Netflix’s third iteration of the Monster biographical crime drama series presents The Ed Gein Story, and it is possibly the best the show has ever been. Delving deep into the gruesome details of Ed’s crimes and the various criminal urges that turned him into the Butcher of Plainfield, the series does a brilliant job combining the real and the fictional. Along with featuring the murder that finally got Ed Gein caught and the reasons behind it, The Ed Gein Story episode 4 also takes us deeper into the psyche of Ed’s close friend and romantic interest, Adeline Watkins.
Spoiler Alert
What is Adeline’s unexpected reaction to the horrific discovery?
The Ed Gein Story episode 4 begins with Adeline Watkins walking into the bedroom on the upper floor of the Gein house, where she had entered just once before, that too with Ed accompanying her. On that previous visit, Ed’s mother, Augusta, who was supposed to be living in the bedroom, had acted very coldly with Adeline, never uttering a word to her or even turning her chair to meet her. While Adeline had found this to be very odd behavior, she had no idea that the woman was actually long dead, and some other corpse dressed to represent her had been seated on the rocking chair all this time. Therefore, at present, Adeline does not want to let go of the chance to see what is really up with the woman, and she enters the room and turns the rocking chair to make a horrific discovery. The young woman finds exactly what she had been very close to stumbling across during each of her visits to the house—the figure in the bedroom Ed claimed to be his mother was actually a decomposing dead body.
At this same time, Ed Gein is busy embalming and covering the dead body of his latest victim, the babysitter, Evelyn Hartley. As Adeline finds the dead body in the room and gives out a very natural shriek out of shock and fright, Ed hears her from the shed and runs out to explain his actions to her. To Ed, there is not much wrong with his house and his actions, and he is sure that he will be able to clarify all of Adeline’s doubts very soon. After all, he is very much interested in marrying the young woman and spending the rest of his life with her, although he does not technically know how to balance his liking for Adeline and his mother’s imaginary (schizophrenic) warnings against getting intimate with a woman. Nonetheless, Ed follows Adeline to her house, which is close to his own, still hoping to settle all their differences and convince her to marry him.
What follows is extremely unnatural, though, as Adeline reacts in a very unexpected manner, as opposed to keeping away from Ed, which would have been the more normal thing to do. Instead, Adeline sort of lures Ed into her bedroom by putting her undergarments on display and then confronts the man, with a real sense of interest in getting to know him better. She admits that she always knew Ed was stealing her undergarments from her room but had never stopped him because she found it to be a passionate display of affection. Now, Adeline opens herself up to Ed in a new manner, as she admits that she has a keen interest in macabre and gory visuals too and how she is unperturbed at seeing images of dead bodies or human remains. Photographs of battered dead bodies taken by Weegee did not bother her at all, and neither did seeing a decomposing body in Ed’s house, other than the initial shock. Rather, she asks for details about how Ed had acquired the body and even how it felt when he touched the skin of the corpse for the first time. It is evident from this conversation that Adeline gradually finds an inlet into her repressed desires, which are usually considered beastly and unnatural, through Ed Gein. This brings the two lovers even closer and also gives Ed a real sense of validation, which is immediately on display as he returns to Evelyn Hartley’s corpse and possibly defiles it, with a sense of joy evident on his face.
What brings Ed and Bernice close to each other?
The Ed Gein Story episode 4 also introduces Bernice Worden for the first time, as the unhappy woman struggles with her emotional dissatisfaction on a regular basis, driven by a sense of extreme loneliness in life. Bernice lives with her son and feels a massive gap in her life because of the absence of a lover, following the death of her husband, Leon, and her separation from her lover, Bert. As she reveals eventually, Bernice was already quite emotionally unstable and longing for a romantic partner when she first met Bert and fell in love with him. The regular customer at her grocery store soon expressed his love for her as well, and just to move in with her, he divorced his wife, who took her own life after being unable to live with this heartbreak.
As a result, the townsfolk started blaming Bert and Bernice for the death of the devout Christian woman, and they were slandered for what was essentially their affair. This was enough to make Bert leave Bernice, leaving her heartbroken as well and also dependent on pills to keep her emotions in control. Even at present, Bernice remains just as yearning for a romantic partner as ever, which is why she is immediately hooked on Ed Gein when he simply checks in on her health whenever he visits the store. While Ed visits to buy exorbitant amounts of lime to help speed up the decomposition of the dead bodies at his house, Bernice is impressed when he asks if she is doing alright and then even asks to take her to lunch. Both of these gestures are rare in Bernice’s life, and when she catches Ed repeatedly staring down her blouse, she cannot help but feel a sense of excitement in the otherwise creepy action.
Bernice and Ed are both extremely lonely individuals, who would jump to enjoy the company of anyone willing to spend the time with them, and the woman does not mind any of Ed’s strange requests with regard to letting him wear her undergarments. They make love passionately, and Bernice even starts to dream of a life together, as she expresses a desire to marry Ed and make him her own. Despite admitting that he probably loves someone else (suggesting either Adeline or maybe one of the corpses at his house), Ed also agrees to marry Bernice, and the two loners finally seem to have found their soulmates. After all, Adeline had been turning down Ed’s requests to marry him, and he had been clearly growing a strong urge to be with a woman, so he agrees to Bernice’s plan.
Why does Ed kill Bernice Worden?
But it all goes terribly wrong when Ed’s schizophrenia strikes again, making him have another confrontation with his dead mother, Augusta, who is initially very calm and seemingly accepting of Ed’s decision to marry Bernice. But just as he is about to leave, the woman lashes out at her son for laying with a woman of loose morals, who had gotten intimate with just about everyone in town, and then deciding to marry a woman, which is a terrible sin that he had promised to never do. Augusta obviously does not exist, and in reality, this confrontation is Ed’s own tormented psyche, which has developed based on what he had been taught by his mother, and also his own experience for all these years, trying to pull him back from the decision. He has only known to hate and fear women, to stay away from them, and to abide by the teachings of his mother at every step. Yet, Ed feels the strong and natural urge to be with a lover, in his case a woman, and so he is caught up in the dilemmas of his own twisted mind.
Ed agrees to Bernice’s marriage proposal because of the yearning for love, but he is also afflicted by a strange belief that any woman who would agree to be with him is also immoral and sinful and should therefore be punished. Thus, on the very next visit to the grocery store, after his imaginary confrontation with his mother, Ed tells off Bernice for corrupting his mind and body and for luring him into sleeping with her. He even states that his mother has said that Bernice carries venereal diseases, which she has now spread to his body, and therefore rejects her company. Since these accusations are baseless and hurtful, Bernice Worden pulls off the courageous move of breaking up with Ed and asking him to leave the store.
However, Ed has already decided to punish her by now, while also clearly still being attracted to her physically, and so he shoots her in the head and drags her corpse back to his house. Very interestingly, he sees her blood to be bright green in color, instead of red, similar to the color of the tea earlier in the episode, which he saw to be green as well. This shift in color is seemingly a marker of Ed’s growing schizophrenia, making him believe the imaginary (in this case, the color green) to be real and part of his surroundings.
Why does Adeline choose to be a part of Ed’s plans?
Ed soon brings Adeline back to his house, this time to reveal his real acts in front of her and to make her an even more core part of his life. By now, he has already strung up Bernice’s body from the rafter in his shed and gutted her just like the carcass of an animal, which he intends to show to Adeline. Surprisingly, Adeline also agrees to be a part of whatever twisted reality that Ed wants to introduce her to, as she is clearly driven by an immense intrigue towards the macabre. As becomes evident in the later episodes, Adeline Watkins even wants to make a career out of her love for the grisly and the grotesque, and she applies to become Weegee’s assistant. Beneath all her unnatural yearnings, Adeline also wants to leave the small town and make it to the big city, move to New York, and base her life there by working as the photographer’s assistant.
It is at this stage that Adeline’s cunning and manipulative nature somewhat becomes visible, as she technically starts using Ed’s weirdness to her own benefit, both to get pleasure through his actions and also to set up a possible career for herself. When Ed shows her Bernice’s strung-up body in his shed and then the rest of the severed body parts in his house, Adeline does not feel disturbed or moved but starts taking photographs, all of which she plans on using as part of her job application later. She totally embraces Ed’s unnatural and criminal behavior and seeks thrills through simply witnessing his actions.
How does an aspiring filmmaker find inspiration in Ed’s story?
The Ed Gein Story episode 4 also takes us into the future, to Texas in 1959, where the story of the Butcher of Plainfield simply rocks the psyche of a young boy when his uncle tells him the tale. This young man, Tobe Hooper, grows up with this story in his mind, as he is fascinated by how Ed Gein had skinned his victims to make masks and furniture out of them. On a seemingly usual visit to a convenience store, Tobe suddenly thinks of how Ed must have used a mechanical chainsaw to cut through the bodies of his victims and how convenient it would be to use such a weapon on the people in the long queue in front of him. Keeping the unhinged second thought in control, Tobe writes a screenplay based on these ideas and presents it to a few of his friends, and then sets out in search of producers.
The villainous Ed becomes a fictional character, Leatherface, in his story, who wears multiple human faces on his head as masks and simply goes around killing people with his chainsaw. In one of the conversations with his friends and producers, Tobe Hooper expresses his displeasure at how Ed Gein’s story had been portrayed in cinema so far, particularly by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, which lacked violence and gore, according to him. Thus, when he finally gets to make his own film, titled The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe makes it overly violent and gruesome, leaving the audiences shocked but also satisfied. Almost as a final stamp of approval, Monster: The Ed Gein Story shows Ed Gein flail around his chainsaw in a manner similar to Leatherface as he kills the two hunters who had lost their way in the forest and stumbled upon his shed.
