O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
It’s not often that you’ll find me quoting Jim Morrison, largely due to the fact that he seemed to be a bit of an ass-clown and his poetry makes my teeth hurt. But he definitely got it right when he wrote that “people are strange.”
A lot of human behavior strikes me as peculiar, especially when viewed through my own subjective lens of normalcy, which could probably use some recalibration, seeing that many of my own behaviors may strike others as odd.
However, I will argue that dressing oneself in human skin and dancing around a room is empirically strange and gross and repulsive. The same can be said for holding full conversations with a corpse propped upright on a chair.
It is also an irrefutable fact that the serial killer Ed Gein was one of the worst human beings to ever inhabit this planet, which makes him juicy content for “American Horror Story” creator, writer and producer Ryan Murphy’s series “Monster,” which has featured fictionalized tales of some of the most demented and depraved killers in the annals of American crime.
The first season’s subject was everyone’s favorite cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, which was followed by another viscerally disturbing season about the Menendez Brothers—a series so compelling it prompted California to reconsider the parole for the rich boys who brutally murdered their parents, although their parole was recently denied.
On Oct. 3, Netflix dropped the third season “Monster: The Ed Gein Story,” which has, so far, been largely panned by critics, although actor Charlie Hunnam has received some modest accolades for his performance as Gein and his attempt to humanize the killer, who was clearly more monster than man.
The eight-episode series takes us through Gein’s troubled relationships with his family—while it was never confirmed, the show asserts that Gein killed his brother, Henry—and a particularly bizarre connection with his overbearing mother Augusta Gein (Laurie Metcalf). It also covers an on-again/off-again pseudo-romance with fellow freak Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) as well as his killing spree and his digging up of dead bodies from a cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin.
There is plenty of blood and flaying and disembowelment and decapitation and necrophilia and all of those strange and disturbing things that are better left unseen by most people.
But Gein’s legacy stretches far beyond his deranged and despicable crimes, which have been woven into the plots of some of the most chilling horror films ever produced. In fact, the series’ most interesting episodes explore how Gein’s real life story was used in the screenplays of films, such as “Psycho” (1960), “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974) and “Silence of the Lambs” (1991). The cross-cutting between Gein’s crimes and the filming of the movies influenced by them is impeccably executed.
For me, the best episode of the series (Episode 4: “Green”) includes “The Texas Massacre” writer and director Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) explaining—in a completely unhinged diatribe—how the macabre nature of Gein’s murders mirrored the government sanctioned behaviors of some American troops in Vietnam. “I’m not making the movie America wants, I’m making the movie it deserves,” Hooper says to a colleague on the set.
Tom Hollander also shines as Alfred Hitchcock, and Joey Pollari, playing as a young and deeply-closeted Anthony Perkins, steals the small screen in the earlier episodes.
However, the series’ best party trick occurs toward the end of theseries where Gunnam almost succeeds in making Gein—who suffered from acute schizophrenia and was finally medicated in a mental institution—seem, dare I say, sympathetic. Of course, this feeling is fleeting once perspective returns and we realize the ineffable pain and suffering this man caused other people and their families.
Seeing that Chelbys was closed for renovations—in case you missed it1—and I was bored off my rocker and may have enjoyed “Monster: The Ed Gein Story” more than I normally would have, but I would also tentatively recommend it to anyone who has the stomach for this sort of thing.
Next year, Murphy and crew will bring us to Fall River as “Monster” will explore the murders committed and later acquitted by the infamous Lizzie Borden. I can’t wait.
- They reopen today. More to come. ↩︎
You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com.