In the Flesh: Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

TCBY Treats. Mr. Buffalo. Pink Dot. Cheesecake Factory. It’s no accident that these symbols of metastasizing chain mediocrity keep popping up throughout Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. They reek of the New Money naivete which is the beating heart of the Menendez family, brutalized people whose sudden access to money and power has allowed their generational trauma to grow to grotesque proportions within the concealment of that classic abuser’s paradise, the American family home. They symbolize the glossy, impersonal facade of modern America, the dream of infinite, unaccountable wealth packaged in a form and with a name instantly recognizable to everyone and anyone. Family patriarch Jose Menendez (Javier Bardem) may have come a long way from his job bussing tables, may be separated from his sexually nightmarish childhood in Cuba by a gulf of decades, but the only difference between that helpless child and the grown man who visits equally horrific abuse on his own sons is that now he has the power. 

And these boys, these dead-eyed Ken dolls with their sculpted muscles and their pouty lips, so loathsomely spoiled and self-obsessed, so easy to despise on sight. Manic, self-aggrandizing Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and sullen, sulky Erik (Cooper Koch), both of them reminiscent even on a visual level of John Dall and Farley Granger in Hitchcock’s Rope, the two young men challenge and twist the prejudices and politics of the world around them. How should the victims of rape behave? What should they look like? Can a man be the victim of sexual assault? What rights does a parent have over their children? Where the lies end and the horror begins is left an open question. The brothers are slippery animals, opaque and unfeeling one moment, boyish and vulnerable the next. Their mercurial behavior perfectly echoes that of their father when he drunkenly calls his elderly mother to beg her to admit the truth of what she did to him in his infancy and childhood, an endlessly reverberating corridor of human suffering stretching back to his own mother’s childhood, and doubtlessly beyond, to who knows what dark, primordial cave recessed like a rotten tooth in the gumline of human history.

But more than its brilliant sculpting of character and theme, it’s the season’s fifth episode that vaults it past excellence and into the realm of great art. A single shot. A single take. 36 excruciating minutes. Erik sits opposite the viewer across an interview table. His attorney, Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor), sits with her back to us, listening as Erik disgorges a lifetime of abuse and sexual violence, a litany of horrors flowing out of him and crashing over us, pushing and pushing, crushing every word of reassurance and kindness Leslie gives him, and all the while the camera creeps closer and closer, Erik growing in the frame until there’s no trace of Leslie and we’re staring right into his tear-filled eyes, unable to escape from his misery, from his unwillingness and inability to see and understand himself. Showrunners Ryan Murphy (an anti-union piece of shit) and Ian Brennan don’t try to solve the Menendez brothers, don’t try to relitigate their trials, they simply pour out all the shards of a broken family and let the light catch them as they fall.