Take the Wine and Run
The first episode of American Horror Story: Cult, which originally aired in 2017, begins with footage of Trump and Clinton on the campaign trail, followed by the election night reveal as it’s received by a group of well-to-do liberal friends, a fanatic, and a Vassar-dropout in Michigan.
When Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck first announced that the seventh season of American Horror Story would be about the election, I had to read every article I could find to verify. Their past seasons had inspected a collage of American horrors from more distance. Seasons alternate between contemporary and period pieces. In the present day, the show explored witches, haunted houses and disintegrating families. In 1950s Massachusetts, an asylum full of demonic possession, Nazis, and conversion therapy. That they would tackle the election felt more immediate than usual.
The first episode of season seven, which originally aired in 2017, begins with footage of Trump and Clinton on the campaign trail, followed by the election night reveal as it’s received by a group of well-to-do liberal friends, a fanatic, and a Vassar-dropout in Michigan.
Ally (Sarah Paulson) and Ivy (Alison Pill) spend the night in despair, reassuring their young son Oz that this does not mean their marriage will end. The news hits Ally hard, though. In the following days, the phobias she’s worked to suppress begin reemerging.
In her therapist’s office, she explains how the anxiety has reached a pitch since Election Night. Paulson delivers a stunning monologue, and the cinematography tracks her unease. She keeps reliving the night over and over again. In unsteady close-ups, the camera follows her hand movements, the welling of a tear, how she bobs into the bookshelf as she speaks of her fears of confined spaces, blood, particles in the air, the dark. The worst is her coulrophobia, fear of clowns.
My friends and I began watching this season together. I’ve seen every season of the show, but they were newer to it, eager to see how the election and our political climate were represented onscreen. Within a few episodes, the show becomes perhaps its most violent ever as the cult infiltrates the town. Yet, there’s something to that first episode, Paulson’s monologue. We all could agree. This was how it felt.
I was teaching in Japan in 2016. In the teachers’ room, I’d watched the map flush red as other teachers crowded around a computer, calling out Florida and Pennsylvania. When I left at the end of the day, I went on a disconsolate run, took a bad step on the ice and twisted my ankle. I’d carry that reminder for days and spend the intervening weeks trying to interpret what had happened for my colleagues, students and friends.
Ally’s therapist tells her to sign off social media, that he’s channeled his energy into working out. She compares this anxiety to 9/11, how she only got through it because she met Ivy. When Obama was elected president, she felt included in the discussion, in the world, even. He prescribes her new medication and says, “It’s all gonna be okay,” to which she asks, “Is it?”.
We get our answer shortly after. Ally can try, but things will not be okay. She goes to the grocery store, makes small talk with a cashier about the election, which causes him to put on his MAGA hat. The anxiety captured in the previous scene tracks in her body as she pushes the cart down the aisle and each item she places inside clatters against the metal.
Her coulrophobia is put in scene when the cult of clowns appears in the store, having sex over watermelons and chasing her on a Razor scooter with a knife. She throws a bottle of rosé at one of them. She takes another bottle and runs out of the store. Sometimes the fears are real. Sometimes it will not just be okay.
After everything of the last four years, being told everything would work out, that there are good people in the world, is infuriating. Reassurances are tone-deaf. On Pod Save America, Jon Lovett captured this anxiety in the face of mostly good odds that Biden would win: “If I told you…that there was a one in ten shot I put a bomb in your car, you’d be fucking terrified to start it.”
Living in a swing state–North Carolina, not Michigan–I hung literature packets on doors, greeted and observed at the polls, a quiet community college on Election Day. Our county is said to be the best indicator of whether North Carolina swings blue or red. This year, we flipped blue but the state, as of yet, has not.
Cult goes off the rails. Its political commentary loses focus as the cult becomes something more like Fight Club and the violence is so gratuitous it’s almost impossible to watch. It’s easy to forget that the show is supposed to comment on American politics as it progresses. Yet, that scene in the grocery store depicts how immediately Ally remembers things are not “okay.” What ensues is an over-the-top expression of the mess that is the American ethos.
I screamed when I saw the headlines that Pennsylvania went blue, spent all day watching videos of people in New York, Philly, Atlanta, and DC celebrating, hoping to see people out in the streets here, too.
I put on a Phillies hat and ran. Our streets downtown were quiet, so this run became less about spectating and more a place to put the energy. Sometimes, I push too hard and my right knee swells for days–it did several times at the beginning of the pandemic. I ran remembering the bookshelf scene, remembering an icy sidewalk in Hokkaido, the bruise, the scrapes I could look at for days after to remember where we were headed.
