Episode 2 of Monster: The Ed Gein Story oscillated between the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Butcher of Plainfield’s real-life shenanigans; the fictionalization of his real-life shenanigans, to be specific. Ed’s half of the plot focused on his ever-growing fascination with making human body parts a common facet of his house’s furniture as well as utensils. Additionally, we got to see Ed taking Adeline to meet the corpse that he pretended was his mother. Adeline was creeped out by that and refused to meet him ever again. As a result of that rejection, Ed went and murdered a bartender named Mary. After dragging her to his house, Ed then supposedly dressed up as his mother, went to Adeline’s house, and killed her. Well, not actually; Adeline was very much alive. That moment was either a figment of Ed’s imagination or a visualization of what Hitchcock was thinking when he constructed the iconic shower scene. The Psycho half of the plot turned speculation about Anthony Perkins’s sexuality into fact, and made it seem like the main reason Hitchcock cast him in the role of Norman Bates was because he was in the closet, and that mirrored Ed’s “dark secret.” Furthermore, through fictionalized therapy scenes featuring Anthony, the show insinuated that Anthony saw his sexual orientation as a “sickness” that needed to be cured. As if that wasn’t enough, Hitchcock was painted as a creep who would watch his actresses naked through a peephole, much like Ed and Norman. Is there more slander in store for Perkins and Hitchcock? Yes, there is. Allow me to talk about it.
Spoiler Alert
Ed Denies Killing Mary
Episode 3 of The Ed Gein Story gives us our first and last glimpse at this show’s version of Ed’s father, George, who is found passed out on the floor of the house. He has soiled himself as well, which angers Augusta a lot, and causes her to go on a rant. George hits Augusta, and Augusta retaliates by hitting him back and telling him to never come home again. Augusta says that that’s the last that they’ll see of him. In real life, George died of heart failure, probably as a result of his rampant alcoholism. Neither do we get to see that in this episode, nor do we see the way George used to abuse both Ed and Henry. Going back to the plot, in order to celebrate George’s departure, Augusta says that she’s going to put on some music. That’s when the episode cuts to Ed’s present day, where he is wearing Mary’s face and his mother’s dress while dancing to Augusta’s favorite tunes. But that’s interrupted by the sheriff, who has arrived at his doorstep to ask him if he knows anything about Mary, because Ed’s the last person who had seen her.
Ed obviously feigns ignorance and says that he had met Mary a week ago, and on the night of her murder he was with his mother. In addition to that, he casts aspersions on Mary’s character by alluding to her “shady past” in Chicago so that the police never associate her death with him. With all that out of the way, Ed takes a trip to his favorite diner, where Adeline comes to meet him, and the first thing that he wonders is how she is alive. That pretty much confirms that Ed didn’t actually show up to her house to kill her. Maybe he was possessed by his mother’s spirit, and he dreamt the whole moment up. Before Adeline could put any more thought into Ed’s confusion and figure out that he’d probably thought about killing her, Ed apologized to her on his mother’s behalf—because she didn’t “talk” to Adeline when she was at the house—and that prompted Adeline to rush out of the house in such a huff just because his house was “dirty.”
Ed Wants To Marry Adeline
Adeline and Ed’s conversation takes a sharp turn towards Christine Jorgensen, the first person in the United States of America to have sex reassignment surgery. This tickles Ed’s fancy, and he rushes out of the diner, saying that on Friday, he’s going to surprise her. What’s this surprise? A marriage proposal. Of course, Ed doesn’t have the money to buy a ring. So, he digs up a grave and steals the deceased Edith Bach’s ring (please, take the authenticity of scenes like these with a mighty grain of salt). Then, as promised, on Friday, he takes Adeline on a date to a fancy restaurant and then to the cemetery, which is where he proposes to her. Adeline says “yes,” and after Ed puts the ring on her finger, she commences a makeout session. That’s when Ed catches a glimpse of his mother’s grave and puts a stop to Adeline’s sexual activities. He says that they can resume such acts once they are sure that they want to have babies. Adeline senses that Ed also has a fear of being a part of a family because, as mentioned before, he has grown up in the presence of an abusive father, an absent brother, and an overbearing mother. So, to quell those fears, Adeline gets him a job as a babysitter at the Heller household in the hopes that he’ll be around kids and then come to a conclusion if he wants some of his own with Adeline.
Mrs. Heller says that they had a babysitter, Evelyn, but she has been hospitalized with polio. Their second choice is clearly Adeline, but since she claims that she is busy and even vouches for Ed, Mrs. Heller has no choice but to accept Ed’s candidature. That turns out to be a really bad idea, because on his first night with Frank Jr. and Enid, he takes the kids over to his own house and puts on a magic show with his skull bowls, bones, severed fingers, decapitated heads, and flayed skin. I’ll be honest, as much as I hate everything touched by Ryan Murphy, the final skin mask reveal and the kids shrieking did get a chuckle out of me. When Ed drops the kids back at their home, he gets reprimanded pretty heavily by Mr. Heller, and he is told to never come close to his kids ever again. Soon after that altercation, he learns that Evelyn has returned from the hospital and resumed her duties as the Hellers’ babysitter. So, he stalks her and even confronts her in an alley. Since it’s daylight and there are people around, Ed doesn’t do anything drastic and just walks away. Later that night, when Mr. and Mrs. Heller are gone, Ed arrives at their house to terrorize the kids and Evelyn. When Evelyn goes to the basement to check out some eerie noises, Ed sneaks up behind her and knocks her out.
The Aftermath Of ‘Psycho’
The episode abruptly cuts to Ed showing up at Adeline’s house and telling her that he is ready to marry her now that he has gotten a taste of family life. When Adeline conveys this info to her mother, she gets furious. Yet Adeline chooses to move in with Ed, and as soon as she gets to his house, she starts cleaning up the place just like a “trad wife” would. Ed goes up to “check on” his mother, and when he comes back down, he says that she fell asleep in her chair. Then Ed leaves to hunt some rabbits, while Adeline continues her cleaning program. While taking out the trash, Adeline notices a light in Augusta’s room. Hence, she decides to see what her future mother-in-law is up to. That’s when Adeline gets the shock of her life as Ed, wearing Mary’s face and Augusta’s dress, lunges at her. Since this cuts directly to the final reveal of Psycho, and Hitchcock reveling in how people are reacting to it, there’s a good chance that that didn’t actually happen and it’s a mixture of what Ed imagined he’d do to Adeline and what Hitchcock thought had happened in Ed’s life.
Going back to the plot, we see Perkins and his boyfriend going to watch Psycho. Technically Perkins is watching the movie, and his boyfriend is focused on his crotch. Later on, Perkins announces that he is breaking up with him because he has found a woman he loves, and he plans to marry her and live “normally.” Perkins tells his therapist that after feeling aroused by a woman’s touch, he feels like he has been cured of the sickness that’s homosexuality. However, when it comes to moving on from Psycho and Norman Bates, Perkins becomes a “victim of his own success,” and he is told by his publicist to embrace the fact that people want to see him in “strange” roles. Hitchcock suffers from the same issue, as producers want him to do something as perverse and psychosexual as his latest hit. After watching a sequence of The Blood Pit of Horror, Hitchcock comes to the realization that he has opened a Pandora’s box—where true crime and crimes against women are glorified to hell and sequences of women being tortured are enjoyed by the masses—which won’t come to a close any time soon.
Ed Didn’t Kill Evelyn
At the end of The Ed Gein Story episode 3, we see that Ed has dragged Evelyn all the way to the tool shed behind his house, disrobed her, and is complaining about how her taking his babysitting job ruined his chances of building a family with Adeline. Then he proceeds to bring in the decomposed body of his “mother,” puts a hammer in the corpse’s hand, and uses her to crudely crack open Evelyn’s head. This is seamlessly cut together with a scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by Tobe Hooper where Leatherface tries to use “Grandpa” to kill Sally Hardesty with a hammer. Okay, now, I have to address a bunch of things. Firstly, Adeline’s relationship with Ed is hugely disputed. She gave an elaborate interview to a newspaper right after Ed’s story became popular, and we see a version of her stories in the show. Eventually, Adeline retracted all her statements and said that she hardly knew him. Secondly, the police concluded that there was no connection between Evelyn’s disappearance and Ed’s serial killings. So, Ed killing Evelyn for taking his babysitting job and inspiring that scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is fictional.
Thirdly, everything about Perkins is just slanderous. There were allegations that Perkins was gay, and concocting this whole story about how he “cured” his homosexuality is deeply disturbing. Ryan Murphy is a gay man himself; regardless of Perkins’s sexual orientation, Murphy should know how to handle these topics sensitively. At this stage, it looks like he is ready to demonize the community that he belongs to because he knows it’s going to attract enraged articles and that’ll get people to hate-watch his show. Well, newsflash, Netflix is in such debt that no amount of hate-watching is going to help them. Perkins and Hitchcock will be remembered as legends, while Murphy will always be seen as a hack; that’s not an opinion, that’s a fact. What else? Oh yeah, showing Hitchcock having some kind of crisis of faith due to the success of Psycho and using that fictional moment to justify making a slew of true crime series where the serial killers in question are sexualized to such an extent that people make thirsty edits of them is so not done. Hitchcock and Hooper’s work inspires eye-opening think pieces; Murphy’s projects just make your eyes roll.
