Thoughts on 1984
They Live was a primal scream against Reaganism of the '80s. And the '80s never went away. They're still with us. That's what makes They Live look so fresh – it's a document of greed and insanity. It's about life in the United States then and now. If anything, things have gotten worse.
John Carpenter; "They Live : John Carpenter talks about his sci-fi classic" (Chris Nashawaty); Entertainment Weekly (November 5, 2012)
What you don't want is for violence and gore to become more important than character and structure. A lot of slasher movies from the e__ighties were only focused on violence and gore, which robs the human beings in the story of any empathetic reaction from the audience, and instead makes them cheer for the gore.
Mike Flanagan; "Hush Director Mike Flanagan Talks Slasher Violence, Silence and…Sound" (Brad Miska); Bloody Disgusting (April 16, 2016)
Initially a pitch-perfect homage/parody of summer-camp slasher movies, AHS/1984 subsequently morphs into something of an amalgamation of a ghost story, a true-crime thriller, a study of serial killing, and a multi-character tale of redemption, giving us one of the coldest and most ferocious villains the show has ever seen. For me, it's the best season of American Horror Story since the exceptional second season, Asylum . However, there's no denying it's a divisive beast – the type of highly stylised story that'll have as many detractors as admirers. AHS purists probably won't be overly impressed. For one thing, it's a dark and very, very, very camp comedy before it's a thriller or a horror. For another, it leans so heavily into '80s clichés and slasher movie tropes that it's practically on its side. On the other hand, it's consistently hilarious, it's a brilliant parody of slasher movies, it doesn't take itself even remotely seriously (although it does have something to say about the media's commodification of serial killers), and despite the ridiculousness of the plot and the twists layered on top of twists layered on top of twists, it actually manages to elicit quite a bit of empathy for a couple of characters who were introduced as one-dimensionally irredeemable. And the soundtrack, wardrobe, and hairstyles have more '80s cheese and excess than you could ever imagine.
We begin in 1970 at Camp Redwood – a summer camp for kids in Oakhurst, CA. The show opens as three of the young counsellors are about to enjoy a threesome when they and everyone else in their dorm are butchered. Cut to LA, 1984. At an aerobics class, we're introduced to the main characters – Brooke (Emma Roberts playing against type), a shy and innocent woman who has come to LA to start a new life; Montana (an excellent Billie Lourd), a fiery devil-may-care extrovert who immediately tries to draw Brooke out of her shell; Xavier (a superb Cody Fern), a self-serious aspiring actor; Chet (Gus Kenworthy), a professional athlete who has been suspended from Team USA for the 1984 Olympics after failing a drug test; and Ray (DeRon Horton), a pleasant and friendly man with a troubling secret. When Xavier tells the others that LA will be dangerous during the summer due to the serial killer dubbed the Night Stalker, he says he's got a gig as a counsellor at the newly reopened Redwood and asks them to join him. All agree except Brooke. However, that very night, she's attacked by Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker (a brilliant Zack Villa). She fends him off but the incident convinces her to get out of town. And so, off they head to Redwood. Once there, they meet Margaret (an exceptional Leslie Grossman making the most of a meaty role), who survived the massacre in 1970 and now owns the camp; Rita (Angelica Ross), the camp's nurse; Bertie (Tara Karsian), the chef; and Trevor (a hilarious Matthew Morrison), the activities director and owner of an exceptionally large…appendage. Meanwhile, Benjamin Richter, aka Mr Jingles (a scene-stealing John Carroll Lynch), the former groundskeeper at Redwood and perpetrator of the 1970 massacre, escapes from a nearby mental facility and is on his way to the camp with murder on his mind.
The first thing you'll notice about 1984 is how immersed it is in slasher movie references and tropes. The show features a litany of nods to contemporaneous films (mainly, but not entirely, in the slasher genre), and even a few similarly themed movies from the '90s. I noticed references to Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Brian de Palma's Carrie (1976), John Alan Schwartz's Faces of Death (1978), Joe Giannone's Madman (1981), Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp (1983), Andrew Davis's The Final Terror (1983), Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters (1984), Joseph Zito's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Richard Donner's The Goonies (1985), James Bridges's Perfect (1985), Danny Steinmann's Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1985) and Misery (1990), Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), and Jamie Blanks's Urban Legend (1997). And I'm sure there are many, many references I didn't notice. However, the two primary touchstones for the season are John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and, especially, Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), both of which are referenced throughout the nine episodes. For example, the show takes place in a camp that's reopening years after a horrific tragedy (Friday the 13th ), whilst the man who carried out that massacre was caught, locked in a psychiatric facility, and escapes on a rainy night (Halloween ). Indeed, the opening scene of the first episode is a carbon copy of the opening of Friday the 13th , where a killer bumps off two horny counsellors. There are also direct visual quotes from the movie, such as a character sitting on a dock with her legs dangling into the water, unaware that a body is floating towards her. The more you know about '80s slasher movies, the more you'll get from 1984 .
Not quite a post-modernist reimagining of the genre, the show instead recreates the themes, tropes, and narrative beats by way of a modern lens which affords a lot of room for irony. However, it's never sardonically self-referential, with the characters winking at the audience about how ridiculous the whole thing is. Instead, the season could stand as a respectable slasher story in its own right, and in this sense, the tone is absolutely pitch-perfect. Take the opening credits. AHS has always excelled when it comes to credit sequences, and so too with 1984 . However, whereas previous sequences are usually unnerving, the opening to 1984 is a thing of tacky '80s beauty – shot on VHS in 1.33:1 (the recording even has some visible tracking lines from time to time), the pastel-infused credits are made up of shots of aerobics, tape decks, gaudy fashion, dodgy '80s video graphics, VCRs, Ronald Reagan, and roller skates. Meanwhile, the unsettling AHS theme music, originally created by composer Charlie Clouser and sound designer César Dávila-Irizarry, is here rendered in that most questionable of musical styles – synth. It's horrible, it's cheesy, it's about as unthreatening as you can imagine, and it's awesome, setting the tone perfectly.
As in many slasher movies, the introductory scenes are perfunctory at best, doing nothing more than to provide a flimsy reason to put the characters in harm's way. And also as with many slasher films, which are usually fairly short, the pace is initially manic, ploughing through narrative beats, character revelations, and twists at a relentless speed (the first five episodes are told in what is fairly close to real-time). Along the same lines, the show hits classic genre markers such the campfire scene used to provide heavy exposition, the clichéd chase scene where the girl being pursued keeps tripping and falling over, the characters continually splitting up for various (dubious) reasons, the plethora of pseudo-POV shots from behind trees, and composer Mac Quayle's John Carpenter-inspired score.
Having said all that, however, there are certainly elements of postmodern-esque deconstruction at play. So, for example, the five main characters initially fall into a very neat archetypal collective; there's the tough girl (Montana), the jock (Chet), the laid-back party guy (Ray), the airhead (Xavier), and the virginal, non-doping, non-drinking, non-smoking girl (Brooke). However, it doesn't take long for the show to turn these archetypes on their head – Montana has much more than just a tough streak, Chet proves more empathic than most jocks, Ray isn't as clean-cut as he likes to pretend, and Xavier has unexpected reserves of courage. As for Brooke, for the most part, she adheres to the genre paradigms of her character type, even as the show sets about deconstructing and reformulating everything around her; the girl with the huge breasts becomes the guy with the huge penis, the black characters survive beyond the opening act, the quintessential shower scene upon which someone is spying involves not women but men, and there's a fascinating pseudo-meta defamiliarisation of the clichéd notion that despite being flesh and blood humans, serial killers in slasher films are notoriously difficult to kill. It's all wonderfully handled, and could only have been put together by showrunners extremely well-versed in the genre.
As with every season of AHS , the acting is superlative. Grossman plays the part that you would imagine would have been played by Sarah Paulson had she returned this season, and she leans into every nuance of Margaret's character – from her religious fundamentalism to her conviction that Jingles can't hurt her to her pride in reopening Redwood. Morrison has all kinds of fun with Trevor, essentially playing him as a porn star without the porn. With a constant twinkle in his eye, Morrison plays Trevor as, in essence, a good man, and one of the most empathic story threads in later episodes involves him. Villa is a revelation as the Night Stalker, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. Some of the funniest moments come from his subtle use of dark humour at just the right time, and his obsession with Billy Idol is a hilarious running gag. Lily Rabe returns for a couple of later episodes, and is as stunning as you'd expect, with one emotionally charged scene in "The Lady in White" giving us as good a bit of acting as you're likely to see all year. And then there's Lynch as Jingles. He's just stunning, playing the hulking Vietnam vet as a silent monster in early episodes, before turning that depiction on its head.
The other vital element of any good season of AHS is humour, preferably of the camp variety, and 1984 is no different. Usually, the best laughs come from the earnestness of the characters, who are blissfully unaware of how ridiculous they sound. So, when Brooke meets Xavier, he tells her, dead-pan, "I'm an actor. Not one of those happy to get a role on a soap opera or a Coca Cola commercial types. I'm a serious actor. I trained with Stella Adler. I'm method ". Later on, he discusses the dangers of being in a coma by referencing Boy George's smash hit song, "Coma Chameleon". After one of the characters is badly burned, an argument breaks out about how best to deal with the Redwood situation, and when someone tells this character to take it easy and breathe, they proclaim, "I have breathed the fire of a thousand white-hot suns ". Discussing Billy Idol, one character points out to Ramirez, "You can't sing "Rebel Yell" and not be a rebel ", a point he concedes as pretty reasonable. Finally, we have Montana's obsession with the '80s, and her reluctance to move on when her beloved cultural markers start to go out of fashion. So when she's told, "you're '80s forever ", it really is the nicest compliment anyone can give her.
Thematically, despite its campiness, 1984 does actually have some things to say. The most obvious issue is media commodification of serial killers. Whether it be by making a movie or putting their face on a magazine, serial killers and mass murderers sell, and there's something inherently wrong about that. Of course, AHS in general, and this season in particular, is part of that commodification, which renders the critique a little meta, but which doesn't blunt the edge of what is a fair point; why do we give serial killers cool nicknames and then endlessly engage with them in every way imaginable, thus giving them exactly what so many of them want – infamy. One need only look at Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who appeared on the cover of TIME magazine not once, but twice. Why? Because they sold magazines. The media's sensationalising of horrific crimes feeds into their continuance, and although the show doesn't engage with the media per se , it does look at the contradictory place serial killers and mass murderers occupy in our culture, a place very much created by the media.
And, of course, it wouldn't be AHS without looking at religion ("All you need to have the freedom to do whatever you want is two things; God and trauma ") and gender issues. Here we see a savage critique of the notion that female victims of male serial killers are celebrated as "feminist heroes", as if they'd rather be an icon than be alive. There's also a nicely written reformulation of the serial killer trope whereby women are not believed as they fight male monsters, and a very succinct dovetailing of the themes of serial killer commodification and gender paradigms, with Montana stating, "men do heinous shit all the time; carve up tits, fuck dead corpses. And, you know what, they're treated like rock stars. Fan mail, movies and books up the wazoo. And, somehow, it's always Mommy's fault for not loving them or the wife who couldn't satisfy him or the pretty girl who rejected him. Why are we always the scapegoat for sick men to blame their bullshit on? "
In terms of problems, to a certain extent, the season feels both too long and overly truncated. On the one hand, there is too much time spent on explaining things the audience already knows and hitting character beats we've already hit. On the other, there is a disorienting and not entirely successful time jump between the second to last and last episode, and it feels almost like there was an episode skipped between the two, especially insofar as the finale ill-advisedly introduces an entirely new character (this sense of truncation isn't helped that the season is only nine episodes – AHS 's shortest yet). Some viewers will also undoubtedly find the humour too camp and too frequent, undermining the horror element, whilst some will find the plethora of references nothing more than pastiche, intertextuality for its own sake.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this season of American Horror Story . It's not the most thrilling or unnerving, but it is the funniest and most self-reflexive. Strong characters, typically tremendous acting, and some genuinely heartfelt moments combine with great costumes, foolish hair, and a soundtrack of so-bad-they're-great songs to produce a season that might mean little to those born post-1989, but to the rest of us is an ode to the achingly familiar.
