So this weekend I binged all of Monster: The Ed Gein story, and walked away thinking it was pretty freakin' phenomenal. Then I went on tumblr hoping to find a gifset that approximated what I loved about this series that I could gush over in the tags — but pretty much all I encountered were cringey posts that seemed to completely misconstrue what the show was about, denouncing it with the sort of reactionary, surface-level critiques that have become so endemic of today's 'woke' pearl-clutchers. This happened before with Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, which irked me a lot, but this time I made a whole dang post about it...
(Read on for spoilers, screenshots, and what I hope are coherently articulated thoughts about Ryan Murphy's *actual* intentions regarding true crime, exploitation, transphobia, mental illness and American cultural phenomena)
When I first heard about this series, I had some reservations. I wasn't sure that Charlie Hunnam seemed like the right choice for the lead role. I worried that maybe Murphy's 'Monster' anthology had already peaked, and was bound to take a wrong turn by tackling a figure that had already been distorted beyond recognition by the horror genre.
All of these concerns were disproven though, to my delight. Hunnam was fantastic. Perfect, even. His hunky qualities were majorly overshadowed by his skilled performance, and on the few occasions where these were highlighted (nude scenes), they accomplished what Murphy does best: combining titillation with the macabre, to disorienting, unnerving effect.
This sort of thing, of course, will not be to everyone's tastes, and that's fine. Murphy does tend to go big on the sexploitative thrill factor to a degree that's sometimes a bit campy, no doubt. Even being a big fan of 'Monster,' so many seasons of American Horror Story were (for me) downright unwatchable for a variety of reasons. Anyone is of course free to steer clear of his stuff on account of personal tastes! What I object to, though, is the implication that because of his storytelling style, his efforts to tackle these real-life subjects are only ever "trashy" depictions without merit. As a matter of fact, I think he's kind of perfect at telling these stories— not only because he doesn't shy away from the gory details, but because he has a fantastic way of weaving social commentary in between all the depictions that seemingly go "too far," demonstrating that these depictions are exactly what we're expecting from his stories, and showing why that is.
In the case of Ed Gein, a lot of it boils down to he really did do that. We might never fully understand all the particulars of how or when or why, but we do know the what from the police reports. The facts of his case are so harrowing that any attempt by anyone to try to piece it all together by filling in the missing details via our imaginations will inevitably lead into some dark and disturbing territory.
Murphy showcases this brilliantly by weaving popular, external narratives into his own depiction of Gein's story, intentionally blurring fact with fiction by merging scenes of his own version of Gein with those we recognize from horror classics, making us wonder "wait... did it actually happen that way?" before we realize, oh, no, of course— that's just Hitchcock's version of events, etc. This disorientation is a sly way of making a very important point: that this is all just another sensationalized accounting of a real story, because that's what we want to see, and have always wanted to see. Murphy even offers relevant historical-cultural context for the three major films that capitalized on Gein's story, showing how the filmmakers were each products of their own time, deliberately pushing the boundary of what was considered "acceptable" by their audiences in order to make what they felt was an urgent psycho-social statement while also making something artistically outre (i.e. shocking, yes, though not necessarily only for shock value).
The series works with this theme a lot—dehumanization—perhaps presenting how easily people can dehumanize one another with more brutality than anything else it depicts. The inclusion of the Ilse Koch story was actually pretty fucking brilliant, in that regard. It doesn't even matter whether the 'real' Ed Gein had any nuanced understanding of Koch, or of Nazis in general— the point was that, for whatever reason, he was fascinated by the concept of inconceivable violence being committed by one group of humans on another. We can draw any number of conclusions as to why this was, and Murphy attempts to do just that via an imagined conversation between Hitchcock and Psycho writer, Robert Bloch:
Hitchcock was deeply invested in exploring the darkness of the human psyche, and found the perfect outlet for his own "morbid fascination" through his adaptation of Bloch's Psycho. His film is widely acclaimed; he wasn't lambasted for distorting Gein's story to achieve artistic and commercial success. Even so, the knowledge that the character of Norman Bates was 'based' on Gein resulted in the two being conflated for one another in the public imagination. Then came Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs — and over time, "Ed Gein" became even more of a boogeyman in cultural consciousness, whose proclivity for cross-dressing (taken to the extreme, in the form of not only women's garments, but women's actual skin/body parts) was as much of a part of his "weird, freakish otherness" as was his fondness for necrophilia, murder and digging corpses up from graves.
This is, of course, a problem. Murphy doesn't present it as anything else, which is why I was so baffled to encounter readings of this series as "transphobic." It deals with the issue of transphobia, certainly, showing how it was perpetuated by these dramatizations. Perhaps the most impactful moment in the series regarding this subject occurs during an imaginary conversation between Gein and Christine Jorgensen, a real-life trans woman who Gein was obsessed with. When Gein tries to articulate the commonalities that he feels he and Jorgensen share, Jorgensen (slipping into the role of Gein's psychiatrist, as this conversation occurs when Gein is institutionalized and succumbing to a schizoid episode) refutes his claims, emphasizing that "transsexuals are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it."
In a subsequent conversation with his psychiatrist, Gein learns that a distorted, obsessive "gynephilia" is a key element of his unique pathology; his overbearing mother's insistence that he forego his sexual urges resulted in an inversion of his sexuality, making his forbidden desire to penetrate women so extreme that it manifested as him wanting to penetrate her entirely, i.e. getting inside of her and wearing her skin, etc. Murphy uses both Jorgensen and Ilse Koch as contrasting archetypes that Gein imperfectly attempts to embody, but whom he ultimately misunderstands at the most fundamental level. Gein is no more a misfit trans woman trapped in a male body than he is a Nazi sociopath. He's a mentally stunted, sensitive schizophrenic whose rigidly puritanical, abusive upbringing—in combination with his exposure to violent Nazi imagery at a crucial point in his psychosexual development—created the perfect conditions for his pathology to spiral out of control.
Ryan Murphy's series—and his whole Monster anthology, to date—attempts to show us the humanity behind the so-called "Monsters" of our imaginations, showing a side to these people that most true crime media often overlooks. That's what I love about it. He doesn't necessarily tell you what to think about them, but he gives you more context to judge from. He draws viewers in with the promise of graphic sensationalism and sexy bodies, and leaves us questioning our preconceived beliefs. He emphasizes the fact of human frailty, the role of trauma, and how we're shaped by our environments and the people around us, for better or worse. He's really good at deconstructing the cultural conditions surrounding real events, and how these have shaped and distorted public perception. He acknowledges the role of writers and filmmakers and journalists in this process, with full awareness of his own contribution to this phenomenon. You don't have to like him for it. But when you flood the tumblr tag with the sort of negativity that suggests that others might be 'bad people' for enjoying this sort of thing, and that you're 'better' for rejecting it, you just look like a fool by those who actually watched and understood the series from a less reactive standpoint.
But as the script started to come in, I thought the only way this level of vitriol that he has works is if he's in love with Armand. There is this extraordinary psychological term called reaction formation, which is what Iago has for Othello. It's a defense mechanism whereby your impulses are so unacceptable to your ego that they're replaced by this opposite, exaggerated behavior.
Santiago finds Louis incredibly attractive. Because Armand killed Santiago's maker — who I think he was in love with too — and also finds Louis attractive, the whole thing must be destroyed. It gave such a drive to his hatred. It was just something ruminating in myself that drove him forward in a very aggressive, mad, extreme, way. – Ben Daniels [X]
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