The most popular method of engagement nowadays, when it comes to creating any kind of “content,” is ragebait. Tweets, Instagram posts, TikTok edits, and all other forms of stuff on social media use this faux sense of ignorance to get people to engage with the original poster. And since the ones posting such nonsense have no intention to educate themselves, they continue to act ignorant in order to enrage the people conversing with them. Once the hate becomes overwhelming, they just say something like, “Society’s anger issues are the main problem,” and then just switch over to another topic. The worst part is that, despite all that criticism, since such posts can be monetized, ragebaiters don’t really have any incentive to stop partaking in such activities. This same theory can be applied to politicians, stand-up comedians, directors, and showrunners. They all know that they have the power and privilege to do good in this world, but since that’ll improve the situation and take away their favorite source of entertainment, they spread misinformation with malicious intent, and watch everybody get angry about it. With that in mind, allow me to talk about Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s The Ed Gein Story, with the episodes being directed by Brennan and Max Winkler, is the third installment in the Monster series. It’s about Ed Gein. It covers everything from his first murder to his death by cancer. Everything that has been put in between those 2 points ranges between falsified misinformation and utter derangement. And like I mentioned before, this isn’t by accident; it’s by design. Murphy and his team have done this with Dahmer and the Menendez brothers too. Neither do I know nor do I care if Gein is bigger than Dahmer and the Menendezes, but it’s apparent from the get-go that Murphy and his team have gone the extra mile to ragebait everyone except perverts. I am not kidding; several times across the 8 exhaustingly long and boring episodes, Murphy and his writers keep stating, through their characters (who are fictionalized versions of real people), that this show is merely a symptom of the rot in the USA. They are doing what’s in vogue, which is true crime. It’s like they would have done something else if the country wasn’t obsessed with true crime horror stories. But since the people aren’t looking away from a mangled mass of bodies, that obviously means that there’s demand for stories that involve mangled masses of bodies. It makes total sense.
What does that achieve, though? Is the avalanche of necrophilia, Oedipus complex, severed limbs, trussed-up human carcasses, and more supposed to sensitize us? Is it supposed to provoke us to do something about it? Are we supposed to hail The Ed Gein Story or the other entries in the Monster franchise for being brave enough to hold up a mirror to society? Well, I’d hate to break it to Murphy and his crew, but neither did the show disturb me nor did it seem like an apt representation of the state of society. By the way, I’m not saying that I’ve become desensitized to violence or that I’m not afraid of serial killers. What I’m saying is that thinking you are being provocative and brave by making biopics about serial killers shows just how out of touch you are. The world has seen dead bodies of Palestinian babies on their FYP. We’ve seen the charred remains of Ukrainian people on our television. Inhumane instances of casteism and racism appear in our newspapers all the time. Did Ed Gein or Jeffrey Dahmer inspire such actions, or is it the work of our so-called international leaders? The answer to that is pretty simple, but folks like Murphy don’t have the guts to talk about it. They’ll bring up the Nazis, as if that’s the pinnacle of evil, and then call it a day. You want to be provocative and relevant? Try and talk about the serial killers who are massacring hundreds on a daily basis as you read this sentence. If you don’t have the courage to do so, continue to convince yourself that you are a brave little boy by making the umpteenth Wikipedia page adaptation of a “notorious” person.
I am not really irritated by whether or not Murphy and his cohorts are authentically portraying the story of serial killers, murderers, or all the other kinds of criminals that he has vowed to make shows about. What obviously got to me was his and his writers’ odd targeting of Anthony Perkins, Alfred Hitchcock, Tobe Hooper, Jonathan Demme, David Fincher, and everyone involved in the making of Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, and Mindhunter. No, Murphy and co. don’t have any real critique of those projects, even though there are a lot of valid criticisms that have been leveled against all of them by film scholars and critics. The showrunners want to use the mistakes made by those projects, or intentionally misinterpret their artistic intent, to purposefully spread transphobia and countless other types of bigotry by basically saying, “If they did it, so can we.” To be clear, Murphy and his team haven’t accidentally learned the incorrect lessons from history. They know the difference between right and wrong, and yet, they want to do the wrong thing because they are aware of the fact that it deteriorates the social fabric. And the more we deteriorate, the more fertile ground is created for the likes of Ryan Murphy. It’s a demented mindset, and it’s odd that he and his crew flaunt their disgusting mentality with such pride.
Now, here’s the thing: Ryan Murphy and his team can demean, degrade, and denigrate Perkins, Hitchcock, Hooper, Demme, Fincher, and everyone else all they want. To be honest, their hatred for Perkins will make you think the Norman Bates actor personally ran over Murphy’s dog with his car or something. But yeah, regardless of the reason for their hatred (or faux hatred) and the amount of hate they are piling on the people who have been instrumental in creating the bedrock on which Murphy is building his wonky-looking “true crime” empire, the truth of the matter will be that neither Murphy nor anybody on his team will be as influential as the people they are trying to pull down. Ryan Murphy’s projects nowadays have become the flavor-of-the-month kind of stuff. Sure, people will rage over it for the next few weeks, and then it’ll be forgotten. Sure, he can make a lot of money off of this kind of ragebait content, but I am putting it in writing that he isn’t inspiring the next generation of artists like Perkins, Hitchcock, Hooper, Demme, and Fincher are. He never has, and he never will. Despite being a gay guy himself, Ryan can be homophobic towards Perkins all he wants, and despite being stuck in a rut for ages, Ryan can call Hitchcock out for fizzling out after making Psycho all he wants. That won’t change the fact that he is a hack and his work is only ever talked about when someone escapes his clutches and becomes famous, e.g., David Corenswet.
The performances in The Ed Gein Story are really bad. Ryan Murphy’s productions seem to have this odd effect on talented actors where they begin acting like idiots. Charlie Hunnam, Vicky Krieps, Olivia Williams, Suzanna Son, Tom Hollander, and the rest of the cast seem to be giving the worst performances of their careers. I know that every time someone plays a famous deranged person, and they put on a funny voice and do odd stuff, the expectation is that people will just go gaga over it. But this kind of approach has become repetitive, and the intentional lack of nuance when it comes to playing lunatics has become apparent. So, yeah, Hunnam did nothing for me. The most disturbing piece of casting, in my opinion, was that of Addison Rae as Evelyn Hartley, who was allegedly killed by Gein. Since Addison is in her 20s, she can show up on screen in her underwear while playing a girl who was 14 or 15 years old at the time. You are free to label me as “too woke” for being “ragebaited” by everything else in the show, but I hope you can draw the line at casting a 20-year-old so that a minor character can be shown semi-nude to millions of people. If not, I guess you and Ryan Murphy’s projects are a match made in someplace worse than hell. In closing, I’d like to say that I hope a day comes when Ryan Murphy bears the consequences of his ragebait and all the money he has amassed by mining the miseries of real-life people disappears like sand slipping through your fingers.
