American Horror Story: Delicate Recap: I’m the Auteur, Bitch

Between the nun-centric thrills of Immaculate and The First Omen and the current season of American Horror Story, horror stories about pregnancy and birth are having a pop-cultural moment. AHS: Delicate takes inspiration from Rosemary’s Baby — “inspiration” here meaning that the actual people involved in the production of that film were fictionalized in last week’s episode, in case the parallels weren’t obvious enough already. Thematically, however, Rosemary’s Baby has more in common with Immaculate and The First Omen in the sense that all three of those films use demonic pregnancy to explore ideas about coercion and patriarchal control.

By comparison, AHS: Delicate is both frothier and more reactionary. Through the story of Anna Victoria Alcott and her desire to “have it all” (in this case, a baby and an Oscar), this season of Ryan Murphy’s long-running anthology series ends up becoming a cautionary tale for ambitious women. Occult-themed media often falls into the trap of inadvertently preaching conservative values: Take the Conjuring franchise, the most successful Christian horror series of all time, which ends up affirming its characters’ Catholic faith by positing holy rollers Ed and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) as righteous crusaders against very real supernatural threats.

Similarly, AHS: Delicate implies that even if she’s a wealthy celebrity, it’s not possible for a woman to have both a career and a family without selling herself in the process. Again, it seems safe to assume that Murphy, a gay man who openly worships fabulous women like the actresses on his shows, is not telling women in general to get back into the kitchen lest they lose their immortal souls to Satan — at least not intentionally. But what can you take from a plotline that begins with an actress undergoing fertility treatments while campaigning for an Oscar and ends with that same actress being conscripted into a coven of blood-drinking witches who manipulate her into birthing an Antichrist who will establish a matriarchy on Earth if not the idea that feminists are sinister and cannot be trusted?

This is, of course, giving AHS: Delicate more credit for ideological coherence than it deserves. The sole redemption of the writing on this season is that it’s often hilariously bad, and the reveal that Anna’s publicist Siobhan has orchestrated every moment of Anna’s life so she would choose her Oscar over her child — she can have both, but she has to join the coven, you see — establishes an agenda that falls apart when you think about it for more than a few seconds. Siobhan and her coven say they want to destroy the patriarchy — men have ruined everything, they tell Anna with camp glee, so it’s their time to go — so why is their whole infrastructure built around punishing ambitious women?

Siobhan uses girl-power platitudes to seduce “liberated” women like Anna: “When are they going to let us tell our own stories?” she quips in a flashback to 2019, when she and Anna bond over being honestly pretty terrible people at an infertility support-group meeting. Given what this all leads to — namely, Siobhan and her crew luring Anna with blood magic and shanking her between the vertebrae so she can serve as a vessel for sperm from her dead husband’s preserved testicles — it would seem that Siobhan doesn’t believe what she’s saying. Is she just willing to accomplish her goal by any means necessary? Or is the destruction of the patriarchy another lie the witches tell Anna to try to join her in their incestuous eugenicist cause?

We already knew there was a coven and a conspiracy, which means that the only real bombshell in “The Auteur” is the revelation that Anna’s baby is actually the product of Dex’s sperm and one of Siobhan’s eggs and Siobhan is Dex’s birth mother, which makes Siobhan both mother and grandmother to the demon child whose birth we’ve been awaiting all season. (In another deliciously tasteless parallel between reality and fiction, two of Kim Kardashian’s four children were carried by surrogates.) It’s a camp twist worthy of the chic red-and-black staging ground where most of “The Auteur” takes place after poor, doomed, loyal Ivy drops off Anna and a freshly fingerless Dex at a Los Angeles warehouse after Anna goes into labor at the Oscars. There, Anna gives birth surrounded by cackling witches and wakes up the next morning with a choice: Join or die, bitch.

Something that’s always difficult for me, personally, in fictional scenarios is when a female character pushes back against the idea of matriarchy. Yeah, men are cool and all, but why would Anna be so horrified at the idea of destroying a system that’s declared her an irrelevant dried-up husk of a person in her 30s — not to mention embroiled her in a misogynist conspiracy that goes back generations? At this point, she’s aware that her husband’s father, Dex Sr., was gaslighting and abusing Dex’s mother for decades, and that Dex did the same to her in service of manifesting that sweet baby Antichrist she just birthed without painkillers in a concrete bunker. I’d be pretty ready to swear off the patriarchy at that point, but maybe that’s just me.

The finale’s disavowal of even the tenuous connections to reality seen in earlier episodes of AHS: Delicate makes “The Auteur” a more pleasurable viewing experience, or at least a less risible one. While the members of Siobhan’s coven are dialing up their performances to camp levels, their hissing and cooing feels correct when they’re dressed up like giant Victorian crows in a glossy white room with a dripping gore centerpiece. In fact, the moments when “The Auteur” references earlier episodes — the coven calming Anna by spraying her with perfume from the gifting suite, for example — are somehow sillier than the plastic Halloween-store organs hanging above the … giant blood balloon? … in the demon baby’s nursery.

Also silly but undeniably enjoyable is the dark glamour that permeates “The Auteur,” such as the image of sharp stiletto nails dripping with blood — an image with which episode director Gwyneth Horder-Payton must have been quite taken, given the number of times it appears onscreen. Kardashian — who, I must say, has been much more compelling in this batch of episodes than I expected her to be — epitomizes this aesthetic as Siobhan, outshining even such glamorous figures as Cara Delevingne, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Juliana Canfield, and Annabelle Dexter-Jones, who are fabulous but don’t quite have the self-awareness of a woman who’s spent most of her life performing her life on television.

One thing that isn’t fabulous are those hideous Oz-green spiky stilettos, which Anna puts on after the deus ex machina that is Adeline’s reappearance from beyond the grave in the last ten minutes of the season. Feeding Anna an ode to Hestia — Adeline’s patron goddess, as we learned in the episode-length flashback two weeks ago — Adeline begins chanting, and Anna goes along with her. Siobhan almost immediately withers and crumbles into dust, further complicating an already confused theme by implying that the only way to fight dark, glamorous feminine magic is with the light, crunchy-linen-pants kind.

Thus, with some bad CGI and a few Latin phrases typed into Google Translate, ends another season of American Horror Story in a finale that has little to do but let everything that’s been revealed over the past few episodes play out. (So little, in fact, that the finale is the shortest episode of the season, clocking in at a mere 31 minutes.) We close on a sudden, rather unsatisfying, but ultimately triumphant note as Anna clutches both her baby and her Oscar, a white witch of Hollywood who’s finally figured out how to have it all. (Well, except for her husband, but he sucked anyway.) Now all that’s left for her to do is to utter one last string of magic words: “What I really want to do is direct.”