Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Netflix, Jeff Daly/FX/Everett Collection
One scene in the current season of Ryan Murphy’s Monsters anthology, focusing on Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle Menendez (Nicholas Chavez), crystallizes the show’s perspective.
The moment comes after the brothers have testified at the trial for the murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, and takes place between Vanity Fair scribe Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane) and defense attorney Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). “Either those two boys endured the most sickening abuse imaginable and their parents got exactly what was coming to them,” Dunne says, “Or you were able to coach that performance out of a lying murderous psychopath. I don’t know which one of those possibilities scares me more.“
In the series, Dunne serves as a kind of Greek chorus and town square in scenes where he discusses the case with friends. He essentially platforms talking points against the brothers. He suggests they murdered their parents for money, that they burglarized houses as teens, were obsessed with figuring out their parents’ will, that they went on a spending spree after the murders, that they were acting on the stand. But the Dunne character’s binary, psychologically obtuse way of talking about survivors of abuse, essentially arguing that minutely observing their behavior can help adjudicate the truth of their claims, isn’t limited to his perspective as one character. The series itself takes that perspective. It plays up a binary ’90s understanding — that the brothers are either very convincing psychopaths or they were abused — until the very final scenes.
The Monsters franchise is no stranger to controversy. The last season, 2022’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, raised the usual ethical questions about the exploitation of victims’ stories. But the recent critiques and backlash against The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, and its failures to adequately address sexual abuse, raise different questions. Stories that involve people who commit crimes, who are themselves survivors of abuse, are difficult to depict responsibly. A survivor of violence who lashes out in violence blurs lines between victim and perpetrator in a way that is hard to grapple with. Empathetically depicting traumatized characters while attending to the harm they inflict requires nuanced storytelling. This is especially true as conversations around mental health have questioned the sensationalizing spectacle of the sociopath and psychopath.
Previous Murphyverse projects, like 2018’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, garnered Emmys and critical acclaim.But that show’s depiction of Cunanan’s violence, focusing solely on the spectacle of his actions, is in keeping with Murphy’s true-crime oeuvre. His work has always been more of a retread than reckoning. Instead of pursuing new questions about these cases, he re-stokes ones that have been undeniably answered.
The Assasination of Gianni Versace revisited Andrew Cunanan’s 1997 murder of five men, culminating with his killing of Gianni Versace. Murphy chose Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, as source material for that show. The book is, above all, a minutely comprehensive biography of Cunanan, who grew up in San Diego, born to a Filipino American father and Italian American mother; it covers his childhood and ends with his suicide in a houseboat when the FBI discovered his hideout. It also covers the failed FBI investigation and humanises Cunanan’s victims and their families.
The show purposely de-centered Cunanan, starting with the title. It created a portrait of Versace and imagined the last moments of lesser known victims like David Madson and Jeffrey Trail. It explored law enforcement’s relationship to the queer community. That’s a valid storytelling decision. Except the spectacle of Cunanan’s actions was still center stage in every episode. And the show platformed all the ’90s tropes about Cunanan as a jealous psychopath: that he was “dying to be famous,” that he had met Gianni Versace before the murder and killed him out of envy.
In the show, Darren Criss compellingly plays Cunanan as a dissociated poser, including sensationalistic scenes of S&M sex. But where did that dissociation come from? In the book, Orth overlooks Cunanan’s experiences as a queer, Filipino American femme in the ’80s and the homophobia surrounding the understanding of his story. After the first murders, the media was rife with anti-gay sentiments that Cunanan was a revenge AIDS killer; that he was in love with Tom Cruise and wanted to kill him, too. (Contemporary with Orth’s reportorial book, queer critic Gary Indiana’s Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story did take issue with what he termed the media’s cartoon of tabloid evil.)
Cunanan was the child of an interracial marriage, with a father obsessed with success and assimilation, who clearly distorted his relationship to himself. After his death, his father told Orth John F. Kennedy Jr. — a straight white man — should play his son in a movie. And despite seemingly being comfortable as an out gay man, Cunanan was very uncomfortable assuming his identity as a Filipino American.
In Vulgar Favors, when Orth asks Cunanan’s father about the rumors that he had sexually abused Andrew he denies it, but he also denies ever abusing his wife, which did happen. It later came out that Cunanan might have called an abuse hotline for survivors of the Catholic Church priest cover-ups, under the pseudonym Andrew DeSilva. But in a show that had endless fictionalizations, the idea that Cunanan might have been a survivor of abuse as well as a perpetrator was never explored, except in a coded way in scenes with his father in the penultimate episode of the series.
It’s not that Cunanan has to be viewed with empathy alongside the men he victimized. But it’s worth considering what it means that some Murphyverse projects are more willing to extend empathy and complexity to violent actions. In contrast to The Assasination of Gianni Versace, The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was criticized for centering Dahmer and for its insensitivity to his Black victims. Similarly, in American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, the show gives Hernandez, who killed three Black men, a complex backstory, exploring the sociocultural factors that impacted his mental health. This isn’t to nitpick but to suggest there are deeper questions about the way true crime participates in cultural imaginings of empathy that could be explored even within these productions.
The Menendez murders took place in 1989, years before the media reckoned with the ways we talk about survivors of abuse, and before the mainstream public started more overtly questioning police and prosecutors. The brothers were tried twice and claimed imperfect self-defense, meaning they feared for their lives based on years of abuse. The first trial ended in a hung jury; the second ended in a conviction for murder.
After decades of both-sidesing journalism about their claims, there is now a consensus that there was a preponderance of evidence of abuse. Both Erik and Lyle talked to cousins on both sides of the family about what was happening to them as children. Neighbors testified that Jose Menendez tried to groom them into accepting child-sex-abuse videos as home entertainment; Kitty Menendez’s therapist said that she was holding back ”sick” family secrets. This evidence was ignored at the time, or sifted through by pre–Me Too mainstream media, including journalists like Dominick Dunne, who platformed the prosecutors’ suggestions that they were lying sociopaths.
The show’s subtitle is The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, except it completely sidelines this evidence again. Murphy argued in a recent interview that “you have to get [into] everybody’s perspective so that the audience can then form their own.” But the series never tells the story from their perspective at all. The precariousness of evidence about the childhood abuse is both-sided, instead of contextualized. The show makes all kinds of decisions, from how it orders information, to what information is a snippet of expository dialogue versus a scene, to create doubts.
Outside of their own testimony or snippets of dialogue, there is no dramatization of moments where they talked about the abuse as children. Instead, there is a dramatic scene of their confession of the murder to their therapist Jerome Oziel (Dallas Roberts). Why start there? Well, police and prosecutors highlighted that taped confession to feed doubts about the brothers, questioning why they wouldn’t tell their own therapist about the abuse even as they confessed to murder. Oziel, though, was hired by Jose Menendez, so it’s understandable why they might be reluctant to tell him anything, for fear he would report back to their father.
In contrast, in one much later, long scene, Erik finally talks about the sexual abuse to his attorney Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). She seems to believe him. But the show’s structure leaves the impression that the abuse mostly came up when they were facing criminal charges. And every claim they make is counteracted by endless scenes and dialogue: for instance that they came up with the abuse “theory” after reading books about abuse, that Lyle convinced Erik to lie. The defense attorneys, Jill Lansing and Leslie Abramson, treat the abuse allegations as pure courtroom strategy. The prosecution’s machinations and political motivations — getting a conviction after major losses like the O.J. Simpson case — and the judge’s decision to leave out evidence of abuse in the second trial are not explored.
To be fair, the show, more so than Assassination, does sometimes attempt to hint at intergenerational abuse endured by Jose Menendez. But it’s with ham-fisted scenes that are completely fabricated, and come at the expense of understanding the brothers’ actual traumatized paranoia.
The backlash to Monsters versus the critical acclaim of Assassination speaks, in part, to a growing sympathy and consensus that has emerged around the Menendez brothers, in spite of Murphy’s efforts. It also speaks to the wider de-stigmatization of the idea of the sociopath or psychopath, which the Murphy oeuvre seem to depend on. Since the show, a more accurate and succinct portrait of Cunanan emerged, for instance, in the Bad Gays history podcast.
Some critics have taken a step back to point out the imprecise nature of terms like sociopath and psychopath, and the complicity of forensic sciences — and notions like “serial killer” — with the prison-industrial complex. They view the classifications less as a scapegoating myth about inherent evil that true crime has often helped perpetuate and more as a cultural construction.
In contrast, Ryan Murphy’s shows’ occasionally stylish flair and striking palettes are in service of retro ideologies that take us back to the ’90s — not to question the era’s dated mores but to revive them.
Related
Did Ryan Murphy’s Monsters Need to Be So Sexy?The Problem With Dahmer
