If there’s a throughline that connects every aspect of this episode — which is Adeline’s more than it is Ed’s — it’s misogyny. Adeline flees her hometown because its only future for her is as a housewife and mother. The women’s circle is a punishing group of judgmental hypocrites who question Adeline’s womanhood even as they make excuses for their rapist sons. She’s half-forced, half-intrigued into indulging Ed’s blue balls like they’re a matter of life and death, going so far as to help dig up a corpse to take care of them.
After Weegee indulgently looks at Adeline’s photography, he first mocks her as a no-talent, then makes crude sexual comments about her until she flees. Even the landlady she savagely beats suggests finding a man is her main option. When she finally returns home, her mother — in a magnificent monologue by Weigert, one of our very best — viciously berates her, suggesting Adeline’s in some way defective because she threw herself down the stairs multiple times in an effort to end the pregnancy.
The legal lack of reproductive freedom, like contemporary anti-trans measures that seem a million miles removed from the friendly newsreel footage of Christine as a compelling curiosity, is the ultimate state expression of woman-hatred, turning women against one another in the process. In many ways this is the most grim thing about watching The Ed Gein Story right now. Across the country, and at the highest levels of government, men are working to return the country to the benighted state it was in when Ed and Adeline went insane because of it.
I reviewed the fifth episode of Monster for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, Monster, monster: the ed gein story, TV, TV reviews