Though the first season of the anthology series Monster, produced for Netflix by Ryan Murphy, had its lurid aspects – a hunky, lustily filmed Jeffery Dahmer (Evan Peters) doing wicked things in the night – it did, admirably, try to focus as much attention on the victims of Wisconsin’s most notorious serial killer as it did on the man doing the murdering. Season two of the series turned away from that drab gloom and focused, with at least some sensitivity, on the sensational trials of the Menendez Brothers in sunny California.
Season three, the Ed Gein Story, returns to midwest murk and, especially in its early episodes, makes far less of an effort to do anything other than grimly titillate. The show’s thesis makes some sense: Ed Gein, who murdered at least two people and stole the bodies of many more from their graves, was an object of intense fascination in the middle of the 20th century, his crimes serving as inspiration for Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs and, in creator Ian Brennan’s argument, other budding serial killers. Thus Monster can depict Gein’s squalid deeds in gruesome detail while also saying something big about American culture, an analysis that might justify the show’s prurient interest in Gein’s graverobbing, necrophilia and other aberrant behavior.
That trick worked better in the Dahmer season, which rubbed our noses in some of the worst crimes imaginable but did so with at least the appearance of higher purpose. The Ed Gein Story spends most of its early episodes giving us pure freak show: weirdo loner Ed (Charlie Hunnam, another hunk to be gawked at) explores his fascination with women’s bodies as his hectoring mother (Laurie Metcalf) brutally shames his sexual impulses and, really, any attempt to live a life outside their moldering farm house in the middle of nowhere. It’s bleak, ugly, and wholly expected: we saw some version of this on the lugubrious Psycho prequel series Bates Motel. And we’ve seen religious-nut, harridan moms before in movies like Carrie. Monster, though, acts as if it has discovered a new trope, as if mothers have never before been blamed for their son’s ornate sexual hangups.
What are those hangups, exactly? Monster’s diagnosis is complicated. Toward the end of the season, we hear the term gynophilia, which on the show is described as an erotic sexualisation of the female body so profound that a man like Gein seeks to dress himself up in a woman’s skin in order to fully possess her. That’s somewhat persuasive, as is the more fact-based assertion that Gein was schizophrenic, and thus in some way not responsible for his heinous crimes. (Gein died in a mental institution, not a prison.)
And yet, the show saves its more generous, humane assessment of Gein until the end of the season; what’s come before is awfully reckless in its leering examination of gender expression. There is some editorializing happening under the show’s surface that feels awfully pointed at trans people. Which may be deliberate – in the final episodes, trans icon Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby) gets a chance to push back against any idea that Gein is among her cohort. Monster might be presenting this dangerous conflation only to dispel it. But it takes a long time to get to that place of nuanced understanding. There are hours and hours of the series in which gender queerness is carelessly compared with harmful deviance.
This has, sadly, become a Ryan Murphy specialty. Murphy only produced the Ed Gein Story, but his authorial stamp is nonetheless all over it. It’s there in the garishly outsized performances dragged out of Metcalf and Lesley Manville (as one of Gein’s hapless victims). It’s there in every insistence that the envelope ought to be pushed that much further. And it’s perhaps most hideously present in the way the show treats Anthony Perkins (Joey Pollari), the semi-closeted star of Psycho. Murphy – in the Monster series and in other shows like the noxious Hollywood – has long strained to draw a straight, short line between queer identity and a kind of depraved self-loathing that manifests in terrible ways. One gets the sense, after years of watching Murphy-stamped product, that he is trying to drag queerness (gay men in particular) into a psychosexual torment that not all of us share. It’s troubling, and sad, and deeply frustrating.
Perkins did, in the rough course of his life, consult a therapist who was eventually branded a dangerous practitioner of something like “conversion therapy”. But that was much later in his life, not when he was filming Psycho, as Monster suggests. And it’s grossly unfair to suggest that Perkins, bedeviled as he might have been, felt some sort of dark allegiance or kinship with a man who raped dead bodies and wore women’s skin like a suit simply because Perkins struggled with his sexual orientation. This is what results when a show tries to launder its baser impulses – its deep interest in gore and psychological anguish – in ersatz sociology.
The Perkins stuff is only one of myriad examples of Monster’s flagrant contortions of the historical record. Plenty on the show is flat-out made-up, lies that are then waved away with the assertion that much of what happens on the series is only happening in Gein’s mind. That’s interesting to a point – some of the show’s fantasy is alluringly dreadful, even poignant – but the technique fails when it becomes mere excuse to show us ever more terrible events. Why must we see serial killer Ted Bundy, who had no material connection to Gein, kidnap and torture two women in the final episode of the season? The show tries to culturally tether Gein to Bundy, but it does not sell its tenuous argument. It’s not unlike the wholly unnecessary scene at the end of the Dahmer series in which we are, for some miserable reason, dropped in on John Wayne Gacy as he abducts a boy he will later murder. Both instances are gratuitous pilings-on, and yet are presented as wise considerations of the serial killer continuum, the interconnectedness of all acts of horror.
That is, after all, the Monster series’ ultimate assertion: that we live in a sick, sad world and thus should be shown the sick, sad things that happen in it. Maybe there is some value in that. Though, one wishes that Murphy and Brennan and all else involved in this dubious project would be honest about what interests them. If they want to revel in the blood and muck of American life, so be it. Plenty of people will happily hop into the gunk with them. But it’s rather galling to cloak that indecent fascination in pseudo-academic analysis. It’s possible that the Ed Gein Story clumsily grasps for higher meaning simply because it has to fill eight hours of programming. And yet it’s hard not to see a more sinister, self-exonerating motivation behind it. Whatever the reason, the end product is crass where it tries to be elegant, exploitative where it plays at compassion. At least Gein was honest about wanting to mess around with corpses. Monster thinks, or pretends, it’s doing something much more sophisticated than that.
