Ryan Murphy’s Menendez Brothers Netflix show is outdated

Photo illustration: Vulture; Photos: Netflix, Jeff Daly/FX/Everett Collection

One scene in the current season of Ryan Murphy’s Monsters anthology, focusing on Erik (Cooper Koch) and Lyle Menendez (Nicholas Chavez), crystallizes the show’s perspective.

The moment comes after the brothers testify at the trial for the murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, and takes place between Vanity fair writer Dominick Dunne (Nathan Lane) and lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). “Either those two boys suffered the most sickening abuse imaginable and their parents got exactly what was coming to them,” says Dunne, “or you could coach that performance out of the hands of a lying, murderous psychopath. I don’t know which of those possibilities scares me more.”

In the series, Dunne serves as a kind of Greek choir and town square in scenes where he discusses the case with friends. He essentially platforms talking points against the brothers. He suggests that they killed their parents for money, that they broke into houses as teenagers, that they were obsessed with finding out their parents’ wills, that they went on a spending spree after the murders, that they acted as witnesses. But the binary, psychologically obtuse way the Dunne character talks about abuse survivors, essentially claiming that minutely observing their behavior can help assess the truth of their claims, is not limited to his perspective as one character. The series itself takes that perspective. It plays into a ’90s binary: that the brothers are either very convincing psychopaths or they were abused – until the very last scenes.

The Monsters franchise is no stranger to controversy. The last season, that of 2022 Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storyraised the usual ethical questions about the exploitation of victims’ stories. But the recent criticism and opposition against The story of Lyle and Erik Menendezand the inability to adequately address sexual abuse raise several questions. Stories about people who commit crimes and who themselves have survived abuse are difficult to portray responsibly. A survivor of violence who lashes out with violence blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator in a way that is difficult to handle. Portraying traumatized characters with empathy while considering the damage they cause requires nuanced storytelling. This is especially true as conversations about mental health have questioned the sensational spectacle of the sociopath and psychopath.

Previous Murphyverse projects, like 2018’s The Murder of Gianni Versace: American Crime Storygarnered Emmys and critical acclaim. But that show’s depiction of Cunanan’s violence, which focuses solely on the spectacle of his actions, is consistent with Murphy’s true-crime oeuvre. His work has always been more of an innovation than a reckoning. Rather than pursuing new questions about these cases, he re-raises the questions that have been undeniably answered.

The murder of Gianni Versace revisited the murders of five men by Andrew Cunanan in 1997, culminating in the murder of Gianni Versace. Murphy chose Vanity fair book by writer Maureen Orth Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Biggest Failed Manhunt in American History as source material for that show. Above all, the book is a meticulously comprehensive biography of Cunanan, who grew up in San Diego, born to a Filipino-American father and an Italian-American mother; it covers his childhood and ends with his suicide in a houseboat when the FBI discovered his hideout. It also addresses the botched FBI investigation and humanizes Cunanan’s victims and their families.

The show deliberately decentered Cunanan, starting with the title. It created a portrait of Versace and depicted the final moments of lesser-known victims such as David Madson and Jeffrey Trail. It explored law enforcement’s relationship with the queer community. That’s a valid storytelling decision. Except the spectacle of Cunanan’s actions was still the focus of every episode. And the show presented all the 90s tropes about Cunanan being a jealous psychopath: that he “desired to be famous,” that he had met Gianni Versace before the murder and killed him out of jealousy.

In the show, Darren Criss compellingly plays Cunanan as a dissociated poser, including sensational scenes of SM sex. But where did that dissociation come from? In the book, Orth explores Cunanan’s experiences as a queer, Filipino-American woman in the 1980s and the homophobia surrounding understanding his story. After the first murders, the media was full of anti-gay sentiments that Cunanan was a revenge AIDS killer; that he was in love with Tom Cruise and wanted to kill him too. (Contemporary with Orth’s book of reportage, that of queer critic Gary Indiana Three months of fever: the story of Andrew Cunanan went against what he called the media’s cartoon of tabloid evil.)

Cunanan was the child of an interracial marriage, with a father obsessed with success and assimilation, which clearly disrupted his relationship with himself. After his death, his father told Orth John F. Kennedy Jr. – a heterosexual white man – that he had to play his son in a movie. And despite seemingly being comfortable as a gay man, Cunanan felt deeply uncomfortable assuming his identity as a Filipino American.

In Vulgar favorsWhen Orth asks Cunanan’s father about the rumors that he sexually abused Andrew, he denies it, but he also denies ever abusing his wife, which did happen. It later emerged that Cunanan may have called an abuse hotline for survivors of the cover-ups of priests in the Catholic Church, under the pseudonym Andrew DeSilva. But in a show with endless fictionalizations, the idea that Cunanan could be both an abuse survivor and a perpetrator was never explored, except in a coded way in scenes with his father in the penultimate episode of the series.

It’s not that Cunanan has to be viewed with empathy alongside the men he victimized. But it’s worth considering what it means that some Murphyverse projects are more willing to extend empathy and complexity to violent actions. Unlike The murder of Gianni Versace, The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was criticized for centering Dahmer and for its insensitivity to his black victims. The same way, inside American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandezthe show gives Hernandez, who murdered three black men, a complex backstory, exploring the sociocultural factors that influenced his mental health. This is not meant to nitpick, but to suggest that there are deeper questions about the way true crime participates in cultural imaginations of empathy that could be explored even within these productions.

The Menendez killings took place in 1989, years before the media took into account the way we talk about abuse survivors, and before the mainstream public began to question police and prosecutors more openly. The brothers were tried twice and claimed imperfect self-defense, meaning they feared for their lives due to years of abuse. The first trial ended in a hung jury; the second ended in a murder conviction.

After decades of journalism from both sides about their claims, there is now a consensus that there was a preponderance of evidence of abuse. Both Erik and Lyle talked to cousins ​​on both sides of the family about what happened to them as children. Neighbors testified that Jose Menendez tried to get them to accept child sexual abuse videos as home entertainment; Kitty Menendez’s therapist said she was keeping ‘sick’ family secrets. This evidence was ignored or sifted at the time by the pre-Me Too mainstream media, including journalists like Dominick Dunne, who pushed the accusers’ suggestion that they were lying sociopaths.

The subtitle of the show is The story of Lyle and Erik Menendezexcept that it once again completely sidelines this evidence. Murphy argued in a recent interview that “you have to see everyone’s perspective so that the audience can then form their own.” But the series doesn’t tell the story from their perspective at all. The uncertainty of the child abuse evidence is ambiguous and not contextualized. The show makes all kinds of decisions, from how information is organized, to what information is a snippet of expository dialogue versus a scene, to create doubt.

Beyond their own testimony or snippets of dialogue, there is no dramatization of moments when they spoke about the abuse as children. Instead, there is a dramatic scene of their confession of the murder to their therapist Jerome Oziel (Dallas Roberts). Why start there? Well, police and prosecutors highlighted that recorded confession to fuel doubts about the brothers, wondering why they wouldn’t tell their own therapist about the abuse even though they had confessed to the murder. However, Oziel was hired by Jose Menendez, so it’s understandable why they might be reluctant to tell him anything for fear he would report back to their father.

In contrast, in a much later, long scene, Erik finally talks about the sexual abuse with his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). She seems to believe him. But the structure of the show gives the impression that the abuse was mainly addressed when they were facing criminal charges. And every claim they make is countered by endless scenes and dialogue: for example, that they came up with the “abuse theory” after reading books about abuse, which Lyle convinced Erik to lie. Defense attorneys Jill Lansing and Leslie Abramson are treating the abuse allegations as pure courtroom strategy. The machinations and political motivations of the prosecution – obtaining a conviction after major losses such as the OJ Simpson case – and the judge’s decision to suppress evidence of abuse in the second trial are not examined.

To be honest, the show more than Murdersometimes tries to point out intergenerational abuse suffered by Jose Menendez. But they are ham-fisted scenes that are completely fabricated and at the expense of understanding the brothers’ actual traumatized paranoia.

The counter-reaction to Monsters versus the rave reviews of Murder speaks in part to a growing sympathy and consensus that has developed around the Menendez brothers, despite Murphy’s best efforts. It also speaks to the broader destigmatization of the idea of ​​the sociopath or psychopath, on which the Murphy oeuvre seems to depend. For example, since the show, a more accurate and concise portrait of Cunanan appeared in the Bad gays history podcast.

Some critics have taken a step back, pointing out the imprecise nature of terms like sociopath and psychopath, and the complicity of forensic science – and terms like “serial killer” – in the prison-industrial complex. They view the classifications less as a scapegoat myth about the inherent evil that true crime has often perpetuated and more as a cultural construct.

In contrast, the sometimes stylish flair and striking palettes of Ryan Murphy’s shows are in service of retro ideologies that take us back to the ’90s—not to question the era’s outdated mores, but to reinvigorate them blow.