American Horror Story: Hotel is the best Lady Gaga music video ever.
It is gorgeous. It is graphic—both bloody and erotic—and borders on pornography.
It is campy as hell and hypnotizing, and it often makes no sense. Stefani Germanotta’s acting debut is obviously the biggest draw of the latest installment in Ryan Murphy’s deranged, often uneven horror anthology, and Hotel is as deranged and uneven as ever, making watching Gaga’s performance a positively nerve-wracking experience.
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She’s The Countess, a socialite sex fiend and maybe vampire, we’re not really sure. Her performance as a high-fashion regal diva is dripping with enough camp and affectedness to make Joan Crawford look Method.
Are her deliberate, arguably wooden line readings a sign of an impressively controlled and confident performance? Or is it simply bad acting? Hey, it’s a Ryan Murphy show. Everything is pretty and insane, so the beauty of it is that it doesn’t really matter anyway.
But crucial to note: Lady Gaga doesn’t show up until just about halfway into the premiere, at about the same time Matt Bomer’s butt first shows up, too. Both are worth the wait. (But you didn’t need me to tell you that.)
And before we meet them, Murphy treats us—or maybe assaults us is a better way of putting it—with multiple creepy children and a woman impaled mid-coitus while her partner has his eyes gauged out, his tongue removed, and his member super-glued inside her. An albino creature bursts out from inside a hotel mattress. (Good luck ever sleeping at a hotel again).
Sarah Paulson has crimped hair and a drug problem, Denis O’Hare slinks around in drag and calls himself Liz Taylor, and Max Greenfield is sodomized by a goblin.
It’s The Shining had Kubrick dropped acid before filming and Jack Nicholson been Born This Way.
It all serves as foreplay for what is without a doubt the most explicit and out-of-its mind scene that American Horror Story has produced in its five seasons: a nearly three-minute orgy featuring Gaga, Bomer, and an anonymous couple they pick up at a park when Gaga makes a cunnilingus symbol with her tongue.
The tangled naked limbs and musical chairs of screwing is both beautiful and badass and so, so, hot. So, so hot and so, so gross…the money shot here comes when Gaga and Bomer slit their swinging partners’ throats and begin ravenously drinking their blood. The whole thing ends with the couple lying artfully nude and bloodstained, perfectly arranged to hide their FCC-forbidden naughty bits (which is to say, not very much) amidst the pool of carnage.
They almost look classy.
Perhaps no scene better exemplifies the mad ambition of American Horror Story: provocation and gratuitousness so exquisitely and carefully portrayed you have no choice but to admire its art. And when the show heads off the rails, as the franchise inevitably does—and would do, considering the unwieldy nature of such wanton creative ambition—you don’t mind entirely because you’ve soaked in the boldness, the gore, the singular acting performances and, most importantly, Matt Bomer’s butt.
But the American Horror Story: Hotel premiere is more than just an orgy, though that’s certainly going to be all that people will talk about come Wednesday night. There’s a plot, arguably, though it’s a little hard to piece together from the purposefully vague and confusing episode.
We are introduced to the Hotel Cortez through two beautiful blonde tourists, who are immediately put off by the hotel’s creepy vibe and the aggressive gruffness of its proprietor, Iris (a beleaguered and always perfect Kathy Bates). The blondies are almost certainly going to get into some sort of bloody trouble—and they do—as they encounter the creepy children, the aforementioned creature in the mattress, and a disgruntled Lady Gaga.
There are at least two Big Bads to fear. The Cortez is haunted by the Addiction Demon, a goblin with a conical drill for a dick whom we first encounter when he’s doing unspeakable things—in graphic detail, we might add—to a druggie played by Max Greenfield. But most of the narrative is focused on the 10 Commandments Killer, whose gruesome murders have caught the attention of Detective John Lowe, played by Wes Bentley.
Lowe is literally called to the scene by the Killer, who rings him on his iPhone to warn him about his next murder. More than that, the Killer seems to have taken special interest in Lowe’s family: a daughter, a harried wife played by Chloe Sevigny, and a son that had disappeared five years prior (and who may not be gone at all…).
It should be no surprise that the Killer has a connection to the Cortez, a hotbed for the unsavory.
As we slowly meet its residents, it becomes clear that The Countess is their Mother Monster, of sorts. Bates’s Iris is serving her whims, which seems to include finding blood donors for her sanguine appetite. Bomer’s Donovan is her devoted boyfriend who shares her unusual feeding habits. But he becomes jealous when it seems like he’s about to be kicked to the curb because of her flirtations with the hotel’s ostentatious new owner, played by Cheyenne Jackson.
And the reason they’re all there seems to stem from a horrible sequence of events kicked off by Paulson’s Sally back in 1994.
Or something.
As it’s always been, American Horror Story is more of a showcase of fine actors going H.A.M. on crazy characters than it is a narrative achievement, eliciting performances that are far more engrossing and meaningful than the show’s often nonsensical and disappointing plot.
Paulson and Bomer are ferocious in the premiere, perfect in their sordid desperation. Gaga certainly is no successor to Jessica Lange, the Grande Dame of Horror Story, but give the girl credit for charging into the crazed world of Ryan Murphy with reckless abandon. She’s already responsible for some of the series’ weirdest content yet, which means she is giving us everything we craved when it was announced she’d be joining the show.
For most of the episode it is completely unclear what in Satan’s name is going on, but that’s strangely one of the premiere’s greatest assets. The bewilderment amidst the chaos of killings and twists and ambiguously evil characters has a sort of “what’s lurking around the corner” vibe that befits a series which pays such passionate homage to the horror genre, all while spinning it on its head.
I gagged a handful of times—Hotel truly dials the gore up to 11—found myself mesmerized by the swooping, eerie cinematography; felt palpable excitement when Gaga showed up and perhaps similar arousal when Bomer’s bum did, too; and had the urge to applaud at the brilliant use of “Hotel California” in the premiere’s final sequence.
Plus there was Lady Gaga in a thong fucking a dead guy. In other words, make your Hotel reservation now.
