Monsters

The Lyle and Erik Menendez Brothers Story

 Mystery, intrigue. Sex, predation, violence. Family values. The United States of America.

A vengeful Cuban father, Los Angeles millionaire businessman, wanna-be Floridian congressman with anti-Castro sentiments. How typically American. He raised two boys to be great sportsmen, academics, and politicians. How typically American.

He molested those sons. How?

He distorted his sons’ entire worldview, their sense of safety; he uprooted their lives with perverted, torturous dreams of grandeur, of the gladiators and the Romans who bonded – deeply, physically – with their brothers in arms. José treated his sons like nobody ever should. He was not a father, but hell on earth. In the end, he paid a high price.

I mean…what a far-fetched story! Lyle Menendez just so happened to be assaulted by his father, before telling him to stop, then causing José to begin assaulting Erik, from the age of five or six or so, until one day Lyle and Erik – then young men – bought some shotguns and blew their parents to pieces. And Erik was being assaulted the entire time, up until the murders? And Erik’s defense attorney, Leslie Abramson, had recently ‘won’ a case where she convinced the jury that her client deserved sympathy for the fact that he was abused as a child? And the brothers only came out with their story of abuse after weeks and weeks of sessions with the psychiatrist Jerome Oziel, where they recounted in detail the killings but never mentioned anything about sexual or physical abuse? And Lyle privately and bragadociously discussed his ‘performance’ in recounting how that abuse on the witness stand moved the jury – in quite Trumpian fashion – more than any witness they had ever seen?

Oh, I’m beginning to sound like Dominick Dunne.

 Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Brothers Story appeared on Netflix nearly two years after the first instalment of Ryan Murphy’s series, the eponymous mini-series on Jeffrey Dahmer. Monsters received some generally critical reviews for its long run time and meandering story. Meander it does, and for somewhat good reason: the show’s nine episodes come and go like ocean waves, each crash offering us a new fictionalised perspective. We begin with the murderous, psychopathic boys who killed their parents for money. Then, after their arrest, the narrative of abuse begins to emerge. We ask, who are the monsters which the show portends to portray? Surely not the brothers, who endured years of assault at the hands of their father. It’s José and ‘Kitty’ Menendez – the perverted sadist father and neglectful, narcissistic mother. Those poor boys.

 Then, things come falling down. Lyle appears as a pure actor after his tearful performance on the witness stand, while Erik comes across as cold and psycopathic. The jury cannot decide on a verdict and the boys are sent to a second trial, where their story of abuse begins to further unravel in a legal sense. Popular journalist Dominick Dunne writes countless pieces supporting the prosecution. The boys’ popularity wanes as the country grows tired of the case, the boys, and Abramson; all eyes shift to the mega-visible O.J. Simpson murder trial. We are thrust back into what appears to be reality, where the murderous boys are just that: murderers. Erik and Lyle are the true monsters.

But the smell of parental abuse never quite leaves the nostrils. We aren’t gifted an easy yes or no answer to the question of who are the true monsters. Nor should we! Many true crime series appear to pursue a snappy, definitive narrative on who the bad person is and why, but Monsters lays out a variety of possibilities. “What I was interested in doing was telling a really big, complicated American tapestry about this notorious case,” showrunner Ryan Murphy told Vanity Fair. “I think that people really struggle with the idea that two things can be true at the same time. You could kill your parents, and you could have been sexually abused, and you could be morally ambiguous…People are uncomfortable with all the points of view that we present.” In a country which expects clear winners and optimism, Murphy’s show gives us more questions, questions about psychology, wealth, discipline, revenge. It ain’t easy, but it’s important.

Monsters takes on a gravity of its own in Episode 5, ‘The Hurt Man’. For the entirety of its thirty-six-minute run time, Erik opens up, slowly, then all at once, about the decade-long abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. As the zoom creeps in, we see only him: the viewer is trapped in this conversation. We can’t look away, run and hide, or ignore the story as told by one of its victims. For me, this is television at its finest.

Image: Alžbeta Szabová