Maybe No More Monster

In the spirit of wanting the TV industry to continue to employ human beings instead of reassigning their jobs to AI clankers, I will say this about Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story: Kudos to this franchise for keeping practical special-effects artisans employed to produce all the blood, vomit, bone, intestines, and viscera that their sicko minds can come up with. It’s good business for them, but, my God, at what cost to the rest of us? Every Monster season is less interesting and more repetitive than the last, and The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth entry so far, is like a bowl of peeled grapes inside a knockoff Sofia Coppola–themed haunted house. The proprietor of the attraction keeps insisting that the grapes are eyes, and you should be scared, and if you’re not you might hate women, and the end result is a tiring and superficial collection of neo-woke platitudes buried under a twee cursive-and-floral aesthetic.

Some people might come into The Lizzie Borden Story aware of the “Lizzie Borden took an axe” playground rhyme about how she killed her stepmother with 40 whacks and her father with 41, and the series contorts itself into increasingly pained positions to build out that ditty into eight episodes. (All premiered on Netflix on September 17.) Perhaps the most suspect maneuver: Monster takes the position that the acquitted-in-real-life Lizzie was not only guilty but also justified, a duality that the series has flirted with before but now embraces fully, erasing any texture of doubt from the proceedings. This is also happens to be the furthest back in history that the Monster series has gone — the Borden murders took place in 1892; the previous seasons on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein were all 20th-century jaunts — meaning that series co-creator, showrunner, and sole writer Ian Brennan has the least amount of contemporaneous source material to work with, and the gaps show. Most of the series’ run time follows Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty — yes, of the Bening-Beattys — worrying me with her one expression), an introverted, nature-loving young woman who is verbally and emotionally tortured by her demanding, cruel stepmother, Abby (Rebecca Hall, worrying me with her increased entrenchment in the Ryan Murphy television universe), and neglected by her greedy, womanizing father, Andrew (Charlie Hunnam, worrying me with his attempt at a Daniel Plainview accent).

But just like in the series’ preceding season, The Ed Gein Story, this one deviates from its titular character to pad itself out. We travel hundreds of years into the past with the bathing-in-virginal-blood Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Vicky Krieps) and into the future with serial-killer-of-men Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson, taking on a role made famous by Charlize Theron in the unrelated 2003 film Monster) as well as bop around inside the Bordens’ past with unnecessary flashbacks heavy on tragic backstories. I suppose that imagining Wuornos as a Borden devotee who demands that her younger lover Shelby (Jessie Lee) read to her from a chapter book about Lizzie (one of the series’ recurring framing devices), and then fingers Shelby on the couch where Borden’s father was killed, and then communes with an angelic Lizzie who is pleased to learn that she’s become famous, is one way to fill some minutes. Yet all those detours end up at the same place: Monster’s insistence that all of these people we think of as evil were really victims and worthy of our sympathy rather than our judgment.

Even if you agree with that, it’s hard to deny that co-creator Murphy’s Monster series is getting clumsier in its execution, more desperate in insisting this project has a point four seasons in. Paulson’s performance is a Hillbilly Elegy–level abomination of caricature, and she’s not aided by lines like, “They’d treat Lizzie like that … then suddenly she’s the fucking villain or some shit!” No one here can escape the Monster signature, which is to make its themes obvious and its takeaways muddled; the whole thing is spectacle without reflection. Whether taken on its own or compared with another women’s-rage show like the recent Furious, The Lizzie Borden Story has all the depth of a papercut.

The series begins with a Joe Wright–style creative flourish to which it never returns, because director Max Winkler is no Joe Wright: On a red-velvet-curtained stage sits a tiny piano decorated with cherubs and a cursive “Lizzie.” That gives way to a children’s choir singing the “Lizzie Borden took an ax” rhyme as Borden herself moves through her house, zealously chopping her parents to bits. This was the collective fantasy, the series seems to say, and here is the reality — which would be a better feint if the series’ posited reality weren’t so similar. Once again, Monster wants you to see a repressed, constricted society that punished people who didn’t fit in, and Lizzie is very, very punished: slapped by her stepmother, ignored by her father, and mocked by her older, sexually experienced sister Emma (Billie Lourd). Beatty plays Lizzie like a woman whose old-maid status belies her girlishness, with a high, breathy voice, a fallen-open mouth in repose, and a wide-eyed stare that never quite convinces you of whatever emotions she’s trying to suggest. Maybe that’s a little nod from the series suggesting Lizzie truly was a sociopath all along. Yet it feels more like a failure of direction and conception, especially as Lizzie’s characterization switches partway through the series, once she starts sleeping with the family maid, Maggie (Krieps, in a double role).

At first, Maggie (whose given name is Bridget, but who Abby forces to go by the only name she will ever call any of her servants) is the worldly one, a well-traveled European who inspects Lizzie’s hymen to figure out why her periods are gushing hemorrhages, talks her through how to use a vibrator, and knows how to poison the Bordens with turned oysters. (The minutes-long scene in which Abby and Andrew projectile-vomit soup and blood and then shit their pants is described with some of the most distressingly evocative phrasing I’ve ever seen on Netflix outside Stranger Things, with closed captions like “prolonged sloshing” and “flatulent squelching.”) Maggie titillates Lizzie with stories about Countess Báthory (sequences that are shot in a boxier ratio and stylishly copy Robert Eggers’s whole deal) and first suggests to Lizzie that they kill the people who are abusing them. Also when it comes to copying, The Lizzie Borden Story apes The Ed Gein Story’s ending in an irritatingly beat-for-beat way, as though Brennan is running out of ways to convey how much these delusional characters see themselves as martyrs. That same imaginative narrowness extends to Lizzie and Maggie as doomed lovers who suddenly fall out of alignment because the plot requires them to, and whose relationship isn’t convincing anyway; Krieps and Beatty have more of a sisterly dynamic than real romantic chemistry. But sure, the series’ anachronisms — like its needle drops from the Runaways, Taylor Swift, and Fiona Apple — make more sense when Krieps’s pink-haired Maggie is coaxing Lizzie into a greater understanding of her “cunny” and herself.

Eventually, though, when Monster has to start fitting its story into the actual facts of the case, characterizations get shakier and more contradictory. Maggie recedes so Lizzie can rise, but no matter which of the series’ female characters has primacy in the moment — Lizzie, Maggie, or Jessica Barden’s actress Nance O’Neil, who coaches Lizzie on how to be more acceptably feminine in public — Monster detrimentally sticks to its Tumblr-level framing of patriarchy’s impact. None of it’s wrong, but it’s not insightful, either. “Motherfuckers treat us like shit! Society treats us like shit! … We’re not allowed to react how we should, right? ’Cause we just got to stay ladies,” Paulson’s Aileen monologues, and one simply must wonder how much more nuanced The Lizzie Borden Story could have been if a woman had written it.

Even then, though, how much more does Monster really have to say? In this go-round, all the franchise’s favorite tricks have lost their impact, and its provocations ring hollow. The show’s critiques of society have an increasing screeching quality, the gore of shot-off penises and decapitated heads are so prevalent that they bleed together, and lines like “She wasn’t born that way, nobody is,” feel like rote placeholders rather than bold proclamations. Regardless of the gender of its central killer, maybe the most equitable thing Monster could do is stop talking.