This article discusses the full season of Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is about female rage and repression. That isn’t my personal interpretation of the latest installment of Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s Netflix true-crime anthology. It’s the talking point that the show’s makers have been leading with, in publicity materials and in multiple interviews.
These are fine themes for the first season of Monster with a female subject, even if they’re not exactly unique within a post-Big-Little-Lies, #MeToo-informed TV landscape where so many dramas aimed at women double as amplifiers for gendered frustrations. The well of misogyny isn’t in danger of running dry anytime soon. But if we must keep diving into it, each descent should at least leave us with some new insight or nuance.
Lizzie Borden, now streaming, fails to clear even that bar. Perhaps the least historically accurate Monster yet—and that’s saying something—the season uses the infamous tale of a Fall River, Mass. woman who probably hacked her wealthy father and stepmother to death with an axe in 1892 as a conduit to just about every plague on womankind you can imagine, past, present, and perennial. Pregnancy and childbirth.
The premium put on physical beauty. Confinement in the home and subjugation to male relatives. By tying together Lizzie’s story with the legends of supposed forerunner Elizabeth Báthory and descendent Aileen Wuornos, Brennan, who wrote every episode, suggests a simplistic kinship between all female killers.
There’s no use fretting over the extremely purposeful anachronisms and inaccuracies in this retelling, which plays as fast and loose with the Borden family as that classic nursery rhyme. With 26-year-old Ella Beatty starring as a dreamy, blank-screen Lizzie, who ages from 32 to her 60s by the end of the season, and Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall cast as parents who were really a couple of decades the actors’ seniors, everyone is much younger and prettier than their real-life counterparts. And more shocking, in some ways, than the hyperspeed double murder reenactment that opens the premiere, is what immediately follows it: a flashback to four months earlier, when Lizzie scares off a suitor by passing a bucket of menstrual blood on the white sofa where they’re sitting.
As it turns out, what the fictionalized Bordens refer to as her “lady time” had some relevance to the actual case. But Lizzie Borden is such a massive remix, mingling facts with half-truths and rumors and fabrications, it barely matters which detail is which. Because its source material is not especially extensive—one double homicide, as opposed to the lengthy and lurid sagas of most past Monster subjects—the show is forced to stretch.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
