Paul Casserly: Binge report - American Horror Story: Freak Show

A scene from the TV show American Horror Story: Freak Show.

The immolation of the Jordanian pilot was nothing short of snuff film. What an awful, terrible, moment in time, a moment that has you wondering what sort of world we live in.

I found myself struggling with similar issues while binge-watching the last episodes of American Horror Story: Freak Show, my favourite of the horror franchise's collection to date. The man behind the show, Ryan Murphy, maker of Nip Tuck, is not known for subtlety or subtext or the subliminal, but he sure knows how to have fun. There's no surprise that his foray into the world of "freaks" has pushed some boundaries: It has at its core a snuff movie, or in this case, a double amputation exploitation flick, suffered by the central character Elsa Mars, (a scene-chomping Jessica Laing) at the hands of Nazis. This is dark, stupid, and funny as heck.

It's the sort of show that revels in its campy creepiness; it appalled me and had me in stitches, mostly simultaneously. By the time, late in the series, Neil Patrick Harris capped off his cameo with an unholy missionary position atop the delighted Siamese twins (played by Sarah Paulson) while his "doll" looked on, I was somewhat in awe of this distasteful delight. Of course, the Siamese sex scene is not quite weird enough for this show so when the crazed character played by Neil Patrick Harris sees the doll, it is of course a human, and that human is played by an actress with Down Syndrome, (Jamie Brewer, who's been with show since 2011). Going "too far" is what this caper is all about.

No doubt the show likes to think of itself as empowering the differently abled who play the outsiders and freaks but it also plays fast and loose and sometimes crosses over to something closer to exploitation. The bob is being had not just two ways, but every which way.

The "Freak Show" in question is a 1950s version of the PT Barnum shows of the 1850s, in which biological human "rarities" were paraded in a circus setting. For a more sober, though equally entertaining take on what one interviewee calls "the great American art form", I can recommend the 1994 documentary, The Last American Freak Show. But it is of course the remarkable 1932 Tod Browning movie Freaks, that serves as the blueprint for Freak Show.

In all these versions, the not so surprising take-home is that the real monsters are the able bodied people. The audience. Us.

In American Horror Story, the worst of the worst looks normal enough but he is one sick puppy on the inside. Dandy Mott (Finn Wittrock) is also one of the best comedic psychopaths of recent TV history. When he says "I will be the US Steel of murder" it's not at all hyperbolic, and by the end of the series he's competing with the kill score of the American Sniper himself. But as good as Wittrock and Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Sarah Paulson are, it's the "freaks" who make this show so special. Ma Petite (Jyoti Amge), Legless Suzi (Rose Siggins) and Toulouse (Drew Rin Varick) are all well named, and impossible to look away from. They give the show its spice and its heart.

A scene from the TV show American Horror Story: Freak Show.

I normally loathe the 'behind the scenes" promos for shows in which bored actors answer pat questions posed by local presenters with shiny teeth, but this show came armed with classy interviews with the "freaks" who star as versions of themselves. In one, Mat Fraser, who plays Paul the Illustrated Seal, talks of how his mother took thalidomide, leading to his deformed arms, but he's embracing the gig with obvious enthusiasm. "I'm a freak actor playing a freak and it's awesome." Just as the Black and White Minstrels or Benny Hill's 'Chinese eyes on a white guy" are now things we frown upon, "spacking up" as Fraser calls it, is still widespread. And by "spacking up" he's describing when an able-bodied actor plays a disabled person rather than a disabled actor. To its credit, the show has employed a groundbreaking number of "freak" actors, along with the "digitally disabled", but its claim on some sort of ethical version of exploitation only goes so far.

Ima Wiggles, the "fat lady", played by Chrissy Metz is a case in point, she's wheeled out like a plus-sized blow-up doll and basically treated as some sort of fetish sex toy. It's the most off-note in the strange and ambitious symphony that Ryan has created.

As we've come to learn during the American Horror Story anthologies, there is unevenness to proceedings, and plenty of episodes that will challenge you with their stupidity or even send you away for good.

The finale was, fittingly, a shocker. I won't spoil it but if you haven't played a violent video game this will probably be a step too far, but too far is exactly where this show has always pushed us to, and it's why I keep coming back.

And who knows, one day, if it keeps going long enough, the idiots of Isis may find themselves reincarnated in this Hollywood version of cartoon hell.

- nzherald.co.nz