Masuk Free Press

When I opened Netflix on September 20th, I set out to find a show about some good old-fashioned fake crime, ready to watch some lovable psycho who doesn’t actually exist commit crimes that aren’t actually real.

What I saw instead was the title Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.

My immediate thought was: “You’re kidding me. Not another one.”

Just two years ago, a similar series was produced called Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. As you might be able to guess from the name, it was about Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic, necrophiliac serial killer.

The Dahmer series received wide public backlash, most notably from the family members of Dahmer’s victims. To create a show centered around a man who took innocent lives was beyond disrespectful. If the show’s focus was giving objective information about the crimes committed, then it could have been shot in the style of a documentary. If they truly cared about getting the real story, the producers could have presented pure facts spoken over pictures of the victims along with anecdotes from those who knew them. Instead, Netflix chose to dramatize the events. The streaming service forgot their past mistakes and put out a show series based on not just one, but two, people who committed cold-blooded murder.

The second after I saw the new title, my mind was filled with two thoughts only:

1. I don’t know nearly enough about the Menendez murders as I should.
2. Hey, this would make a great article for journalism!

Now, I know that the Menendez brothers are murderers. They are criminals of the capital degree who do not deserve sympathy, let alone glory through their own series. In watching a show about them, I would technically become part of the problem… But at least I would be self-aware about it!

So with caution in mind and an active knowledge of how terrible the Menendez brothers were, I locked in to watch the nine-episode miniseries. For research purposes.

If this were a show about fictional people who had decided to shoot their parents to death one August night, I would have nothing but a glowing review. Instead, I have a glowing review with an asterisk.

The acting? Phenomenal. The cinematography? Stunning. The costume design? Perfectly 90s without being tacky. In my humble opinion, it was a beautifully produced piece of media. My only issue lies with the fact that, as I have previously iterated, it is based on actual real-life events that happened.

In order to create any good TV show, you need to have likable main characters. You can’t try to craft a narrative around people that an audience doesn’t care about. And in putting someone at the center of that narrative, you are automatically trying to make viewers more sympathetic to them. To remain engaged, the audience must feel some form of positive regard for the characters that are being put into a series.

A perfect example is Joe Goldberg from the fictitious You tetralogy. The man is entirely insane; his twisted little thought processes polluted my brain for the month that I spent working my way through the books. Yet I devoured the first three works while actively recommending them to other people. Why? Because I love Joe as a character. He is immensely fun to read. 

“When reading the You series, I highly enjoyed reading Joe as a character,” said junior Brianna Kelly. “Since the books are written from Joe’s perspective, it gives readers a deep dive into his mind, revealing his thought process behind his every move. I loved how in every book Joe emphasizes the lengths he would go to for his love interests. This explains how dedicated and loyal he is for the ones he loves, even if he has to go to extreme measures. Getting to know his character adds a lot of thrill and suspense, making it hard to put each book down.”

Despite the fact that he committed three murders in the first volume alone, I similarly found myself rooting for Joe and despairing when (SPOILERS) he was eventually apprehended by the police in the end of book two.

The reason that I cared so much about the fate of Joe Goldberg is because as much of a human trash bag as he was, he still managed to be likable. Likewise, the key to making a successful show series about Lyle and Erik Menendez was to make them likable.

And that’s where it all becomes problematic.

Now, you can make all the documentaries you’d like. Documentaries are objective, factual tellings about what happened. They do not try to sway their audience one way or another. If they leave you with unpleasant feelings towards someone, it is due to that person’s actions, not because of any shaping of the official record.

Whereas in a series like Monsters, the framing is completely different. Everything is set up in an intentional manner. It is not something that people watch in order to learn the hard facts of what happened — they watch it to learn the Hollywood version of what happened. That version requires making a new story, a better story. One where motives for murder can be seen as just, and an audience can muster up some sympathy for someone who utilized, in the words of Jose Menendez’s autopsy, “explosive decapitation with evisceration of the brain” to kill their father.

After I’ve said all of this, you may be wondering, Chloe, did this brainwashing work on you? Or even saying to yourself, Well surely these tactics wouldn’t work on me because I would put on my self-awareness suit before watching the show!

To which my response would be a complete disappointment. Despite the wall that I put up around myself, and regardless of how many times I yelled “sucks to be you, that’s what happens when you kill your parents!” at my television screen, the brainwashing worked.

Fortunately, I have not been as tragically afflicted as some people are. The aforementioned ‘some people’ finished watching Monsters with their first instinct being to make edits.

“I’ve seen edits of them especially from court trials all over my for you page,” said senior Lexia Goldberg-Friedman. “In most of the edits, they’re smiling, or I’ve seen ones of them crying in court which makes it seem like they’re the victim. I only see videos where the creator basically think they should’ve been freed.”

Thanks to my proverbial walls, I still managed to finish the show feeling absolutely disgusted because, goodness gracious, every single person in that show was an awful human being. 

But that does not change the fact that I am still of the opinion that the Menendez brothers should have never been caught in the first place because the evidence that opened the floodgates for their trial was obtained illegally. It does not change the sympathy that I felt upon seeing two siblings being separated from each other for the rest of their lives. It does not change the fact that at 12:04 a.m., I sent my sister a text saying “omg the guy who plays erik is gorgeous,” or that I followed it up two hours later at 2:02 a.m., when I was still sat on my couch binging the show, with the message: “This man is accusing his brother of emotional manipulation and im just like wow. He’s so pretty and has such a nice jawline.”

The moment that a crime stops being about the atrocity committed to the victim is when something is wrong. My focusing on how attractive an actor is instead of the victims of his character is a problem. A problem that Netflix and the producers of Monsters aimed to cause.

“Both of the brothers are portrayed as likable because of their looks, which tends to distract people in why this show was made,” said senior Alison Merriman. “The show seems to be focusing on their personality and attractiveness, and not the fact that they killed two people.”

When the main characters of a television show are cast, directors are going to look for attractive people. That’s a fact of life. That fact runs into trouble when the “characters” being cast are two scumbags who are currently rotting in prison on life sentences.

In casting attractive people, a halo effect is automatically placed onto their actions, inadvertently or not (although in this case I have to say it was decidedly advertent). The halo effect, for those who are unfamiliar, is the idea that your positive impression of a thing or person leads you to believe positive things about it. Such as believing that a pretty person is more likely to be morally good just because they’re pretty. It’s why Disney makes all of their villains fairly ugly and all of their heroes beautiful.

So in having two attractive actors play the leads in this show series about Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers are set up to be more sympathetic to an audience. No one wants to believe that the guy with the nice cheekbones and gorgeous eyes shot his mother 13 times with a 12-gauge.

It is possible to talk about the tragedies of murder without glorifying those who did it. Documentaries can be made, books can be written. Turning the lives of killers into a glamorized Netflix series is not the only answer. My saying this might change nothing in the grand scheme of things. Society wants to shock themselves with the macabre, and I have little power to stop them. But I do hope that it changes how you, my dear reader, will view things like this in the future.

I was going to make a closing joke about how in another two years they’ll probably be trying to convince you that maybe Ed Gein wasn’t so bad and human skin suits were all the rage in the 50s, but I fear that I have been too on the money. It appears that Ed Gein is set to be the next glorified killer in season three of the Monster series.