This article discusses the full season of Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is about female rage and repression.
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Monster → discuss → rage
It’s the talking point that the show’s makers have been leading with, in publicity materials and in multiple interviews.
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makers → ’ → interviews
These are fine themes for the first season of Monster with a female subject, even if they’re not exactly unique within a post-Big-Little-Lies, #MeToo-informed TV landscape where so many dramas aimed at women double as amplifiers for gendered frustrations.
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dramas → ’re → frustrations
The well of misogyny isn’t in danger of running dry anytime soon.
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well → run → danger
But if we must keep diving into it, each descent should at least leave us with some new insight or nuance.
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descent → keep → insight
Lizzie Borden, now streaming, fails to clear even that bar.
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Borden → stream → bar
Perhaps the least historically accurate Monster yet—and that’s saying something—the season uses the infamous tale of a Fall River, Mass. woman who probably hacked her wealthy father and stepmother to death with an axe in 1892 as a conduit to just about every plague on womankind you can imagine, past, present, and perennial.
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you → say → womankind
The premium put on physical beauty.
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premium → put → beauty
By tying together Lizzie’s story with the legends of supposed forerunner Elizabeth Báthory and descendent Aileen Wuornos, Brennan, who wrote every episode, suggests a simplistic kinship between all female killers.
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who → tie → killers
There’s no use fretting over the extremely purposeful anachronisms and inaccuracies in this retelling, which plays as fast and loose with the Borden family as that classic nursery rhyme.
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which → ’ → rhyme
With 26-year-old Ella Beatty starring as a dreamy, blank-screen Lizzie, who ages from 32 to her 60s by the end of the season, and Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall cast as parents who were really a couple of decades the actors’ seniors, everyone is much younger and prettier than their real-life counterparts.
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everyone → star → counterparts
And more shocking, in some ways, than the hyperspeed double murder reenactment that opens the premiere, is what immediately follows it: a flashback to four months earlier, when Lizzie scares off a suitor by passing a bucket of menstrual blood on the white sofa where they’re sitting.
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they → open → sofa
As it turns out, what the fictionalized Bordens refer to as her “lady time” had some relevance to the actual case.
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refer → turn → case
But Lizzie Borden is such a massive remix, mingling facts with half-truths and rumors and fabrications, it barely matters which detail is which.
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detail → mingle → truths
Because its source material is not especially extensive—one double homicide, as opposed to the lengthy and lurid sagas of most past Monster subjects—the show is forced to stretch.
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show → oppose → subjects
The series is padded with Fall River horror scenes that either never happened (the oyster poisoning that leads to so much operatic barfing) or didn’t transpire remotely the way they’re shown (the murder of Bertha Manchester, played by Linda Reiter).
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they → pad → Reiter
Brennan also adds queer love to Lizzie’s life, in the form of the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan, who they really did call Maggie, after a former servant.
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they → add → servant
He is far from the first to investigate this angle; the 2018 film Lizzie, to take just one example, is also built around a romance, between Chloë Sevigny’s Lizzie and Kristen Stewart’s Bridget.
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film → investigate → Lizzie
Monster is, however, the first dramatization to make such imaginative use of the character.
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Monster → make → character
Phantom Thread breakout Vicky Krieps, who played ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ Ilse Koch in Monster’s Ed Gein season, is a conspicuously Germanic Irish maid, with an ahistorical shag haircut dyed a series of shades reminiscent of, by turns, Wuornos and Ziggy Stardust.
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who → play → Wuornos
She has picked up skills in everything from cooking and cleaning to pharmacology in the course of her global travels.
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She → pick → travels
It’s no mystery why the awkward, sheltered Lizzie, who craves a bigger life, is enchanted by this glamorous, androgynous outsider.
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who → ’ → outsider
She’s also the unstuck-in-time character who first connects Lizzie to murderesses from other eras.
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who → ’ → eras
As Maggie reads from a French book about Báthory, a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman said to have killed hundreds of young women and bathed in their blood in pursuit of eternal youth, we see Krieps—with hair and makeup straight out of the goth club—as the so-called Blood Countess.
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we → read → Countess
The Runaways’ anthem of teen-girl rebellion “Cherry Bomb” blares.
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anthem → blare → rebellion
And Lizzie is electrified by the story.
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Lizzie → electrify → story
She feels a kinship with Báthory.
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She → feel → Báthory
Never mind that killing your cruel parents to free yourself and massacring a village’s worth of peasant girls because La Mer has yet to be invented are about as different as murder motives get.
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motives → mind → girls
The fact that each woman is acting in response to some form of sexism is, I guess, supposed to bridge that gulf.
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I → act → gulf
It takes almost half the season for the third member of the deadly trio, played by Murphyverse MVP Sarah Paulson, to show up.
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member → take → Paulson
Often framed as America’s first female serial killer, Wuornos, a Florida sex worker who killed seven johns between 1989 and 1990, is, in this telling, as inspired by Lizzie as Lizzie is by Báthory.
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Lizzie → frame → Báthory
Her presence, and her unsuccessful attempt to claim in court that she acted in self-defense against rape, allows the show to take on—and force us to watch—sexual violence.
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show → claim → violence
I’m not sure it needed to be shoehorned into the rare true-crime drama where it doesn’t have an obvious place.
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it → ’m → place
Brennan also connects Aileen’s well-documented queerness with the speculative relationship between Lizzie and Maggie.
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Brennan → connect → Lizzie
On a pilgrimage to the Borden home, now a bed and breakfast, Aileen and her girlfriend (Jessie Lee) have public sex.
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Aileen → have → sex
A fantasy sequence has the two couples dancing side-by-side in Lizzie’s sacred garden shed.
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couples → have → shed
But it’s never clear what Monster is trying to say about lesbians and murder, and this is a case where ambiguity leaves space to insert some pretty dark assumptions.
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ambiguity → ’ → assumptions
Lizzie is acquitted and buys a mansion with her inheritance, presumably because sexist men can’t conceive of a woman committing such physical murders—and because she learns to correctly perform femininity, crying and fainting at appropriate moments, during the trial.
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she → acquit → trial
Despite wrenching testimony, coarse, unfeminine Aileen is convicted and executed.
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Aileen → wrench → testimony
This might lead you to conclude that privilege and falling in line with patriarchal expectations are what it takes for a woman to get away with murder.
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woman → lead → murder
…and 18 more, not listed.
The Aporia
