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.