American Horror Story Season 7 Episode 3
There goes the neighborhood. American Horror Story: Cult, season 7, episode 3, ensures there won’t be any block party thrown on Ally and Ivy’s street for a very long time. And if it is, they won’t be invited. Even if they were able to finally evict their “Neighbors from Hell.” The doctor prescribes systematic desensitization. He is proud of her progress, but this puts him subliminally with the insane clown posse terrorizing the town. On an early episode of The Simpsons, Bart advises his sister Lisa not to look away from the violence on the screen because “you’ll never get desensitized.” Bart is such a clown, a class clown to be more accurate, but he was also the evil twin, as we learned on one of the Treehouses of Horrors, and desensitization is the evil the cult in American Horror Story is peddling as a spiritual salve. The wonderful, loving couple is buried in white coffins with red cloth by the home invading clowns. This is a shame. They are introduced into the series just to die. This is a shame. They were so close to being cured. Not for everyone. The woman who considers herself the least prejudiced person on the planet has to cross “No justice/No peace” picket lines as she is hailed as the lesbian George Zimmerman. Ally becomes the very poster child of everything she used to disdain, an her wife, Ivy (Alison Pill) still has to go to work. “Never apologize,” Kai Anderson (Evan Peters) advises Ally. But he’s only looking for votes. He’s already got her liberal neighbors wearing sombreros to show how she sees Latin Americans and to prove they are more liberal than she is. Both families are marked. The neighborhood serial killer is taunting victims by painting the symbol of a distorted smiley face we first saw almost painted over in last week’s episode when Ally was rushing out of her neighbors’ house. I predict that it will come out that Kai hired the protesters just so he could appear to be saving Ally. The season took a subtle turn this episode. The convergent plots are beginning to make sense. The patterns that once seemed crazy, are now proven to be insane but no less credible. The world changed after the election of President Trump. It got a little more scared. The people who voted for him, as represented by the establishing episode, are vindicated for their fears. The ones who voted against him are afraid that vindication will only lead to more fear. Fear can be a friend or an enemy, a weapon or an anchor, which actually could be used as a pretty good weapon. American Horror Story: Cult presents a wonderfully twisted version of every liberal’s paranoia, which mirror those of conservatives, like the chemtrails by bus that are killing all the birds. The conspiracy theories often meet, which is really scary because that implies consensus. The cult at the center of the season sees consensus as a double edged sword. Of course they want everyone to believe the same way. But even those who get converted, like the gay man and his beard wife across the street, are in danger of being sacrificed. It is reminiscent of the ending of George Orwelll’s 1984, when the main character, who went from sex rebel to broken ball, goes to bed at night dreaming about the bullet he will gladly accept into his brain. That is party loyalty. Big Brother is a clown. We are all being indoctrinated. “Neighbors from Hell” was written by James Wong, and directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton.
