Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story review – it’s like Ryan Murphy’s new series was written by adolescent boys
The latest Monster instalment, about the 1892 Borden axe murders, is packed with periods and beheadings, and feels like it was made up as they went along
Okaaay – here’s what I think must have happened. Some time in the past year or two, Ryan Murphy discovered that women menstruate. Incredulous but enthralled, he rushed off to share the news with his soon equally incredulous and enthralled little friends. After confirming the basics they all looked at each other for a moment in silence as they contemplated this crazy, secret habit of the wimminz. And then Ryan said: “You guys? We have got to make a show about this!” The others nodded in fervent agreement and off they all ran.
The result is the utterly bonkers, blood-soaked, borderline-fetishistic fever dream that is The Lizzie Borden Story – the latest entry in Murphy’s popular anthology series Monster. This one is written by Ian Brennan and directed in the main by Max Winkler, the pairing responsible for the series’ previous offering, last year’s lamentable The Ed Gein Story. As, I presume, a gesture to the sex of this one’s subject, there is a female director for two of the Lizzie Borden episodes – Sarah Adina Smith – but it doesn’t really dent the vibe. Think: the gleeful disgust of a roomful of adolescent boys being taught about the female reproductive system in PSHE. It is now an eight-hour miniseries starring Rebecca Hall. We live in strange times.
So, then, to late 18th-century Massachusetts where the world’s most famous axe murder is, as we open, taking place in an affluent but otherwise unremarkable household in Fall River. Lizzie (Ella Beatty) gives her stepmother Abby (Hall) then father Andrew (Charlie Hunnam, who previously played the eponymous Ed Gein) multiple whacks and we then rewind to four months earlier to find out why.
Now, in real life, the why (even if you agree on the who, and there are those who point the finger at other Borden relatives nearby) was endlessly disputed. Some think she was angry about various property disposals Andrew had made to family members that she deemed unfair. Others think she had long-harboured resentment towards the victims for usurping and betraying her late mother (Andrew remarried quickly, and Lizzie and her sister Emma always referred to Abby as “Mrs Borden”, not “Mother”). Later theories include possible abuse in the family or a relationship with a suitor Andrew didn’t like and so on, but Messrs Brennan and Winkler have a simpler take: women be crazy!
Especially women who menstruate! Most of the first episode centres on Lizzie’s heavy periods. I actually looked at the credits to see if her womb got separate billing. First Lizzie loses a suitor by clutching at her cramping parts, then enrages Abby by bleeding all over her precious mulberry silk fainting couch. A new maid, Bridget (Vicky Krieps), is hired, whose duties include dealing with Lizzie’s bloody problems. “We keep her on a bed of wooden planks and muslin sheets she’s free to befoul with her putrid clots,” says Abby, presumably while Hall is mentally firing her agent. Bridget tells Lizzie that blood is good (“It means no man’s seed has taken hold”), hands her a hand-cranked vibrator she picked up in Amsterdam for the relief of cramping and reads her stories about multiple murderer the Countess of Báthory who used to bathe in the blood of her servant girls to preserve her youth. The vibrator is later upgraded to a Chattanooga medical massager when Bridget diagnoses an unbroken hymen as part of Lizzie’s menstrual torments. Which suggests that either Brennan wasn’t listening very attentively in PSHE class or that he saw the phrase “Chattanooga medical massager” somewhere and worked backward from there.
Unlike the team behind The Lizzie Borden Story, I have not made any of the above up, and it only gets madder from there. Bridget soon sets up a sex-for-lesbianism-in-the-miniseries relationship with Lizzie and a sex-for-money-for-keeping-the-many-axes-in-your-axe-cupboard-in-good-nick relationship with Andrew (a coffin-maker, who uses them to trim down corpses to a standard casket size, in case you were wondering). An avenue of cherry trees leading to a dovecote is mined for all the symbolism it’s worth, and soon the episodes are wall-to-wall decapitations (from birds to Báthory maidens, no one is safe), good sex (mostly between lesbians in the dovecote), bad sex (“the same ballbag slapping against you forever”), poisoned dinners, neighbours chatting genteelly over tea about “bitchcocks and pearly showers”, abortifacients, cameos from Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos and much, much more. As I believe the Chattanooga medical massager ads used to say: I don’t know quite how they fit it all in.
Bonkers, as I say. Stylish – it has an almost Wes Anderson feel at times – and it’s got brio, energy and is absolutely full of great performances, especially from Hall in one of those roles that an actor shouldn’t have touched with a bargepole, despite being the only one who could possibly have carried it off. But the latest Monster has nothing to say about Borden, the times that shaped her or the prejudices most think helped secure a not guilty verdict in the end – all of which remain interesting and pertinent to the modern era, and which might have made it an illuminating companion piece to Murphy’s flagship show The People v OJ Simpson. It’s a bunch of boys on a dare who should have been called back after class and made to get down to some real work.
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