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.

I reviewed the finale of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

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 reviewed the penultimate episode of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

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.

I reviewed episode six of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

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. 

I reviewed episode four of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

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.

I reviewed episode three of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

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.

I reviewed the second episode of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Decider.

“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.

I’m covering the new season of Monster, The Lizzie Borden Story, for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.