There was a lot of talk when American Horror Story: Hotel first aired about it being the raunchiest season of AHS to date. Many people immediately attacked the show as a sign of the rampant debauchery in Hollywood. An attack on American values, or even a sign of the end times.
I’ll admit, I had trouble watching the show in the beginning. The seasons cast seemed like a laundry list of liberal causes, and although I have no problem with that behavior, it is not something I go out of my way to watch.
Early in the season we were introduced to transgender characters, homosexual characters, drug addicted characters, promiscuous sex, threesomes, foursomes, failed abortions, and tirades against anti-vaccers. It seemed like American Horror Story: Hotel was determined to make a political statement, and it was one that many people were uncomfortable with.
However as the season drew on, something started to become evident. The show stayed true to it’s Hollywood roots and took a page out of the old Hollywood pre code era.
Pre Code Hollywood was fighting the line between free artistic expression and a very old-fashioned mainstream America. In an attempt to appease would be censors, Hollywood would employ a trick of showing all the sin and vice it wanted, as long as those doing the sin and vice were punished in the end.
American Horror Story: Hotel took this to an extreme. Yes, the show assaulted the viewers senses with outrageous acts of debauchery, but it soon became evident that the perpetrators of the aforementioned debauchery were wicked people. The homosexuals were murders, the transgender character was a murderer, the drug addicts were murderers, the anti-vaccer doctor was a wicked woman. The failed abortion attempt created a monster. Truly, every character in American Horror Story: Hotel was a wicked person, and they were all trapped in their own private hell by the end of the season.
Many people would argue (myself included) that pre code Hollywood was a shinning example of the artistic community standing up against oppressive restrictions of the moral majority. But is that what American Horror Story: Hotel was doing? I don’t thinks so. I would say that America no longer has a moral majority. We may have a loud, vocal moral minority, but morality is no longer in the majority.
Instead, it seems that American Horror Story: Hotel was taking part in the current standard of elitist attacks on a persecuted minority while giving that same minority, that it clearly despises, ammunition against them by portraying the shows heroes as nothing more then the depraved masses the moral minority claims that they are.
What did you think of American Horror Story: Hotel? Am I reading too much into it? Was it just entertainment for the sake of entertainment? Let us know in the comments below.