Why put two such similar scenes, slinging around such unfamiliar names, back to back? In part I think it’s meant to reinforce what’s emerging as one of the season’s central conceits: Twin Peaks is everywhere and everyone, not just one little town and the weird people in it. There are weird people there we haven’t met and never will. There are weird people in Deer Meadow, in Buckhorn, in Las Vegas, in New York, in Rio de Janeiro. There were weird people in that rich people neighborhood where James Hurley had his film noir storyline back in Season 2!
To whatever extent the original run of Twin Peaks was intended to feel like a peaceful idyll in a town time forgot — obviously it was much more complicated and sinister than that, but that was there — that’s gone now. Everywhere you look, characters on this show are constantly scrambling to stay one step ahead of the collection agency, the oncologist, the friend or family member who gets loose with his fists when he drinks. Poverty, disease, mental illness, and the threat of intimate violence and gun violence are everywhere.
In working on this review, I mentioned that last bit to my wife. “Well, they are,” she said simply.
Now this is a nice simple Twin Peaks episode. Just your basic, meat-and-potatoes storytelling about interdimensional vortices, murderous spectral woodsmen, mystery diseases, ancient symbols, and prophetic dreams about cherry pie. Easy peasy lemon squeezey!
In all seriousness, this is in many ways the most straightforward episode of Twin Peaks Season 3 to date. Sequences are largely self-contained rather than cross-cut, non-narrative surrealism and dream logic are kept to a minimum, and the continued sense that we’re getting somewhere across multiple storylines provides a natural gravitational pull, sucking us into the story — just like an interdimensional vortex.
Using women like Aileen, and women turned into modern myths like Lizzie, to make this point is a deliberate act of provocation. That’s the Monster project. The idea is that people who have done terrible things are still people, and we can make art that sympathizes with them, that attempts understand what made them what they are, without either artist or audience exploiting or condoning those terrible things. For eight episodes at a time, we can attend their carnival, and take away what lessons we can.
Lizzie enjoys her acquittal, of course. She thanks the jurors individually per Nance’s advice, then stands before the unfamiliar flashbulbs of the press and announces her intention to create an animal sanctuary. (Oh god, Lizzie Borden is going Carole Baskin.) She marches out of the courtroom and travels in her carriage to the triumphant strains of the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” familiar as the basis for the Verve’s hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” She’s just vibing joyfully…but she’s doing it without Bridget, who disappears for the entire trial and is only glimpsed in hallucinations and wishful thinking.
But then I think about the literal acting lessons Lizzie received to win a not guilty verdict. I think about the old-school cinematic irises that have transitioned us in and out of different scenes. I think of that curtain opening at the start of the show, revealing a toy piano played by unseen hands. Is The Lizzie Borden Story hallucinations and wishful thinking all the way down?
I cried during this episode of Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. More than once. First I cried when Aileen Wuornos described her childhood of brutal physical and sexual abuse to her hallucinated idol, Lizzie Borden. Then I cried when Bridget and Lizzie shared one last dance to “Smalltown Boy,” Bronski Beat’s mournful dance classic about an ostracized young gay man leaving home, while Aileen Wuornos and her girlfriend Shelby somehow join in.
I found this material deeply affecting. It made me sad to think about how some people have to feel the way these people were made to feel. It made me think how beautiful any moment of escape can be, whether through music or sex. (Murder is just the Monster-verse’s misguided attempt to find that kind of transcendence through violence.) I thought these scenes were beautiful. They moved me to tears.
I’m saying all this up front just so you know if you’re in the right place or not. If you find this kind of true-crime material distasteful, if you find Ryan Murphy (who does not appear to have been particularly involved in this season, certainly not as a writer) distasteful, if these factors are enough to preclude you from enjoying the show, I understand. I also disagree, and that’s the perspective from which I’m writing. Monster is a surreal exploration of life as an outsider as reflected in the lives of famous killers, their victims, and the legends surrounding them all; it moves me to tears, and to me, that’s worth both examining and celebrating.
An episode this focused on Andrew Borden, one of Lizzie’s hugely unsympathetic victims, invites some wider musings about the whole Monster project. I’ve wondered why it bothers people so much, beyond understandable squeamishness about the subject matter and distaste for Ryan Murphy. I think it comes down to the way Brennan is using both killers and victims as stand-ins for society’s misfits and outcasts, the people who can’t hack it, the abused who become abusers. The fact that all of Brennan’s killers could be considered in some way queer is just one example of how the show complicates our sympathies.
To me, the idea is fairly straightforward. People are people, and our experiences are often quite similar at root no matter how different we seem on the surface. Things that turn some people into monsters have the opposite effect on others; somewhere in between are the rest of us, stumbling along, struggling through the blows life has dealt us. Monster posits that all these lives are worth examining, even if the killers get top billing, because in their lives we see glimpses of our own.
Special guest serial killers. Harrowing sexual violence depicted on camera. Lurid savagery against innocents out of European art films like The Devils or Saló. A woman’s declaration of independence turning into a monstrous display of emotional abuse. And, of course, an axe murder. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story has grabbed ahold of the hatchet, and it’s taking the biggest swings it can.
This, then, is the world as Lizzie knows it. The women are unfeeling harridans who take out their own feelings of inadequacy and powerless on women further down the ladder. The men are uncaring brutes who bond over weapons but won’t dip into their generational wealth to help each other out. All Lizzie wants to do is expand the feeling of freedom and beauty she feels in the cherry blossoms and the dovecote to the world beyond, however many whacks it takes.
Let’s talk about vomit. Lots of vomit. Gushes of it, gouts of it, firehose torrents of blood, bile, and bad oysters, firing from every available orifice in Rebecca Hall’s and Charlie Hunnam’s bodies. Hurling, heaving, gurgling, spraying, splattering, oozing all over the tablecloth and the floor, forcing poor Lizzie Borden to nimbly dodge the puddles as she belatedly leaves this chamber of bodily-fluid horrors to seek help.
But scatology can serve a satirical purpose. Just moments before they began exploding out of both ends, Edward and Abby Borden were chuckling gleefully about Mrs. Borden’s slaughter of Lizzie’s beloved doves earlier that day. Her mother had the temerity to blame Lizzie for forcing her hand; her father screamed at her to shut the fuck up about her stupid birds and leave him the fuck alone.
Under their wealth and their obsession with surface-level propriety, their behavior is repulsive. Should their physical presence be any different?
The truly spectacular sight of the Bordens geysering forth like a Monty Python sketch depicts the Bordens as simultaneously disgusting and pitiable, almost infantile. Whereas Lizzie’s severe menstrual bleeding represents her imprisonment by her gender, Abby and Edward’s vomit and diarrhea is just…them. It’s what they are. It’s who they are. If you are what you eat, it stands to reason you are also what you excrete.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This newspaperman’s maxim from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance might well be the mission statement for Netflix‘s Monster, Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s anthology show about America’s most infamous murderers. Its stories of Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, Ed Gein, and now Lizzie Borden use the facts of these cases as a skeleton, sure. But as the umbrella title indicates, the show is more concerned with the creation of monsters — both how these figures came to see themselves as monstrous and commit monstrous acts, and how they filled the role of monster in popular culture, reflecting the interests and prejudices of the culture that gave birth to them.
The facts are important. The legend is the story. Why else open the show with an old-fashioned iris out on a stage curtain, which parts to reveal a toy piano playing the “Lizzie Borden took an axe” schoolyard rhyme all on its own? The story of Lizzie Borden you are about to see is just that: a story about both a person and the idea of that person, one that calls attention to the artifice of its own construction. It’s like Velvet Goldmine for murderesses.
Twin Peaks Season 3 spreads the heartbreak of Laura’s loss all across the country, in one form or another. But at the end of the main action of the episode, the Log Lady calls Deputy Sheriff Hawk again. Hinting that the secrets of “the dream of time and space … that which is and is not” will soon come out, she speaks of a different force.
“The Truman brothers are true men,” she tells Hawk. “They are your brothers. And the others, the good ones who have been with you. Now the circle is almost complete.” She also insists “Laura is the one” in the same episode where Gordon Cole sees her materialize in front of him. That can’t be a coincidence. Heartbreak is everywhere, but there are still people out there trying to mend what was broken, hanging on to hope as the fabric of reality frays.
That’s right! For the first time in years, I’ll be attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland! I’ll be at table H11, where I’ll be helping Julia Gfrörer sell copies of her new one The Gleaners: Chapter Two, as well as a bunch of our collaborations in one form or another. I’ll also be selling copies of my new/old collaboration with Josiah Leighton, A Real Gentle Knife, brought back to life by Josiah for the show — he’s at table G14B. Stop by and say hello!
What’s the funniest line from the season finale — and it’s clearly a season finale, not a series finale, at least not if Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis get what they want — of FX’s The Shards?
Is it Liz Schaffer wailing “There’s a serial killer targeting the glamorous!”
Is it Robert Mallory patronizingly telling Bret, “You’re struggling with your sexuality, and from what I’ve read — Death in Venice, among other things — that’s some really heavy shit.”
Is it Terry Schaffer dismissing his ambitious assistant Steven Reinhardt by saying, “You look like a prostitute businesswoman on a spaceship.”
Or is it Thom Wright, on his knees in the middle of Hamburger Hamlet following a disastrous attempt to propose to his (ex-)girlfriend Susan, watching her get dragged away by her friend Debbie, plaintively calling after them: “Think about it?”
Of course, if your sense of humor leans in another direction, you can pick just about any bit of Bret Easton Ellis, Boy Detective’s molasses-thick hard-boiled narration: “One of the most intimate ways to kill someone is to push them from a great height.” “That fateful night, before the most terrifying event of her life occurred, Susan went to bed feeling what she hadn’t felt for months: peace.”
Or my personal favorite, the troll to end all trolls: Capping off the entire season with a shot of the entire cast in a police station interrogation room, with the cops announcing someone in that room is a killer, accompanied by Bret saying “And that’s when things really got crazy.” These crazy sons of bitches really went and did the This is just the beginning thing at the end of the season. You have to admire the chutzpah!
Disease remains a constant presence in this season of Twin Peaks. So do money troubles: The Detectives Fusco commiserate over how expensive it is to get a taillight fixed, even taking the time to check out the replacement before arresting Ike the Spike. Andy and Lucy’s sweet “Gift of the Magi” routine is about a chair that costs under $200 with shipping. But people can’t afford to be loose with their money. Just look at the Hornes: Sylvia is shouting for a home aide when Johnny has his accident. Home aides are not cheap, even for the Hornes. Years later, The Pitt would earn well-deserved praise for its depiction of the ugly, crash-strewn intersection of money, health, and happiness in America. Mark Frost and David Lynch knew it too.
Well, that was a slapper of an episode, wasn’t it? With only one episode remaining now, FX’sThe Shards has established some pretty serious candidates for the secret identity of the serial killer called the Trawler, while also digging deep into the way the characters’ extravagant wealth and privilege is a sort of rot that eats away at family, friendship, business, and romance with equal voraciousness. And it remains fun as hell to watch.
Under any other circumstances heaping superlatives on an episode of television like I’m about to do would be overdoing it. With “Part 8,” I don’t know if I’ll even hit the floor of where those superlatives should be. This is a masterpiece, one of one, unparalleled on television before or since. David Lynch and Mark Frost constructed a cathedral for Hell.
Despite the episode’s cruelty — some of it comedic, like the sight of the homecoming queen in cuffs; some of it horrific, like Matt’s awful fate — there are some surprising displays of tenderness. Susan really seems to treasure the opportunity to turn the now drab and dour Rhonda into someone who commands attention once again. (“You’re gonna be able to have sex with anyone you want!” Debbie enthuses when she sees the results of the makeover. “Anyone in the band, at least!”)
Bret, meanwhile, rigs the election so that Debbie has a decent showing, knowing how much the appreciation of others means to her now that her reputation as “a frivolous and spiteful clown” has seemingly been cemented. He doesn’t fix it so she wins, just so she won’t be upset. It’s a decent thing to do, and it shows that despite all his delusions of grandeur, Bret’s heart is in the right place. I just hope his brain catches up.
“Though she returned to school, Rhonda did not come back,” Bret Easton Ellis gravely intones near the start of this episode of FX’s The Shards. “What she felt, she felt alone. The world was lost to her, and her to it.
“I deeply related to this feeling,” he concludes.
I’m sorry, but this show is a goddamn scream. You can feel however you want about Bret Easton Ellis the real person, but Bret Easton Ellis the co-creator of this show has helped craft “Bret Easton Ellis,” a hilariously pretentious and self-serious know-it-all whose good intentions regarding the murder and kidnapping victims now dotting Los Angeles’s tonier districts don’t keep him from planting his head firmly up his own ass.
In addition to the ominous soundscapes of Dean Hurley and the familiar synth-score of Angelo Badalamenti, even David Lynch’s beloved mid-century pop music gets in on the act. Booker T. & the M.G.’s immortally cool rock instrumental “Green Onions” plays almost in its entirety over an unbroken shot of a worker sweeping up the floor at the Roadhouse; it’s slow cinema at its most entertainingly dull, until Jean-Michel Renault reveals that his family, which has been running the place for nearly 60 years, is still trafficking teenage girls there.
Santo & Johnny’s equally iconic instrumental “Sleep Walk” plays over a scene at the Double R, where Shelly and Heidi serve customers as Norma does the bills. Suddenly the door bursts open, and a man (Riley Lynch) yells “Has anybody seen Billy?” No one has. The frantic man leaves, and the song plays on. Ghostbusters did this as a gag at Tavern on the Green; Stephen King did it as a primary characteristic of the town of Derry and its people in It. As Laura put it, “They’ve never listened to my cries.” We sleepwalk past others’ unhappiness to preserve our own, for however much longer we can.
