which witch
The latest season of American Horror Story has gotten me to thinking about something I feel it does very right that is very, very close to something a lot of other horror does very wrong, and that has to do with how it understands that women are monsters.
The idea that females are monsters shows up a lot in horror, especially connected to evil witch tropes and the like, where you have wicked babes with their horrifying sexiness or disgusting crones whose sexiness has all dried up and been replaced with worm parts. Those monsters are the kind that wanted to kill their babies and burn their bras and worship Satan, so you don't feel bad when the good guys they've been menacing either metaphorically or literally burn them at the stake. When females are evil like that, that evilness justifies whatever happens next. The bitches have it coming.
But AHS's monsters are women -- sharp, smart women who have been forced into situations of powerlessness because of their position as women in society, and who have then turned around and taken full advantage of what power they can get their hands on. Some of them, like pretty much all of Jessica Lange's characters, react disproportionally to their situations in ways that try to get satisfaction through revenge, but in ways where you can still see where the initial damage was done. Others are more targeted in their responses to damage; Lana winds up taking out only what she needs to take out. The ghosts in the first series who are aware of their various predicaments are acting out of a desperate need to assert whatever control they can over their various situations.
I can't think of a woman in AHS who is unsympathetic. There are plenty of unsympathetic male characters, and there are other men that are sympathetic but still unforgivable, but the 'bad' women are twisted into what they become by social rules that trap them, men who mistreat them, and abuse that exacerbates whatever instability might have been present already. I guess Hayden is the most obvious utter bitch of the bunch, and even she isn't just out to hurt people recreationally; she has very specific reasons for doing what she does, and she wouldn't have done a single thing if Ben hadn't been a colossal dickface.
Bless, too, that the show doesn't make false gender equivalencies. With Ben and Vivien's marital troubles, whatever questionable things she does, relationship-wise, are hugely offset by how he is, again, a colossal dickface. Whatever pain and suffering Violet visits upon Tate, she takes a hundred times as much; in fact, the show goes out of its way to make it clear that Tate has no real reason to feel the way that he does -- beyond, like, brain problems, but what I mean more is that every time he starts to play the 'poor me' card, the show shuts him down. Sister Jude's ladyboner for the Monsignor is inappropriate, sure, but his counting on those feelings to translate into her continued political support for him is the true transgression taking place here.
Except there's still the whole pregnancy thing. I joked earlier that nothing scares gay men more than pregnancy, but I don't think I'm too far off the real reason weird conception, gestation, and birth have been so important to the various plots. (The third season has just started down that path, but I don't doubt it'll keep going.) But that doesn't automatically make women themselves into monsters, nor are the babies across-the-board evil. If anything, heterosexual sex that leads to conception is the real horror; pregnancy is just a funky aftereffect.
I mean, it's hard to make a lot of things about pregnancy anything but unsettling, even just on a plain ol' body horror level. Plus, it seems disingenuous to take having one human being growing inside of another human being and call it off-limits for creepouts because it's such a gendered process. Even so, I know that monstrous reproduction is a trope that deserves further consideration. (If I ever actually write anything on AHS, I'll have to go kick up some more research on this.)
Mostly, the female characters in AHS don't become monsters without having some sort of obvious external awfulness pressing down on them: respectability, family, trauma, beauty, adolescence, demon possession, et cetera. ...Well, they don't thus far. I'm not entirely sure where they're going with Mme. LaLaurie, but I tell you truly, if they do make her an irredeemable sociopath who was just bad from birth and will be bad to her bad end, it will be the first time they've taken that approach with a lady. And I'll be down with it, because it'll be the first time they've taken that approach with a lady.
Thus, I'm super-excited for the rest of Coven. It seems to have toned down the scenery-chewing from Asylum -- thus far, at least -- and I'm loving the socks off it. It's a good vindication, too, of the principle that you don't need to focus on having all your women be exemplary and above reproach, you just need to have enough women that the medium's entire weight of female representation isn't sitting on a single dainty pair of shoulders.
At any rate, if you haven't seen any American Horror Story, you should definitely get on that. From a simple artistic standpoint, I don't know if I've ever before seen something quite so much become exactly what it set out to be.
The idea that females are monsters shows up a lot in horror, especially connected to evil witch tropes and the like, where you have wicked babes with their horrifying sexiness or disgusting crones whose sexiness has all dried up and been replaced with worm parts. Those monsters are the kind that wanted to kill their babies and burn their bras and worship Satan, so you don't feel bad when the good guys they've been menacing either metaphorically or literally burn them at the stake. When females are evil like that, that evilness justifies whatever happens next. The bitches have it coming.
But AHS's monsters are women -- sharp, smart women who have been forced into situations of powerlessness because of their position as women in society, and who have then turned around and taken full advantage of what power they can get their hands on. Some of them, like pretty much all of Jessica Lange's characters, react disproportionally to their situations in ways that try to get satisfaction through revenge, but in ways where you can still see where the initial damage was done. Others are more targeted in their responses to damage; Lana winds up taking out only what she needs to take out. The ghosts in the first series who are aware of their various predicaments are acting out of a desperate need to assert whatever control they can over their various situations.
I can't think of a woman in AHS who is unsympathetic. There are plenty of unsympathetic male characters, and there are other men that are sympathetic but still unforgivable, but the 'bad' women are twisted into what they become by social rules that trap them, men who mistreat them, and abuse that exacerbates whatever instability might have been present already. I guess Hayden is the most obvious utter bitch of the bunch, and even she isn't just out to hurt people recreationally; she has very specific reasons for doing what she does, and she wouldn't have done a single thing if Ben hadn't been a colossal dickface.
Bless, too, that the show doesn't make false gender equivalencies. With Ben and Vivien's marital troubles, whatever questionable things she does, relationship-wise, are hugely offset by how he is, again, a colossal dickface. Whatever pain and suffering Violet visits upon Tate, she takes a hundred times as much; in fact, the show goes out of its way to make it clear that Tate has no real reason to feel the way that he does -- beyond, like, brain problems, but what I mean more is that every time he starts to play the 'poor me' card, the show shuts him down. Sister Jude's ladyboner for the Monsignor is inappropriate, sure, but his counting on those feelings to translate into her continued political support for him is the true transgression taking place here.
Except there's still the whole pregnancy thing. I joked earlier that nothing scares gay men more than pregnancy, but I don't think I'm too far off the real reason weird conception, gestation, and birth have been so important to the various plots. (The third season has just started down that path, but I don't doubt it'll keep going.) But that doesn't automatically make women themselves into monsters, nor are the babies across-the-board evil. If anything, heterosexual sex that leads to conception is the real horror; pregnancy is just a funky aftereffect.
I mean, it's hard to make a lot of things about pregnancy anything but unsettling, even just on a plain ol' body horror level. Plus, it seems disingenuous to take having one human being growing inside of another human being and call it off-limits for creepouts because it's such a gendered process. Even so, I know that monstrous reproduction is a trope that deserves further consideration. (If I ever actually write anything on AHS, I'll have to go kick up some more research on this.)
Mostly, the female characters in AHS don't become monsters without having some sort of obvious external awfulness pressing down on them: respectability, family, trauma, beauty, adolescence, demon possession, et cetera. ...Well, they don't thus far. I'm not entirely sure where they're going with Mme. LaLaurie, but I tell you truly, if they do make her an irredeemable sociopath who was just bad from birth and will be bad to her bad end, it will be the first time they've taken that approach with a lady. And I'll be down with it, because it'll be the first time they've taken that approach with a lady.
Thus, I'm super-excited for the rest of Coven. It seems to have toned down the scenery-chewing from Asylum -- thus far, at least -- and I'm loving the socks off it. It's a good vindication, too, of the principle that you don't need to focus on having all your women be exemplary and above reproach, you just need to have enough women that the medium's entire weight of female representation isn't sitting on a single dainty pair of shoulders.
At any rate, if you haven't seen any American Horror Story, you should definitely get on that. From a simple artistic standpoint, I don't know if I've ever before seen something quite so much become exactly what it set out to be.