Episode Title: "Boy Parts"
Episode Grade: C+
It's rather banal to say that the theme of a given piece of art is "life." All art is about life, in one way or another. Arguing that a piece of fiction is about "life" is pretty much a waste of bandwidth.
That said, "Boy Parts" is very much about life.
This particular episode of AHS, however, is concerned with the literal fact of life and its creation. "Boy Parts" doesn't do much more than hit the expected early notes of that particular song, but between Kathy Bates' immortality, Lily Rabe's ability to return dead things (including herself) to life, a resurrected college kid stitched together from the body parts of his friends and a conception ceremony that involves Sarah Paulson having sex with her husband in a ring of fire surrounded by snakes, there's every indication that this is going to be a consistent element of the season.
AHS is hardly the first horror story to concern itself with this theme, and in fact it's impossible not to think of Frankenstein's monster when watching Emma Roberts and Taissa Farmiga attempt to resurrect the frat brother Roberts killed last week with her telepathic abilities.
This is the weakest plotline of the episode, and for a couple of reasons. First, Farmiga and Roberts are currently the least impressive actors on the show. Roberts can do spoiled and petulant, but not much else. Unfortunately, those are two more emotions than Farmiga has been able to display so far, acknowledging that it's still early in the season.
As a result, scenes focusing on these two tend to devolve pretty quickly into a series of bitchy comments from Roberts and vaguely pained reactions from Farmiga. It's a pattern that grows old quickly.
Second, it's hard to care overmuch about Kyle's resurrection because it's hard to care overmuch about Kyle. We were given only brief glimpses of the kid last week, and while he looked like a shining star in comparison with his gang-raping frat brothers there was little enough to justify Farmiga's longing.
That she feels guilty about his death is reasonable. That she silently agrees to go along with Roberts' plan to sneak into a morgue and stitch the severed body parts of Kyle's friends onto his head is not, and yes, I realize the silliness of going on about "reasonable" when the sentence includes some of the words this one does.
This little scheme goes as you'd expect, which is another flaw. Resurrection spell apparently fails? Check. Kyle comes back to life at awkward moment by slowly raising his head and upper body from the table? Check. Kyle beats an innocent person to death in rage and confusion? Check. Kyle continues to display rage and confusion at his new state of being? Check.
It's easy to see some of the potential directions the show's writers can take this plot. Kyle's left in the care of Misty Day, the resurrectionist witch played by Lily Rabe we saw get burned alive last week. It's possible they just go the full-on Frankenstein route and make Kyle a groaning, moaning, murdering monster. There's also the chance Kyle will slowly re-gain his humanity and the associated faculties, only to realize the horror of his situation and act as a commentary on the relentless pursuit of eternal life.
Of course, it seems we're going to get a lot of those commentaries this season. The whole idea that immortality is far more a curse than a blessing is fairly tiresome by this point. But to the extent that these plots let us watch Jessica Lange act the bad-ass around fantastic actresses like Bates and Angela Bassett, well, they're fine by me.
The strongest moments in "Boy Parts" come from the interactions between Lange and the other two women. This is in spite of the fact that the dialogue here is nothing to be proud of; it's ponderous and severe, without much in the way of wit or cleverness to recommend it. But these three women make it work.
Bates is particularly good in this episode, as she succeeds in finding a slight measure of sympathy in the utterly horrific character she's playing. There's a wonderful moment where Bates defends herself by saying, "I was a woman of my time," only to have Lange utterly reject the rationalization with, "That's a crock of shit." You don't want to try and humanize Bates too much, for fear of ignoring her crimes, but it's not impossible to acknowledge the severity of both her sins and her punishment.
And Bates, who is, of course, a wonderful actress, manages to convey the horror of her situation with her tone of voice and facial expressions. Marie Laveau (Bassett) displayed the corpses of Bates' family before throwing her in the coffin, and Bates loved her girls very much, "even the ugly one." When Bates talks of Hell as an eternity of seeing the dead faces of your children in front of your eyes, well, it resonates.
We also get to see the first of what we can hope are many conversations between Lange and Bassett. The dynamic between the two is fascinating; Lange, the elitist witch with no small amount of racism tingeing her contempt, and Bassett, the the centuries-old holder of great power resentful of the magic stolen by Lange's little tribe.
The back-and-forth they have in Laveau's salon (of course the centuries-old holder of great power runs a hair salon, because how else would we know she was black) is a delight, if, again, the dialogue is rather on-the-nose. The dynamic here that I find so intriguing is that Lange needs Bassett, who possesses the secret to immortality. And because Lange's character hasn't seen any of the movies that deal with this and doesn't know how immortality stories end, that's a secret she very much wants.
"Boy Parts" is something of a step back from last week's premiere, though not a significant one. It places us at the intersection of a bunch of roads, and asks us to imagine which ones we'll take. Thing is, we have a pretty decent sense of where most of them end. Finding a path that doesn't merely shroud a cliche in various shades of crazy seems to be the challenge of this season.
Notes
- We get another flashback to Bates and Bassett, this time the moment when the latter imprisons the former in a coffin. And I have to ask: was it really possible for a huge mob of torch-wielding slaves to gather in 1840's New Orleans?
- I briefly mentioned Sarah Paulson's plot early in the review. It's fairly basic right now: she's infertile, her husband (who knows she's a witch) suggests magic, she's reluctant and then immediately gives in. Followed by ring of fire snake sex.
- "She's sober." "Except vodka."
- "I'm sorry I killed your boy candy, OK?"
- "Did we just marry the devil? 'Cuz I'm not sure I'm down with that."
- Misty is really, really fond of Fleetwood Mac. Farmiga's one really good moment in this episode is her creeped out reaction to Misty's rambling speech about the beauty of "Dreams." I make that exact same face when other people go on about music.
- Is the New Orleans morgue really just completely deserted for long stretches of time? Like, long enough to collect a bunch of body parts, stitch them together and perform a Satanic rite?
- Bull Man lives!
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