NOW PLAYING: American Horror Story: Hotel
Boldly going in to a section of the series in which I know nothing about.
American Horror Story: Hotel premiered on October 7, 2015 on FX, bringing with it most mainstay actors minus Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy. Unlike Freak Show and the seasons that came before it, Hotel existed in the same world as the first and third season, interconnected by characters such as Billie Dean (Sarah Paulson), a chain smoking psychic who guides the ghosts on their journey in the hotel. Yeah, it’s a journey, not a hotel. Madison Montgomery and Queenie from season three are there serving time in “purgatory” while they await trial into Heaven/Hell. Eventually, when it came out Ryan Murphy tied the seasons together, people ate that shit up. It’s not hard at all to connect television shows as you write them, it’s not like Ryan Murphy had this planned out in advance, but men can do anything remotely “intelligent” and we’ll praise them for their mediocrity. As Kayla Cobb wrote for Decider: “That’s almost a decade, nine seasons, and 103 hours of television that are all connected. Take that, Marvel.”
Sometimes I read quotes like this and can’t believe other people got employed in journalism before me.
The hype around Hotel was thanks to one key element: Lady Gaga. This self-styled vampiric countess served looks the entire season that caused crowds to go crazy. Wearing a sequined gloved hand thing, Lady Gaga truly proved she can do anything: Singing, subpar acting, the creative Director of Polaroid. This bitch ate it up! I didn’t watch the show but I know so many people dressed up as her for Halloween including my ex boyfriends ex girlfriend. I distinctly remember this because while we were fucking I would stalk her and she looked absolutely radiant in their couples costume from the year before. It was disgusting! It was erotic! And yes, I definitely thought about her dressed up as Lady Gaga more than him when we fucked but who cares!
That’s the gay agenda, baby.
Pictured above is the outfit my ex-boyfriends ex girlfriend replicated except with much more cleavage and potentially much bigger boobs.
American Horror Story: Hotel opens on a shot of Hotel Cortez, a run down, dilapidated building that is on its last leg. Two Forever 21 catalogue models get out of a cab decked head to toe in quintessential 2015 fashion sporting a shawl and a floppy brimmed hat asking the cab driver if they’re close to Universal Studios. They open the doors to the hotel and it’s pretty dope inside. Clearly inspired by 70’s Deco art, there’s a red octagonal carpet on the floor, high ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and an all gold trimming surrounding the lobby. They ding the bellhop and silence pursues until Kathy Bates shows up while they debate leaving since the hotel has an incredibly sinister feel. Bates says “no refunds” and they realize they cam’t afford a new hotel so up the elevator they go! Jazzy music like the McDonalds “McPick 2” song plays and they walk down a hallway past doors with moaning emulating out of them as Bates tells them there’s no wifi. Hell, there’s no cell service!
They are lambs and this is the slaughter house.
“Where’s the ice?” the two blondes ask, though it will hardly matter in the end. Ice won’t save your pretty little souls, dummy’s! They pass a maid cleaning a bedsheet with blood and see two blonde twins standing at separate ends of the hall. At this point, I’d abandon my mission for Ice but Ms. Wet Seal CEO over here will not be deterred. As she stockpiles her bucket with ice a gloved hand reaches out to her sending an icy chill down her back. When she comes back to the room the other blonde is lighting candles since it smells like a dead animal in the room. The front desk says they’re sold out and can’t give them another room while the two sniff at the mattress. Noticing it’s stitched up the middle, one of the blondes takes a knife and carves down the middle of the bed as a bald man crawls out from the mattress with blood shot eyes.
“Who was that!!! What was that!!!!!'“ Bates reassures them and tells them they can wait in the penthouse suite until the police come. The door is numbered 64 and apparently the room is never rented out bu that’s okay because it’s not like they’re staying the night, right? Wet Seal CEO falls asleep on the mattress and comes to around 2:25 PM, calling out for her friend Angie. Unfortunately for her, Angie is dead! The two blonde twins are feasting on her because it’s snack time, mommy. Wittle babies need to get their wittle bloodies because babies need cummies too.
A dude with a pristine jawline hears about the news of this and walks on to the scene in Aviators so you know he’s some important cop type person. He tears the aviators away to investigate the scene and it’s… not what I was expecting? They’re actually not at the hotel they’re at some place where a red head is straddling a dude on the bed who is still alive but has had his eyes and tongue ripped out and put on the nightstand. With no tongue, just teeth, and no eyes, this guy kind of looks like Andrew Garfield for some reason. I feel like I’m going crazy because this is, in fact, the Amazing Spiderman. Right? Like, look at this:
(Also I’m really sorry this is about to be a gross photo but..)
The audience figures out okay, they were having an affair!!! Huge bummer for his red headed mistress who is now speared on top of him. Detective Lowe (Wes Bentley) says it’s not the wife who did it though since this looks like a shrine. There’s photos of the family put up with their eyes blacked out and he says “they’re blind to the sins around them.” To make matters worse, this dude’s dick is fucking super glued to the inside of this woman. “Get me out of her” he’s mumbling, since his tongue is sitting on the night stand next to him. Is any of this really necessary to drive the plot? I guess! Cause if there’s anything I’ve learned from the past four pilots of American Horror Story it’s that Ryan Murphy looooves sexual violence !!!
Detective Lowe is sitting at his desk trying to figure out what the heck is up. It’s a classic “who-dun-it” scenario where murder has been stockpiling around the city as he looks at a folder with the photo of a 47 year old man dead from blunt force trauma. Who the fuck is doing all these crimes, Lowe wonders. There’s some gold paint in his rectal cavity too indicating, you guessed it, sexual assault. About now is when Murphy decides we need a little break from the fifteen minutes of nothing but trauma and inserts a phone call Lowe has with his daughter. Things in his marriage must not be great since mom doesn’t want to talk to him or maybe she’s not in love with cops anymore. Maybe ACAB has swept through Los Angeles during the ripe hours of 2015 on the wake of Ferguson and this woman has finally come to her senses. Sure, AHS is showing Lowe is on the good side, hunting down serial killers threatening the area, but I have no doubt he’s done some fuck shit to the mentally handicapped down at Skid Row. If this series is TRULY based off the Cecil Hotel I have NO doubt in my mind Detective Lowe didn’t violently try to break up crime down in Central City East.
I’m on the side of the Mom.
Someone urgent is on line three but this man is trying to make time for his family by reading Little Women to his daughter. Great, so these blonde women are off dying somewhere and this corrupt cop is IGNORING it because he’s SELFISH. He walks around his precinct saying cop shit about “cross referencing” and “fingerprints.” On his way out he gets an ominous call from a guy who’s insisting he’s about to kill again and we cut tooooooo
MAX GREENFIELD absolutely RADIATING twink energy. He’s looking like when I thought I was absolutely SERVING at my corporate Christmas party and instead nobody sat next to me because I brought Laura and people thought we were gay. Did you know corporate America HATES the GAYS??? Couldn’t find ONE place to sit and the guy from tech who always flirted with me barely looked at me because his girlfriend turned fiance was there and I was like okay yes Peter hide the fact we talk about sex all day at work!!!! Love that your boo thing is here when forty hours of the week you talk about not wanting to get married. You go king!!!
Not to rag on Peter but if you were hitting on someone who looked like THIS you had to be at least a little in the closet.
It’s his room and Max Greenfield needs it NOW!!!!!! He’s mad the price of the hotel isn’t $30 and juts his face out like an annoyed twink. Kathy Bates is perturbed and you can tell because she gives him the key to room 64 following up with the fact the elevator is out of service. Sarah Paulson calls out “I’ve got dibs on this one Iris” and watches him walk up the stairs like the little gay witch he is. Knowing what we know about Sarah Paulson’s character, we can surmise that Max Greenfield is an addict which yep, it’s proven in the next scene. He’s shooting up heroin and hallucinating hardcore about some guy in all white latex who has a sharp knife dildo penis. Haha you guessed it, rape!!!!! Ryan Murphy’s favorite thing!
Seriously has anyone done an analysis on this guy?
Kathy Bates says he’ can go look at room 64 if he wants to if he’s escorted by Liz Taylor. Sarah Paulson opens the door to Room 64 first though and sees Max Greenfield being brutally raped. Like Jesus, I truly fucking hate this. “The more you scream the more he likes it,” she whispers to him as Detective Lowe rides the elevator up. Suddenly, I’m pro-cop again. Go save the man being anal raped, please for the love of god! I’ve had it with this sensationalist trauma porn! Liz Taylor, the person escorting him up the elevator, says he has pain behind his eyes but I can’t focus on anything because I truly hate everything happening in this scene!!!!
Sarah Paulson says "say I love you Sally” and it will all go away. She starts crying when he says this which awwww, are we supposed to feel sympathy for the woman playing accomplice to this monster raping Max Greenfield? I guess we’re not given much of a chance to get to know him because he dies after saying he loves her, putting him out of his misery. The elevator dings and Detective Lowe is suddenly walking down the hallway to room 64 completely unaware of the horrors that are about to take place. He bursts through the door gun drawn but finds nothing. He lays down on the mattress and closes his eyes to think, indicating he must be a psychic or something. 2:25 hits on the radio again and Detective Lowe has realized he’s fallen asleep! Uh oh! Even worse, one of the small blonde twins is standing over him and he’s mistaken them as his child!
We already know where this is headed.
He chases the child down the Hallway and finds himself at a dead end before everything goes black, moving in to the next scene. A record plays, a sign that says “Why are we not having sex right now?” shows, and a very attractive woman is putting on lipstick. A naked butt, lines of cook, a man wearing sequins indicates alright, these are going to be the characters everyone wants to be. And I’m right! It is! Because all of a sudden, Lady Gaga and Matt Bomer are on television! Lady Gaga has a long red train following behind her and they take their place watching a movie at a picnic in the park. They scout the area and land their eyes on a relatively attractive couple indicating an orgy is probably going to go down and I’m turned on but also mad. What is this psychology shit Ryan Murphy is pulling on us, putting us through pain to seek pleasure? It’s genuinely so frustrating how sex is utilized in this show for both power and plot. It’s so formulaic and I feel like, though I know nothing about Ryan Murphy, it’s often utilized for shock value instead of interwoven by male producers in to stories that destigmatize or provide catharsis for those who are victims of it. I do not understand how he got away with this every fucking season but at least other outlets dissect his obsession to, as Refinery 29 says about the horrific rape scene with Max Greenfield:
“If that rape scene had happened to a female character — or even a straight male one — the internet would be losing its collective mind right now.”
I have conflicted thoughts about this and hate it but alas, the show goes on, because now Matt Bomer is undressing Lady Gaga down to her corset top and this couple is excited because they’re indicating they’re down bad. Lady Gaga does the pussy V licking their lips like they’re going to eat the girl out which yay!! Queer representation! Maybe it’ll make up for the brutal gay male rape scene because aren’t gay men just objects for fucking anyways? We don’t need to humanize the queer community whatsoever! Ryan Murphy’s depicting an orgy shows that he is ah-bviously progressive and such a forward producer. We stan.
This is 100% sarcastic. As a reward for both of us making it this far in the episode, here’s an above shot of Lady Gaga straddling some dude in a thong.
They’re all laying naked on the bed as Lady Gaga makes her appearance, running her hands on the lips of the blonde dude because no way she’s going to eat a PUSSY are you KIDDING ME? Gaga and Bomer keep their gloves on for some reason and the couple is fine with this, they’re getting topped by two very attractive people. Lady Gaga has on pasties which is a cop out and a thong which, good. She makes out with the girl for a little bit and I’m like okay. All of a sudden their gloves make sense because they have slit the throats of the couple they’re with and are drinking their blood. Given the fact they watched Nosferatu in the park, I’m going to make an educated guess that they’re vampires. They lay in the blood after which, vampire or not, I would hate and say they’ll call housekeeping later to have her clean up these nice silk sheets. I’d fucking hate them if I was housekeeping. Really? You have to do this for “fun?” Can’t you just kill them in the shower?
Apparently Detective Lowe made it out alive because he’s sitting in his car outside his house just spacing off. He opens the door to his house and his daughter jumps in his arms. Chloe Sevigny is his wife and I’m swept up like a princess in heels. Oh Chloe Sevigny, how I love you so. Why did you sell your soul to this show? I understand Lady Gaga but you? My sweet, sweet queen? Please, we do not need to bring ourselves to such lows. Raise your standards. You don’t need to play an attentive straight wife playing doctor in the Los Angeles area on American Horror Story. Ascend to higher heights!
Katy Bates is rolling food to the two blonde girls in the basement now held together by a hybrid cage light fixture. Bates is annoyed they’re ungrateful because she found a ton of Xanax and Klonopin in their bag and all she’s gonna do is pump a fuck of B12 in to their bodies!!! Sure it’s not how I would mother two strung out girls from the Netherlands but who am I to judge!! She pours all the nutrients in to some blender with chicken liver and brings it up to their mouth, forcing a tube in to their mouth. Sally (Sarah Paulson) walks in and is like c’mon can’t you have some compassion? All you do is whine about addicts but you’ve stuck around for twenty years and could leave at any given moment. I think you like it but Bates says “no I’m stuck here because of you. You’re the beginning and end of all my suffering,” which is kind of romantic when you think about it. Bates says fine, you want to get drugs out of their system? Here. Now it’s your job to explain to “her” why they taste like shit. Not hard to follow this logic, gonna guess the “her” in question is Lady Gaga and no one wants to let her down.
To be fair, neither would I.. Have you seen that ass?
Sally is alone in this room saying this used to be a place where people entertain others and now, these two blondes are going to entertain her. “Run!” She yells and one of the blondes takes off in her underwear, sprinting through the lobby as Kathy Bates watches her go, chasing her along the way. The girl is almost at the door when suddenly Lady Gaga appears, slitting her throat right there and then. “This can never happen again,” Gaga says as she sashays past her. The girl bleeds out on the floor indicating it’s Kathy Bates problem to deal with.
I love that Lady Gaga is in ONE season and already gets to demand attention in every scene while the Oscar winning Kathy Bates deals with absolutely pathetic roles in the AHS universe.
Sushi time for Detective Lowe and his daughter since they despise the food Chloe Sevigny makes them. These ungrateful little shits sit there eating while they discuss weird dreams this daughter has been having about some faceless man she doesn’t remember. It seems that both father and daughter have the same dreams since she asks if he remembers his face when he wakes up and he says yes. Meanwhile, Sevigny messages and address and the word “help” making me think this is some knock off Se7en plotline. He gets to the house and draws his gun, moving through the shadows of the rooms as he looks for his wife. The other cop protecting his daughter in the car runs after something he sees move out of the corner of his eye leaving Lowe’s daughter completely unprotected. Yikes! Chaos will ensue! He picks up the phone and it’s a call from Alex, his wife except no it’s not!! It’s from the killer, actually! Okay, so when does Chloe Sevigny come back? This is truly all I care about at this point. The daughter got out of the car to go after her dad. She enters the house as Detective Lowe pulls his gun on a man standing in the shadows. His daughter is now ALSO walking around the house and I’m like perfect, he’s going to kill her with a stray bullet. The daughter enters a room with a long hallway and wanders around finding two men with their intestines pouring from their bellies, serves you right for being curious! The dad pulls his daughter in to him to protect her and we’re on to…
A flashback scene!
It’s Santa Monica 2010 and the family seems relatively happy during this time period and they’re at the pier, horsing around at some Carnival games. Detective Lowe hoists his son up onto the carousel and his child looks suspiciously a lot like one of the blonde kids from the hotel. He checks his phone for a second and looks back to find his kid no longer on the carousel. Well, fuck! Seems like his son is MIA! No wonder him and his wife are always fighting. They’re having an intense conversation in the next scene to reflect some of the tension they face about how the serial killer was able to text John from Chloe Sevigny’s phone. Where she was during this time I still have no idea but it doesn’t matter because she’s perfect and can do no wrong. He says he’ll have uniformed officers protecting them at all times and he’ll move out to put distance between them which is good since Sevigny secretly wants him to go. She sees their son in his face every day and it makes her want to die, which isn’t fair but hey that’s how the cookie crumbles. Your son disappears and your (derogatory) husband is still there? All of it is no good, no good!
Back at the hotel a woman with a tight, gray updo talks about her dog dying to a man and child exiting a car and entering the hotel. I’m truly so lost at this point because every guy in this series looks the same. Wes Bentley and Matt Bomer have already been on the screen, so this dark haired guy has to be new, but I have no idea who he is. Luckily, this is a problem for a lot of people in the series cuz look:
Sick to my stomach just looking at this.
Alright so new guy and son are walking in to the hotel and I think they’re trying to buy it out. They’re interested in the top floor and want to move both work and home out here a la Jack Nicholson in the Shining. This is obviously the comparison they’re going for as the son goes off to throw a ball against the wall like the kid in Shining does around the Overlook. Iris asks how she can help them and the realtor says oh no, we’re okay I’m just walking them through to look around. Kathy Bates says owner? I’ve never met an owner and the woman says okay well this is the new owner Will Drake. I’m taking him up to the Penthouse to show him around and Bates is all stressed that their business is finally done for.
We have a little learning moment here where we learn the Penthouse is where Matt Bomer is laying on the couch naked asking “what are you doing in my room?” Bomer is pissed about this and tells Lady Gaga hey there’s people here can you deal with it but Lady Gaga is sort of smitten because Will Drake made a gown for Ms. Obama and she’s schmoozing him up. It seems for a little bit that these two will team up to make the Cortez a top class hotel. She asks Bomer to show him the James Turrell light sculpture which seems code for something or is just another play to show she’s in charge Always. Personally, I think them all teaming up would really benefit the two vampires in the end because it could mean more business? Of course, more business might mean more people paying attention to the hotel but the verdict is still out on what exactly the hotel is and if it symbolizes anything bigger than a building.
We’re not going to figure out though since I refuse to invest in this season of Hotel more than I have.
Bomer scuffles out to show Will Drake the sculpture and the son stays behind to look at records. Lady Gaga watches over him and says “I want to show you something you’ll enjoy.” They walk down the hall as she reminisces on New York, where it appears she must have still been a vampire during her time there. “Here we are,” she says as she knocks on the door. In a room filled with pinball arcade machines on screen, two blonde children play video games separately but together, filling up troughs of candy when need be. She addresses one of the kids as “Holden” and we realize Detective Lowe’s son has indeed gone missing and is now Lady Gaga’s son? child? demon? Who knows.
Bomer goes downstairs and Kathy Bates is in distress. We learn that Bomer is actually Kathy Bates son and she stays at this hotel as a way of keeping close to him. He doesn’t really give a shit though as he says “time to let go :)"
Another flashback takes place and we see Kathy Bates in 1994 watching Sarah Paulson enter the hotel doors with her son. Sally (Paulson) leads them upstairs and Kathy Bates is desperate to know where he’s going, asking Liz Taylor at the front desk information about the room. They turn Bates money away and continue smoking as she scuttles off to a different ATM to get more money. Sally shoots up heroin first before letting Bomer shoot up with the SAME. NEEDLE. Uh oh!!! Not very safe at all but he doesn’t care, he’s about to trip. Paulson lazily puts lipstick all over her face as the door to 64 is banged on by Bates. Mad, she retrieves her from the front door as Bates tries to revive her son. Paulson’s annoyed he did her entire stash and tries to leave before Bates runs full throttle at her and pushes her out the window, killing her instantly.
Gaga indicates she’s going to take him, Detective Lowe leaves and checks in to the Hotel Cortez, and Hotel California plays the audience out. Thus, the END of Hotel
I really hated all the sexual violence of this pilot so I’m going to give it a 4/10. Maybe this was a good season, maybe it wasn’t. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 64% and according to Collider, it was the worst of the series. That being sad, hopefully the nightmare of AHS is behind us! Unfortunately, I don’t think Ryan Murphy ever abandons sexual assault as a plot line so…
See you next week for Roanoke!