Monsters inspired by real events
“Why did Erik and Lyle Menendez kill their parents?” This is the shocking sentence said by Leslie Abramson (imperial Ari Graynor), the lawyer of the murderous brothers in episode 7 of Monstersas their trial opens in 1993. The method and the victims, everyone knows them. Using two hunting rifles, the Menendez brothers executed their father, José (Javier Bardem) and their mother Kitty (Chloë Sevigny). As a viewer, we know everything, like in an episode of ColumboThe brothers are guilty, that’s obvious.
They have crossed a threshold into the unimaginable. In the posh neighborhoods of Beverly Hills, in a house previously rented by Prince and Elton John (since we have to mention names to add polish), the Menendez parents, distinguished members of high society, were massacred by their own children. After a quick game of hide-and-seek and small stones thrown at the police, the Menendez heirs are arrested. Then begins the real treasure hunt: finding the reason so that the ignoble act makes sense.
In MonstersRyan Murphy takes a step back: it is not about telling the story of the hunt for a killer, but about understanding how these monsters are made. The subject of Dahmer was the autopsy of the murderer’s mind, it was necessary to decode the cryptogram of his mind. His path suggested a derailment sooner or later. For the Menendez, it’s quite the opposite: these two handsome guys, sons of rich people, bathe in the life of luxury.
Their path was all mapped out: Princeton, investments, marriage to a TV star, divorce, fame. They are the embodiment of theAmerican Dreamborn to a Cuban-born immigrant father, who rose to become a West Coast bigwig.American Dream has American Creepthere is only one step: on the day of the murder, appearances give way, and when you start to scratch, you discover hell.
Ryan Murphy loves to play with grand guignol and twisted characters. And the very intense and gory murder sequence suggests that we’re going to go all out with the grotesque and the bloody. But after having delivered his punch to the audience in the gut, Monsters take your foot off the pedal. The rawest horror thrown in the face cracked the veneer of glamour. Now it’s time to dig into this wound with both hands.
Two brothers
Monsters uses the uneasy relationship between the two brothers to lead us into the first steps of this horror. Above Erik and Lyle hovers the shadow of Patrick Bateman fromAmerican Psycho : these two handsome young men are obsessed with body worship, their bare torsos are filmed as if they were Greek statues in a training assembly crazy. The connection with Bateman is also made by the fact that they think themselves above all law. The horror in which they bathe is that of a permanent and absolute lie..
Erik and Lyle, the eldest with his nerves on edge, and the youngest full of anxiety, have opted for a legal path that seems a priori untenable: that of self-defense. Once incarcerated, they explain that they were martyred and tortured morally, physically, and sexually by their parents for years. That’s all The problem with the Menendez case: according to them, the monstrosity of their act would have been justifiedTo support the brothers’ claims, Murphy and Brennan opted for a fragmented narrative, similar to what was done for DahmerThe showrunners take the audience between the past narrated by the brothers, the present of their incarceration, and what may be the truth.
The series opts for the philosophy of doubt. The choice was made not to question the brothers’ words. It is through the alternation of very raw sequences, always brought by the words of Erik and Lyle, that we plunge into hell. José, their father, would have abused them since they were very young. Their mother, Kitty, would have been nothing more than a disembodied ghost drowning the sorrow of her existence in alcohol. All this takes shape little by little, until a heartbreaking climax: that of episode 5, entitled ” The Hurt Man » (The Broken Man).
Very soberly produced by Michael Uppendahl, This episode transforms Erik’s hearing by his lawyer into a suffocating closed-door session. In a long sequence shot of almost an hour, with a shot that slowly closes in on his face, Erik describes all the atrocities he has suffered. Perverted pedophile father, contemptuous and insulting mother, daily violence, humiliations… To which is added a relationship between brothers on the verge of incest (whether or not the limit is crossed, we will never know).
Besides Cooper Koch’s incredible performance (he deserves an award for this performance), this episode is a real slap in the face delivered without restraintwhere horror unfolds through words and screws itself into our minds like a filthy reality, unacceptable, but capable of justifying everything. Murphy and Brennan then performed their greatest sleight of hand: the monsters are the victims, and we can only feel empathy and sympathy for them. But despite the emotions, the question remains: where is the truth?
The series where you are the hero (reluctantly)
A question that Murphy and Brennan take great pleasure in choosing not to answer. After this shocking episode 5, the series changes gear. We have been subjected to the reality of Erik’s words. Now, the showrunners will sow doubt in a reptilian manner: what if all this were true? What if all this were false? What if the murderous brothers were actually only after their parents’ fortune? If all this is true, is it enough to justify a premeditated double murder?
Can we, as human beings, condone murder as an escape? And if the brothers only lied: why did they lie? Did they really do it for the money, or did they make up this story because the facade of a rich WASP to maintain permanently was too heavy to bear? Sometimes Erik appears as the victim of a crushing society, unable to assume his homosexuality, sometimes as a manipulative genius. Lyle is sometimes a dehumanized monster, sometimes the product of an education without any form of love. The creators of the series sow clues in one direction then in another, thus creating a layer of fog around any notion of reality.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan put us in a psychological impasse, constantly pushing us to empathize with these two brothers.to better question our certainties. This sadistic little game has a specific goal, that of forcing the audience to answer the only real question: who are the monsters? Is it this mother who calls her children parasites and who says on camera that she would have preferred that they never be born? Or this sadistic father obsessed with success and social veneer? Or these two brothers who killed these parents?
It would be too easy to answer that monsters generate monsters, regardless of the social category in which they evolve. In the last quarter of the series, little by little, another answer takes shape: the monsters are perhaps those who, through voyeurism and morbid impulses, delight in the stories of true crimesavoring the suffering and misfortune of others, just to comfort himself in the idea that his own little life is still quite comfortable.
By playing with the limits of the docudrama, by sometimes twisting reality (the Menendez brothers cried scandal about their supposed incestuous relationship, and about these sequences where we see José and Kitty as a happy and fulfilled couple), and by pushing us to wonder where the responsibility for the murder lies, the series leaves us with a deep unease.
The Murphy/Brennan duo has succeeded in its coup: we end up feeling sympathy for these two monsters, against our will. From then on, we become the reflection of these groupies screaming Kyle and Erik’s names, brandishing signs with their names surrounded by little hearts at the entrance to the courthouse, and this despite the life sentence of the Menendez brothers. In doing so, we too become monsters.
Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez has been available on Netflix since September 19, 2024
