Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is one of the worst-titled series in Netflix history, but it is also Netflix’s third-most popular original English language series. Besides being a hit for the platform, it also won a bunch of awards, including an Emmy for Niecy Nash Betts—I will never begrudge Niecy Nash Betts a trophy, I just choose to believe this one is belated for Reno 911!

 

The sophomore edition in Murphy’s Monster anthology is now streaming, the slightly more sleekly titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Mendendez Story, which stars Javier Bardem and Chloe Sevigny as the ill-fated parents. And now Netflix has announced that Charlie Hunnam has been cast in the third edition of Monster, which will center on Wisconsin serial killer and human skin wearer, Ed Gein.

 

Insert my long, drawn out, exhausted sigh here. Look, I consume true crime. My preferred formats are documentaries and investigative journalism, though, because fictionalizing the worst day of a lot of people’s lives rarely works out. Every once in a while, you get something like Zodiac that puts a landmark crime case into an interesting perspective, but that happens only very occasionally. Mostly, the fictionalized media just ends up exploitative to some degree. But of course, if Ryan Murphy is going to make a whole ass anthology series about America’s most famous murderers, he would never be able to resist Ed Gein, who occupies truly one of the most ghoulish corners of true crime. As for Charlie Hunnam, look, I like him well enough, and he hasn’t found a new thing since Sons of Anarchy ended, but Ed Gein? ED GEIN? 

 

Dahmer came under fire when word got out that the families of several of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims objected to the show, which forced Murphy to go on defense and claim that the Dahmer team reached out to 20 victims’ families, but no one responded. You know, silence isn’t always complicity, sometimes it’s a rejection. During the show’s awards run, you could see Evan Peters wilting in real time as he absorbed public disapprobation for benefitting from playing someone like Dahmer. It’s one thing to portray a fictional killer, something else entirely to be paid to recreate a person who harmed dozens of people, their families, and their friends. He actually looked relieved to lose the Emmy. 

And now Charlie Hunnam is going to subject himself to the same gauntlet by playing Ed Gein. My sneaking suspicion, though, is that this will be met differently than Dahmer. For one thing, Gein is only confirmed to have killed two people (“only”). For another thing, Gein’s crimes are tied up in misogyny, and, well, the world has a different relationship with misogyny. We can look back on Dahmer’s crimes and see the role homophobia played in allowing him to continue to prey on the boys and young men of Milwaukee—Wisconsin, what is in your water?—but a guy who tries to sew a mom suit out of dead women’s body parts? Haha so weird! A real mama’s boy! Get it?! 

 

Ryan Murphy is the wrong person to produce true crime television, and I would go further and say Ed Gein’s story should be told by a woman. The only fictionalized true crime film or TV show in recent memory that didn’t have me recoiling from it is Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, which fictionalizes Rodney Alcala’s serial crimes to show how ordinary misogyny provides cover for real monsters. And even still, that film, which will coincidentally be on Netflix next month, is a tough watch. But Murphy proceeds, unabated by any amount of criticism or good taste. Monster Gein, or whatever awful title this show inevitably gets, starts filming next month, which means it’ll probably be out around this time next year. I am not looking forward to it.

Source