American Horror Story: Cults Shocking Trump Election Opener Is Brilliant [View all]

[octoberlib]

KEVIN FALLON
09.05.17 11:00 PM ET

The concept for Tuesday night’s premiere of American Horror Story: Cult is so on-the-nose it can only be called brilliant.

The opening minutes of the episode uses news footage from the most unbelievable moments of the campaign—“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters—and scores it with the classic eerie horror music that we all know to the point of parody, building it to a deafening screech before cutting to series villain Evan Peters (an alt-right-adjacent zealot named Kai) watching Trump being named the winner: “The revolution has begun.”

While Kai celebrates, we meet our liberal protagonists, Ally and Ivy, a lesbian couple with a young son played by Sarah Paulson and Alison Pill, respectively. Cheesy thriller music builds while Ally spirals into a breakdown as it becomes clear that Clinton mathematically is out. “I won’t believe it until Rachel Maddow says it!” she yells. “She’s the only one I trust!”

Ivy moans, “How is this happening?” A neighbor at their results-watching party deadpans, “The politics of fear. It always works.” When the race is officially called for Trump, Ally lets out a banshee wail of pain and starts screaming like a lunatic: “Oh go to hell, Huffington Post! Fuck you, Nate Silver! What’s wrong with CNN for not giving us a trigger warning before giving us the results?”


It’s a brutal and actually rather eye-opening satire of liberal white privilege (standout detail: we learn that Ally, who lives in the swing state of Michigan, actually cast a protest vote for Jill Stein) instead of the incessant Trump-bashing most people anticipated—though there’s certainly a lot of that, too.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/american-horror-story-cults-shocking-trump-election-opener-is-brilliant