! - and she shoots the fuck out of her husband and Moira. Yeah, they were living in the house at the time. This is a point in the show where one piece of the puzzle starts unwinding over the next few episodes. For as much batshit insane stuff as gets thrown at us in the pilot, much of it seems to be paying off as the tips of many ugly icebergs.

But this episode is, as far as I'm concerned, really about Ben. He's got a new client, who is distraught over her failing marriage (there that is again). Her husband is leaving her because she's, well, boring. The actress really sells it, too - she's pleasant enough, and she doesn't do a droning monotone or anything as obvious as that. She just makes everything she says seem inconsequential and stays just on the right side of not knowing when to stop talking. It's not overstated, but you don't miss the intent. Ben does the worst possible thing you can do in this instance - he drifts off in the middle of the session, and the next thing he knows, he wakes up in the backyard. The client is gone, nowhere to be found. I'm not a therapist, but I can't imagine anything worse than tuning out in the middle of a session, let alone to the point that you lose time.

So Ben can't do his job. He can't handle the role of provider.

On top of that, Hayden - the woman with whom Ben had an affair - has shown up on the Harmon's doorstep. She thinks Ben's wife should know everything. Like what? Like that Hayden didn't get an abortion. She's keeping the baby and insists that Ben help her raise it, starting by getting her an apartment in Los Angeles. Hayden's passed the point of jilted lover and is headed for crazy-eyed obsessive. Ben's mistake is metastasizing.

So Ben can't bring closure to his infidelity. He can't handle the responsibilities of a man atoning for a mistake.

And he wasn't there during the home invasion that threatened his wife and daughter. They took care of it on their own (well, more or less, but more on Tate over the next few episodes). Violet sees him as irretrievably weak, and her mother as strong and better than the man she married.

So Ben can't carry any authority at home. Nobody takes him seriously. He can't handle being a father.

Ben has failed as man of the house.

As the episode goes on, each of these crises winds tighter and tighter around Ben, and his anxiety and suffocation are tangible. He does not have his shit together at all. His shit is completely apart at this point, and it all ends in sudden, shocking violence, followed by a burial of sorts. Ben finally exerts agency, finally does something of his own will. He builds something in the backyard, a lovely brick gazebo, a fine addition to any home. In doing so, he entombs all of his misery and ensures that he will never be free of it.

Episode Two

American Horror Story, Episode 2: Can't You See The Blood?

Well, if you're going to leverage the success of your previous shows to do something spectacularly messed-up on a network that seems willing to take some chances, you'd best go big. American Horror Story came out of the gate like the tweaking party guest nobody could remember inviting - the one who won't stop sweating and really, really wants to talk to you about the gold standard and some really compelling business opportunities involving the collapse of Western civilization. A whole lot of crazy, all up in your face at once. I had some concerns after the first episode that a constant barrage of weird would be too distracting to be scary, and the second episode eases up a little on the sheer WTF-ery in every scene. It's still a little frenetic in spots, but with the cast of characters in place, the pace slows down a little. It's less a bunch of stuff being flung at you, and more something unfolding. Some piece of origami, maybe. Folded from a hideous picture, each glimpse, each angle, letting us in a little more to the horrible totality.

Just as the pilot opened in 1978, with the house sitting in ruins, this episode opens up in 1968, with the house serving as a boarding house for nursing students. In 1978, two boys intent on vandalism were mauled by, well, something in the basement. In 1968, the house is in fine shape, and some of the students are going out for the evening. Two others are staying in to study, and because they don't want to get themselves in trouble, late-60s-single-women-style. And when a man comes to the door, hurt and bleeding from a cut on his forehead, the nursing students let him in.

He isn't really hurt, and they don't survive the night.

It's looking more and more like this house is built as much out of atrocity as it is brick.

Meanwhile, the Harmon family, already busy disintegrating when they moved in, are hard at work fucking themselves up even more. They moved across the country to get away from everything that happened to them in Boston - Ben's affair, Vivien's stillbirth. Now Ben's affair is reaching out from one coast to the next. She's pregnant, and wants Ben to come to Boston to help "take care of it." Naturally, Ben lies his lying face off about it to his wife and daughter. Not that it matters as much at this point - he and his wife are forging a tenuous reconnection over her new pregnancy (yeah, that's healthy), and his daughter is pretty much openly contemptuous of him because of the affair. She doesn't fit in at school and she's cutting herself. On the other hand, she's made a connection with Tate, one of Ben's clients. Tate is probably not the healthiest friend to have, but he's pretty familiar with the house - including the knowledge that there is something in the basement. So Ben's off to Boston, and Vivien and Violet are on their own in the house.

And a woman comes to the door, hurt and bleeding from a cut on her forehead.

One of this show's strengths so far is how it keeps us off-balance. In the pilot, that was partially because we had so much information thrown at us. In this episode, it's more how new reveals upset what we think we know. The people who die here don't seem to leave, so it remains to be seen who else is a victim of the house. For the most part, we only have the Harmon's perspective, and that's not very trustworthy. It turns out Constance has a life apart from the house, and it's just as messed up as you might imagine. But Moira? Tate? Are we seeing them as they are? Tate is alternately full of rage and lonely, confused. He knows there's something important about the basement, but pleads ignorance as to what. Moira is a seductress to Ben and an older woman to everyone else. People don't really walk into this house. They're just sort of not there, and then they are. The jittery, disconnected editing of the pilot continues, as if what we're witnessing is fragmented, and the gaps suggest there are things we aren't actually seeing, but should. For the nursing students in 1968, the blood on the man's forehead was a lie, and the truth was much worse. This episode reinforces the idea that what we see may very well be the lie, and the truth might actually be worse. What can't we see?

Episode One

Bedlam, Episode One: By The Way, Did We Mention It Was Haunted?

Boy, is there a dearth of scary stuff on television. It doesn't even need to be gory or adult or anything like that. Just something spooky, you know, something to give you a few good frights. Much of what I've seen in the last few years has been courtesy of BBC America - The League of Gentlemen, Afterlife, the occasional episode of Doctor Who (holy shit, "Blink") and Torchwood (holy shit, "Countrycide", "Children of Earth"). So seeing that they were going to premiere Bedlam - what appeared to be a series about a straight-up haunted building - I was all "woo-hoo!" and setting the DVR. The premise seemed a little goofy - former asylum turned into luxury apartments and haunted by the ghosts of patients who died there - but the ghosts looked cool and the setup allowed for both episodic and continuous storylines. So hey, let's check this out, episode by episode.

So the first episode opens with Kate Bettany trying to sell potential occupants on units in her father's newest development, Bedlam Heights Luxury Flats. Apparently, the building has been in Kate's family for generations, since the days when the Bettany family ran the asylum. What they were thinking, calling the development BEDLAM Heights, positioning it alongside the most notorious example of early insane asylums, well, it's TV so fuck it. But seriously, you wouldn't put up condos on the site of a former German P.O.W. camp and call it "Stalag Gardens" or anything. So no wonder Kate's having trouble filling the units.

Kate lives in the building along with her friends Ryan McAllister and Molly Lucas. Molly kind of has a thing for Ryan, but it's tough to tell whether or not Ryan's gay - he might be, but he's not saying. Then there's Kate's friend Zoe, who doesn't live there and isn't really liked by anyone else. They're all trying to get Kate to go out with them for her birthday. Warren (Kate's dad) comes by as she's finishing up for the day and gives her a lovely antique ring for her birthday. "Where'd you get this, Dad?" "I found it in one of the walls." Gee, thanks, Dad. Nothing says "I love my daughter" more than the personal effects of a long-dead mental patient.

Kate puts on the ring, and a hollow-eyed apparition in a patient's gown appears behind her, and water starts running down the walls. Uh-oh.

Rounding the cast of characters is Jed, Kate's cousin. He's muscular, full-lipped, brooding, tormented, and can not only see ghosts, but can also see how they died. He and Kate are just this side of estranged, mostly because Jed's been in and out of mental hospitals himself as a result of his "gift." He's the black sheep of the family. He's back because he keeps getting text messages on his phone that say "help Kate" or "save Kate" or "Kate in danger" or variations thereof. Jed sees the apparition and knows why Kate needs saving, even while Kate rolls her eyes at him and misses death by that much.

I'm not convinced by this first episode. Part of it seems to be the show's attempt to be both a Melrose Place-style relationship drama and a ghost story. The relationships are inchoate, muddled. More goes unsaid than said, and nobody seems like they really connect. Maybe this is by design, but it's tough to tell who these people actually are to each other, so there's not much reason for me to care about what happens to them. The ghost part is equally problematic, because even though the ghosts themselves are effective, their every appearance is telegraphed by a HUGE! MUSICAL! STING! as if we're not going to know there's a ghost on screen otherwise. It's distracting and robs the show of any suspense or tension it could have. This is too bad, because there's a lot of potential here, and Jed's introduction demonstrates that they can handle ghosts subtly too, they just don't. I'd like to think that some of this is down to this being the first episode, but ghosts don't need all of the fanfare. They can just be there in the background and be way more chilling than if someone kept yelling in our ear "THERE ARE GHOSTS! THIS PLACE IS HAUNTED!" Dude, I know, it's why I'm watching in the first place.

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