Ryan Murphy’s Monster series is frustrating. Each new season ends up being upsetting one way or the other and despite how many times we complain, he just keeps going. And now he’s putting two complicated female killers in one show! …Great.
As part of season 4 of the series, Murphy is telling the story of Lizzie Borden. However, it was announced yesterday that Sarah Paulson is in talks to play serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the same season as part of the same style as The Ed Gein Story. With season 3 of the series, Murphy and Ian Brennan showed how Gein (Charlie Hunnam) inspired some iconic horror characters.
The show cut to Anthony Perkins and the filming of Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as glimpses of Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Now, it seems as if Murphy wants to do the same thing with Borden and how she inspired inspired other female serial killers. Or that is at least the assumption of what this season will do seeing as Borden is the focus of it.
I have to ask: Why? Is there a reason that you have to throw both these women, who have a complicated history and story, into one season? Wasn’t the pushback at what was done with Ed Gein enough? We have to keep living through these bad seasons of television?
Aileen Wuornos and Lizzie Borden have nothing in common
Lizzie Borden allegedly killed her parents with an axe. It is not confirmed and we don’t know why she did it but that’s the story and the rhyme. Aileen Wuornos killed men who allegedly tried to sexually assault her as she was working as a sex worker. How those two are going to connect with each other into one season of television, I do not know.
But it is frustrating that this just keeps happening. From season 1 of the show, when it focused on Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer, my biggest complaint was that it just was fictionalizing what these men did (with liberties) and still not focusing on the victims. With both Borden and Wuornos as female murderers, their story is complicated, more so then the men that Murphy and company have focused on.
I don’t think this is going to be a good idea. No matter what he has planned, what exactly is a story on Aileen Wuornos going to give us that the movie Monster didn’t already do? If you want to tell a Lizzie Borden story, TELL a Lizzie Borden story. Not whatever this new “trend” is with this show and mixing killers and styles together.
(featured image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
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