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This season of the show takes the 1932 movie “Freaks” as an inspiration. Credit Illustration by Sachin Teng |
The New Abnormal
The carnival logic of “American Horror Story.”
“A little culture for the TV viewers. God knows they need it,” Madame Elsa, played by Jessica Lange, purrs. A sideshow impresario and a double amputee, Elsa has just finished crooning “September Song” to her lover, Paul the Illustrated Seal—she’s rehearsing for her anticipated musical début on that novelty stage of the nineteen-fifties, the television screen. Handsome as a matinée idol, Paul (Mat Fraser) reclines on an ottoman, his flippers resting beside his tattooed chest.![]() |
Dot & Bette Tattler -the conjoined twins played by Sarah Paulson, performing double-duty — taking approx.12 to 15 hours to film |
Andrew Solomon, in his excellent book “Far from the Tree,” describes two kinds of identity available to the disabled: “vertical” (the family they’re descended from) and “horizontal” (the people with whom they share a physical trait, like dwarfism or deafness). “Freak Show” is about many things—clown phobia, snuff films, David Bowie—but, primarily, it’s about horizontal identity, as viewed in a fun-house mirror, distorted by fury and desire. In this theme, it replicates its source material: the classic horror movie “Freaks” (1932), which was about circus performers who take violent revenge on a villainous “normal” woman, Cleopatra, when she exploits a member of their troupe. (If Cleopatra existed in the modern era, the word for her would be “ableist.”) The director Tod Browning’s pet project (he ran away at sixteen to join the circus himself), the film was a notorious flop, and wrecked its creator’s career. The studio demanded that Browning edit out a castration sequence and add a sappy ending; even so, after a test screening the producers were accused of causing a moviegoer’s miscarriage. In the nineteen-seventies, “Freaks” became a cult sensation, best known for the chant “Gooble, gobble! One of us, one of us!”

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Twisty |
Like “Freaks,” “Freak Show” also mingles able-bodied actors—some wear prosthetics, while others are altered with special effects—with what the marvellously charismatic Mat Fraser terms a “radically different person onstage entertaining with their radical difference.” Fraser is a British performance artist, sometimes using the name Seal Boy, who has created shows like the burlesque “Beauty and the Beast” and “Thalidomide!! A Musical.” There’s also Jyoti Amge, as Ma Petite, a tiny dwarf; the trans actress Erika Ervin, as the giantess Amazon Eve; and Ben Woolf, who has pituitary dwarfism, as Meep, a pinhead. Rose Siggins, who was born with a condition called sacral agenesis, plays Legless Suzi. When the season began, these characters had few lines, which suggested a tricky hierarchy: the real-life Seal Boy was an extra in scenes starring Evan Peters’s prosthetically created Human Lobster. But, midway through the season, Murphy began to shift the spotlight, mining these bodies and personalities for warmth, sex, and tragedy. A sequence in which the lovable Ma Petite stands in a large glass jar, fluttering her fingers like a butterfly, became one of the show’s most frightening bits of poetry, like some candied fairy tale from Oscar Wilde.
Not surprisingly, Murphy’s approach has triggered complaints of exploitation—and not for the first time. Four of Murphy’s shows include characters, and actors, who have Down syndrome. On “Glee,” Artie (played by an able-bodied actor) was in a wheelchair. In “Asylum,” Chloë Sevigny played a nymphomaniac whose limbs had been amputated. There are many other examples—in fact, there are so many disabled characters in Ryan Murphy’s series that it’s impossible to judge these portrayals as a class, although it’s worth noting that, like Madame Elsa, Murphy is the rare impresario who explores this subject matter at all. Along with the concern that he’s a huckster, his shows raise the question of what it means to have stars “crip” or “spack up”—disdainful terms for able-bodied actors playing disabled characters. This debate, among disability advocates, has analogues to similar issues about cross-racial and transgender roles, from Mickey Rooney’s notorious “yellow-face,” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” to Jared Leto’s turn as a transgender character, in “Dallas Buyers Club.” Activists complain that Hollywood stars win Oscars, and score points for “bravery,” in roles that could go to a disabled actor. They resent the notion that disability itself is a costume. That’s what acting is, of course: it’s putting on a new identity. But what makes blackface different from drag, or from adding a flipper?
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Jared Leto's transgender role as Rayon, a transsexual woman living w/ AIDS in Texas during the 1980s on Dallas Buyers Club (2013) |
Still, the related complaint, that the characters are bad role models, misses the point, from my perspective. “Freak Show” embodies the philosophy put forth by Fraser in a promotional video for the series: while do-gooders view the sideshow as nefarious, it was, historically, the one place where people with odd anatomies were glamorized, not hidden away. There they could make money, live independently, and find sex and love. The difference between gawking and gazing, fearing and desiring, is not so simple. Murphy’s “freaks”—both the organic and the artificial ones—aren’t lessons for the able-bodied, and when the show does veer into pedantry (“You’re the real freaks!”) it’s at its weakest. They’re divas and lovers and revengers and martyrs, who get to experience the extremes of human emotion. There are enough of them so that they can’t be only one thing. At the show’s best moments, they’re stars, not props.

This coarseness gives the show leeway to be, at times, both nasty and funny, making it impossible to distinguish its best from its worst—as in a recent episode in which a “normal” was tattooed, and her tongue forked, against her will, a sequence that felt at once nonsensical and indelible. The series is endlessly, archly quotable: “They said I made men ejaculate gold,” Elsa reminisces, of her days as a dominatrix in the Weimar Republic. If it risks going too far, that’s an “American Horror Story” tradition, too—it’s why we watch through our fingers, squinching our eyes. Why go to the circus if there’s no chance of blood? ♦
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