When Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story dropped in 2022, I was as skeptical as anyone about whether the series was necessary. Dahmer’s story was well-covered ground, and there was the trepidation one might feel when they wonder if a series or film is a ghoulish, opportunistic creation built for ratings or box office.
Then I watched it.
While I thought the final two episodes following Jeffrey Dahmer’s (brilliantly played by Evan Peters) capture lost some steam, the previous eight were a marvel of handling such difficult material with no small degree of tastefulness. Dahmer was the linchpin that Murphy’s series was built around, but in its rather brilliant way, the series did something most serial killer projects don’t do: focus on the victims. Typically, when watching a series or film based on a serial killer, the project is based mainly on the hunted and the hunter. Dahmer was something other. Each of Dahmer’s victims was humanized, shown to you as a whole person, a person who mattered.
The best example of Murphy’s intent to make the show victim-focused can be found in episode 6: “Silenced,” (so brilliantly directed by the great Paris Barclay) which tells the story of an aspiring male model named Tony who moves to Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually becomes one of Dahmer’s victims. Tony, a young Black man born deaf, becomes friends with and briefly dates Dahmer. In a single hour, you fall in love with Tony, and the pain that you feel as he heads towards his fate, like that famous ship that struck the iceberg, is heart-wrenching. The episode also touched on many of the more significant themes of the show: police indifference, white privilege, alcoholism, preying on the vulnerable, and, most importantly, the truth that people in distressed minority communities are ignored when they raise their voices.
When it was first released, Dahmer was met with suspicion and disdain, mainly by those who hadn’t seen it. Once critics and audiences took it in, they found something much different than they expected–I know I did. The series didn’t just experience a critical turnaround but was widely seen and scored a stunning thirteen Emmy nominations.
Murphy’s true-crime follow-up to Dahmer, The Menendez Brothers (NOTE: I hate that both series have the word “monster” in their titles. I think it’s cheap, dehumanizing, and completely wrong. People do monstrous things. There are no real monsters. There are no dragons, face-huggers, or King Kongs; there are people who commit horrible acts: to define a human being as a monster is something we do to help ourselves wrap our heads around that which is impossible to comprehend. We use that word to make us feel better. The End) is not likely to garner the same sort of long-term respect.
The show is a bit of a mess despite its genuine ambitions. In showing us different perspectives on a story (that of two sons who murder their wealthy father and mother in 1989 and then claim a history of sexual abuse) that gives the brothers at least two viewpoints and then also includes the POV of the parents, the sons’ lawyers, the Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne, and a seedy psychologist. The Menendez Brothers takes a Rashomon approach to storytelling. Perhaps the director of that classic film, Akira Kurosawa, could have pulled off such an undertaking, but try as Murphy and his talented crew might, what they have produced is a series that is everywhere and nowhere at once.
However, amidst the relentlessly frustrating story of two sons whose actions are never in question (only the why?) is the genuinely remarkable episode 5, “The Hurt Man.” Stuck precisely in the middle of an often confounding treatise on the fine line between fame and infamy, “The Hurt Man” is a single-shot episode (if there are any hidden cuts, my eyes could not find them) that runs for 36 minutes between Erik Menendez (Koch Cooper) and his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Gaynor, a dead-ringer for the real Abramson) in the jailhouse. The episode begins with Abramson (seen only from the back) sitting down with her client, Erik, who shares with her the specifics of the history of claimed abuse that his father (and, to a lesser degree, his mother) committed against him. The details are incredibly graphic and harrowing. If there is any place where Dahmer and The Menendez Brothers intersect, it is in “The Hurt Man.” There is an overlap of abusive parenting (albeit of a far different kind) and sexual confusion.
Erik starts from the age of six (the age at which the alleged abuse began) up to the murders. As he does, the camera, ever so painstakingly and incrementally, sneaks into a close-up of Erik, sharing the most intimate details of his life with his father to Abramson. Taken on its own, outside of the other eight episodes, “The Hurt Man” is a tour de force of direction by Michael Uppendahl and in performance by Koch. As Erik states that he never felt like his dad loved him except when he was abusing him, we see Erik shrink, even as the camera closes in on him, until Abramson can no longer be seen, and the younger Menendez brother takes up almost the entirety of the frame. Koch becomes increasingly vulnerable as Erik lays out his story. He comes off like a wounded animal, looking for a place to hide but nowhere to go.
Erik speaks of no matter how bad the abuse made him feel; there was a part of him that felt close to his father during these awful times alone. “I was the center of his world,” Erik states. There is an awkwardness and discomfort in Erik’s telling that feels uncompromised and very real. Throughout the series, Murphy and the filmmakers on the show make schizophrenic efforts to humanize Erik and his brother Lyle. I say “schizophrenic” because the pendulum swing between two sons who may have been sociopaths due to awful parents or due to criminally abusive parents never lands on a place of decisiveness.
Still, if you pluck out this episode from the four on either side of it, it’s impossible not to feel pain and genuine empathy for Erik. If this is what Murphy was hoping to do with the series, it’s the only episode that accomplishes that goal. There is so much flash and, at times, attempts at satire that veer into wealth porn camp that I never could find my way into The Menendez Brothers over the course of the nine-episode series. That was not the case with “The Hurt Man.” As Erik speaks of his alleged and unwanted sexual encounters with his father, he reaches a bruising conclusion about how the stated abuse has left him confused about his sexuality. The stark and spare location, direction, and camerawork force us to focus on every word. And when Erik says that after having gone through such an ordeal, a person can’t know what way they are. What they’re supposed to be. He says, “If that’s me or if it’s how I’m supposed to be. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. I am the hurt man. That’s me.” And it’s devastating.
Watching “The Hurt Man” brought me back to my junior year of high school. There was a boy I will call “Joe” who attended the eleventh grade in my hometown. He stuck out from the rest of us. We were small-town kids raised by hunters and men who worked with their hands. Our school uniform was a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a flannel shirt when it got cold. Joe did not conform. He came to school daily in slacks, a button-down shirt, and a tie. His hair was always heavily moussed in the way of the ‘80s. His part was so sharp that there was no hair on the wrong side of the strip that ran from the left side of his forehead back to his crown.
One day, Joe and I ended up in the library together, essentially alone. Joe and I weren’t friends, but we were friendly. I have no recollection of the impetus that started the monologue that followed. Still, for whatever reason, Joe confided in me that he was raped repeatedly by his uncle during his pre-teen years. He spoke of how this caused him sexual confusion. He thought that he must be gay because he had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of another man. I was only sixteen years old. I was utterly unequipped to respond to the horror that Joe had experienced, that he had, for some reason, shared with me. “That’s horrible,” I muttered blankly. At that moment, the bell rang, and we were off to our next classroom. Joe and I never spoke of this encounter again. He did not return to my high school. I do not know what became of him. I just hope he ended up being okay.
I mention this memory here because I hadn’t thought of it in such a long time. However, during “The Hurt Man,” the similarities between the conversation taking place on screen and all those years ago between Joe and me were immediate and palpable. I know it’s challenging to pick out merit from a show that I found unsuccessful in many other ways, but “The Hurt Man” reminded me of a hurt man I once met. They are out there. They deserve empathy. They deserve to be heard.
If nothing else, The Menendez Brothers accomplished this one moment of genuine value, if only in microcosm.
The Menendez Brothers is streaming now on Netflix
This show feels me with a deep sense of foreboding. I struggle to watch it.