Spoilers follow for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, all eight episodes of which premiered on Netflix on October 3.
Much like the other installments of Monster, you can guess the point The Ed Gein Story is making: We don’t know the full story of killer Ed Gein, and maybe if we did, we’d sympathize instead of judging him, and we’d better understand America, its crassness and consumerism. Creators Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy aren’t implicating themselves in that formula, of course, because they’re doing the important work of pointing out all the other filmmakers, law-enforcement authorities, and media professionals who spun the Gein story for their own devices. But their pointed fingers would feel a little cleaner if they weren’t delivered alongside lengthy scenes of Charlie Hunnam’s Gein having sex with a corpse or dancing around in the snow while wearing a suit made of women’s skin. Brennan and Murphy could’ve ended the season with its fourth episode, which features its most insightful observations about the United States’ blinkered perspective on political violence. Monster tip-toes very close to delivering a thought-provoking argument about the way we use entertainment to avoid taking responsibility for our collective sins of complacency and cultural narcissism. Alas. Like Gein, Monster doesn’t know when to stop.
Monster starts in the early 1940s with Gein’s life in remote Wisconsin, trapped at a failing farm with his abusive religious mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf). The pair’s routine basically goes like this: She screams at him that he should never have sex, catches him masturbating while wearing her underwear and choking himself with a belt, then screams some more Bible quotes at him until the cycle starts again. Ed’s repressed and lonely, a cowed boy trapped in a broad-shouldered man’s body, and Hunnam’s falsetto-voiced, wide-eyed performance is a little bit Lennie from Of Mice and Men, a little bit Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. When his on-again, off-again girlfriend Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) shows him Polaroids taken by a soldier in the Nazi concentration camps and a kinky fetish comic featuring Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), the German war criminal nicknamed “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” Gein becomes obsessed. After his mother dies in 1945, he starts digging up graves to mimic Koch’s hobby of using human skin to make home furnishings and furniture, and eventually, remains from more than 200 bodies litter his house, like belts made out of nipples and bowls made out of skulls. Later, Gein begins killing people around town and using their bodies for his creations, too. (It cannot be overstated how distressing this show is to watch. Kudos to the props department, but also, what in the actual hell.)
Once Monster establishes these rushed motivations for Gein’s increasingly horrifying activities, it jumps around in time: to 1959, when Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) began thinking about making Psycho; 1968, when Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) tapped into his childhood fear of Gein to conceive The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and the late 1980s, when Gein inspired Buffalo Bill’s crossdressing in The Silence of the Lambs. Monster traces the massive shadow Gein left on 20th-century horror to convey how far Gein’s lore spread, how well-known he became for acts he didn’t entirely understand himself, and eventually, how disconnected he felt from both those crimes and that reputation. But it’s also trying to make a broader argument that is less about Gein as an individual and more about why we as Americans are more comfortable with ingesting some kinds of gore and brutality over others. Why do we pay money to see Leatherface shove his chainsaw into people’s torsos, but turn off the TV when news coverage of the Vietnam War comes on? Why do we transform images of Jewish misery into lurid soldier’s mementos, shrug off war crimes like My Lai, and treat New York City crime-scene photographer Weegee like a minor celebrity?
Monster doesn’t have answers for these questions, just a general disdain for Americans and broad observations about our own cowardice. It’s frustrating that the series presents this bloodlust and apathy as a post-World War II development in the American psyche, thus tidily ignoring that the U.S. was born out of genocide and built on the backs of enslaved people. But Brennan and Murphy find thought-provoking tension in these imbalances, contrasting our disinterest in keeping up with America’s imperialist destruction with our never-ending fascination with Gein’s brutality and depravity. And the series incriminates us, of course, when Hunnam looks straight into the camera and says, “You’re the one who can’t look away.” By fourth episode “Green,” Monster has hit all these points, and hit them well. The episode’s final minutes feature Hooper ranting about how he was “fucking bored” by Psycho. When someone tells him he can’t make his movie, he replies, “Why not? They’re mowing down whole villages and putting it on TV. They’re burning babies … I’m not making the movie this country wants. I’m making the movie it deserves. They created it. The ugliness, the violence, the cruelty, the depravity, the lies. We’re humans, but we’re not human anymore.” His tirade is nihilistic and grandiose, but he makes some good points! Gein is the bogeyman, Hooper argues, but he’s a bogeyman for an America that’s already deeply lost its way, and maybe never had it.
Imagine if Monster had ended there. We’ve seen Gein infantilized and mistreated by his mother, led on and corrupted by Adeline, have his schizophrenia activated by those horrific images from the concentration camps, and become a ruthless murderer of women who made him angry. We understand that headlines about Gein were inspiring copycats and changing true crime as we know it. We feel Brennan and Murphy’s contempt. But Monster just keeps going, making the same arguments and piling on the stomach-churningly awful visuals until you lose all sense of whatever nuance the show once had.
Consider the finale, which floats a bunch of big-brained ideas about the cruelty of religious moralizing, the churning depravity of the American audience, and the failures of our criminal-justice and public-health systems, only to let them all splatter to the ground like the organs of so many of Gein’s victims. In “The Godfather,” Gein is reformed. With therapy and the appropriate medication, he’s lucid and penitent, but he’s still stuck in an underfunded asylum, surrounded by inmates who insult and bite him. The only people who write him letters are serial killers who adore him, especially serial killers who were portrayed on the Netflix series Mindhunter (which Monster, for some reason, takes a swipe at with a frankly exhausting, metatextual parody). He has information from serial killer “Birdman” Richard Speck about Ted Bundy, who is still on the loose beheading young women, but the FBI is ignoring Gein’s tips — until finally, a cop meets with Gein and uses his information to catch Bundy. This is allegedly a fantasy sequence, but one of Monster’s greatest flaws is how flimsy it is at differentiating Gein’s imagination from what the series is presenting as objective truth.
The most needless scene of all is a bizarro fantastical sequence where Speck, who describes Gein as his role model and hero for faking insanity (even the killers who idolize Gein didn’t know him, Monster argues), narrates a letter he wrote to Gein in which he asks Gein if he’d like to masturbate while touching Speck’s estrogen-enhanced breasts. Look at all these freaks and opportunists, Monster tells us, unlike good boy Gein, who as he dies imagines himself going down the middle of a Soul Train-style line of asylum patients and employees and the people from his life, all bumping and grinding to Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” His final thoughts are of reuniting with Augusta, who greets him warmly at the top of a set of stairs. (If you’re picturing a Glee performance mashed up with Leo and Kate’s reunion at the ending of Titanic, that’s exactly what it’s like.) Ed has made her proud, Augusta tells him, and although “only a mother could love you,” she does.
The final image of Monster is the pair drinking lemonade on the front porch of their home. Is this a rare moment of familial pleasantness we didn’t see? A hypothetical, what the Geins could have been like if Ed had received treatment earlier? Or a vision of Ed and Augusta in heaven, somehow? It’s unclear! Regardless, this is an exceedingly genteel way to end a show that previously had shown us not one, not two, but three shots of removed and preserved vulvas. Monster practically insists that Gein changed in the later years of his life, and Hunnam’s performance shifts into a man more self-possessed and calm, his voice pitched downward and his body language steady after years of proper treatment for his schizophrenia. (Although the show struggles to really clue us into Gein’s interiority, Hunnam admittedly tries his hardest to make him accessible.) But Monster is gratuitous in conveying both Gein’s deviance and reform, leaning into the excessive characterizations and flourishes it previously criticized Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and Mindhunter for demonstrating, too. In the season’s back half, neither its overloading of vile desecrations nor maudlin sentimentality adds anything that Monster hadn’t already established four episodes ago. We already know how the tale of Ed Gein ends, with commercialization and infamy. What Monster fails to consider is that it’s part of the problem.
Related
