The fourth installment of the FX anthology series, titled Freak Show , wants able-bodied people to feel good about themselves. Seriously, we shouldn’t. Warning: Spoilers ahead if you have not seen the season premiere.
Sarah Paulson as Bette and Dot Tattler in American Horror Story: Freak Show.
Frank Ockenfels / FX
Despite the sordid history of human display, it's clear that audience sympathy in American Horror Story: Freak Show is meant to lie with the performers in Fräulein Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosities. "Don't call us freaks" is a refrain, and, although owner and headliner Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange) prefers the term "monsters," the performers are, the show tells us, people.
Though it's set in 1950s Florida, this fourth season of American Horror Story, which premiered Wednesday night, has its origins in the 1800s, when the "freak show" emerged as a form of human display and the people watching were less sympathetic — audiences confirmed their own normality through viewing these "abnormal" people. These Victorian shows were part of a larger trend: Around the turn of the 19th century, medicine shifted its focus away from health in itself and toward the establishment and attainment of a "norm," as well as the description of pathologies that deviated from it. These ideas found a lowbrow outlet in "freak shows," which were presented as both entertainment and science. When introducing the acts in the Cabinet of Curiosities on American Horror Story, Kathy Bates' non-gender-conforming Ethel, also known as "the bearded lady," invokes this, saying the performance is "for your amusement and edification."
What's also hinted at in the series are the racial dimensions of human display in "freak shows": Ma Petite hails "from the dark continent, the spice-laden lands of India," while Meep the Geek, though apparently Caucasian, is hawked as "straight out of the jungle." In the 19th and 20th centuries, on display alongside people who physically deviated from the norm were racial Others: see, for example, Ota, the supposed cannibal abducted from Congo and taken in 1906 to a cage in the Bronx Zoo, where he was an "educational exhibit." Ma Petite and Meep the Geek both represent this dimension of the historical "freak shows," although, in addition to being raced as nonwhite, the characters are physically unusual (Ma Petite is played by Jyoti Amge, the smallest woman in the world, and Ben Woolf, who plays Meep, has pituitary dwarfism).
FX / Via mtv.com
No comments:
Post a Comment