True crime has an obligation to justify itself. With “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” Netflix not only fails to meet that requirement, but misses the mark so spectacularly that it ranks among Ryan Murphy’s most tasteless projects. That’s saying something against Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan’s “Dahmer,” another installment in the “Monster” anthology littered with tone-deaf creative decisions.
Controversy is a troubling if time-honored tradition for Murphy, one that dates back to the school shooting arc in his Fox teen musical “Glee.” Speaking on stage at the show’s New York premiere, Murphy and Brennan said the well-known 1989 case was worth reexamination.
“This season is about abuse,” Murphy said. “Who is believed, who’s not believed.”
Brennan added, “We finally have a vernacular to think about and discuss sex abuse and mental health that did not exist at the time.”
It’s true that our understanding of criminal psychology as it relates to troubled family dynamics has improved in the last 35 years. And when Netflix dips into this case again in a few weeks with director Alejandro Hartmann’s “The Menendez Brothers” documentary, that may be a conversation worth having. But “Monsters” undermines its credibility with caricatures as opposed to characters.
Tackling child molestation and domestic violence through a relevant true-crime case is one thing; pursuing that goal with a style so campy that the series tips into douchebag cinema is another. This is the only show with the audacity to depict an outrageous prison escape fantasy — dressing up two murderers with enough prosthetics to look like they’re in a Scandinavian “White Chicks” — before having those same men describe the taste of their father’s semen from when they were raped as children.
“Monsters” fearlessly explores the tough conversations Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle (Nicholas Chavez) Menendez had with their lawyers about why they say they gunned down their parents on a random Sunday night. During the trial scenes, the show further details the years of systemic sexual abuse and violence the brothers alleged from their father Jose (Javier Bardem) and sometimes their mother Kitty (Chloë Sevigny).
If this were a sympathetic exercise instead of a salacious one, a more algebraic reconsideration could use the modern vocabulary and cultural nuance Brennan said the Menendezs didn’t have at the time. Instead “Monsters” juxtaposes those disturbing claims with scenes that appear to be ripped from Murphy’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”
Granted, Beverly Hills is an iconically capitalist environment and the possibility that money motivated the murders is relevant, but “Monsters” mocks Erik, Lyle, Jose, and Kitty with a relentlessness that suggests it was the reason to exhume the case.
Fair enough if you believe all four of them are deplorable — just two child abusers and the killers they made — but that’s not what Murphy and Brennan have said. Whoever you decide to blame, something horrible happened before the murders and “Monsters” has little sympathy for the real people involved, living or dead. Rather, it finds unethical entertainment value in needlessly illustrating their pain.
The story revels in contrasting the Menendezes’ seemingly idyllic life (first as a nuclear family, then as two bachelor brothers out on the town) with the most shocking and embarrassing parts of their reality. The series isn’t interested in offering a sobering reflection on abuse so much as villainizing and ridiculing a tragedy involving extreme gun violence and pedophilia.
Whether you’re seeing Jose get his head blown to pieces with a shotgun or watching Kitty’s jaw muscles twitch while she’s enjoying an expensive facelift, “Monsters” is entirely comfortable using real murder victims like horror movie meat sacks. Assuming what Jose and Kitty’s sons said about them was true — and further, imagining a world in which they were convicted for those crimes and sentenced to death — Netflix would still have no business dramatizing a lethal injection.
Conversely, the so-called boys go through an up-and-down arc that indicates Murphy and Brennan never intended to be sensitive with their stories. Lyle gets the worst of it, appearing as an arrogant bronze Adonis destined to eventually scramble around a prison shower floor snatching for his wig. Erik seems almost as much of a joke when he’s posing for his model portfolio and hissing at his attorney, “You made us wear pastels.”
Plenty of people don’t watch TV series all the way through; that’s especially true when it comes to the diminishing returns characteristic of a Murphy show. But even if you do get through all nine parts of “Monsters,” this spin on the Menendez family story is more demented than overdue. Again, you don’t have to have sympathy for any of these people — but Murphy and Brennan cut against their own thesis by creating material that could encourage disbelief and callousness in other cases. There’s now a cultural association between these real child abuse allegations and murders with needless and muddled schlock.
At the premiere, Murphy maintained that “Monsters” was factually accurate; that’s generally true. He further emphasized that monsters are made and not born, and that the series aimed to chart that evolution in a thoughtful way. The co-creator has yet to explain how exploring the theory that Erik and Lyle were in an incestuous relationship themselves forwards that effort — but to expect any better from this vicious piece of onscreen cruelty, mostly true but rarely justified, is rich.
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