Charlie Hunnam really did it

Last year we saw Charlie Hunnam in character as serial killer (and grave robber, etc) Ed Gein for the next installment of Ryan Murphy’s incredibly popular true crime anthology series, Monster. Season one dealt with Jeffrey Dahmer and won many awards for star Evan Peters. Season two dealt with the Menendez brothers and garnered a lot of nominations (if fewer actual trophies). Now season three tells the story of Ed Gein, and even though we only hear Hunnam speak one dialogue and only get a few brief seconds of him in character as Gein, I bet this gets him a lot of awards, too. It’s a complete transformation on Hunnam’s part. 

As I said last year, though, I don’t intend to watch Monster: The Ed Gein Story. I don’t love fictionalized true crime, I especially don’t love it coming from Ryan Murphy who makes, at best, elevated trash TV. As Lainey feels conflicted about watching a recreation of the public stalking of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette, so do I feel conflicted about watching stuff like The Ed Gein Story. That said, this looks LEAGUES better than Peacock’s upcoming series about John Wayne Gacy, Devil in Disguise. Monster at least has the lure of Charlie Hunnam’s performance, never mind Laurie Metcalf as Gein’s mother, Augusta—heard but not seen in this teaser—to give it a sheen of respectability. However else I feel about Murphy’s work, he always gets great actors to give great performances, and Hunnam obviously committed to this, and I have no doubt his performance will be the highlight of the series.

Seeing this teaser, though, I am now curious how other people will react to this season of Monster and Hunnam’s performance. Ed Gein is just so gross. The teaser emphasizes all the fictional monsters he inspired, like Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill, while showing off his house of horrors, full of human skin lamps and masks, and Gein attempting to make his skin suit of lady parts. GROSS. I physically recoiled from this teaser, will others feel the same? Or is this scintillating? 

One of my areas of discomfort around fictionalizing true crime is how the fictional element creates a gap between audience and subject, allowing the obscene to become alluring. Fictionalization gives the audience a kind of pass to indulge feeling empathy when hearing a true crime story. That is certainly what happened with Dahmer, which no matter how hard anyone tried to do otherwise, did end up making Jeffrey Dahmer into a pitiable character. 

Will it happen with Ed Gein, too? Or is Gein just too gross? I am genuinely curious how people react to this. It’s one thing to hear Ed Gein’s story, it’s something else entirely to SEE it. Even knowing what the cops will find in his house, I flinched when seeing it for mere seconds on screen. Will the scope of Gein’s crimes disgust people so much that it will be impossible to celebrate Charlie Hunnam’s performance?