September 23, 2024

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story and the sins of the sons

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
The 1989 murder of José and Kitty Menendez by their sons, Lyle and Erik...but also possibly the rapes of Lyle and Erik by José, and maybe also by Kitty...allegedly.

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The story
It's always nice when a true-crime property exceeds expectations, and Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story well exceeded mine. Granted, said expectations were about ankle-high going into Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's nine-part Netflix exploration of this infamous case, but Monsters sees a handful of narrative opportunities that previous properties about the Menendezes didn't, and it doesn't waste them.

For starters, this case is far better suited than the Dahmer installment of this franchise – or the recently announced Gein iteration, which strikes me as taboo-chasing for its own sake – to go under the patented House Of Murphy lens: the effects of toxic masculinity, bigotry, and misplaced trust in institutions. 

When the Menendez season was announced, we couldn't imagine what else was left to say about the murders, but it's not so much that there's any new information in Monsters as that we're better equipped to hear it in 2024. Even laypeople understand post-abuse and generational trauma, imperfect victimhood, and copaganda better now than we did when these murders occurred and went to trial. We have some perspective on what LAPD was doing, or not doing, in the eighties and nineties. We have some useful distance on what Dominick Dunne meant to the genre. 

Monsters also understands what continues to drive interest in the murders, namely that, while we know what happened, we can't really know why, or whom to believe about why, still. The show's structure is really smart about that, laying out the case more or less in the order we originally "received" it and using flashbacks and montages judiciously (which is also how it underplays the notorious snatching of Lyle's wig) – and it's also kind of challenging in the way it moves back and forth between the ideas of Lyle and Erik as, well, murderous little monsters, but also desperate broken victims, but also maybe both at once.

It takes more care and furnishes more detail than contemporary accounts (and rushed, campy TV movies) could, but it also leaves conflicting information and impressions unresolved, letting more than one thing be true. American Crime Story's second season let Andrew Cunanan be a spoiled, striving villain, but it also let you feel sorry for him sometimes, and Monsters has a similar approach. 

I was especially struck by Monsters giving most of an episode to Erik's (Cooper Koch) harrowing account of the abuse he and Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) claim they suffered at the hands of their father for most of their lives…and then pulling back near the end of the season to a more cynical view of the brothers' allegations. True-crime stories often "choose sides," and true-crime audiences often want exactly that; Monsters won't, and it's discomfiting.

The production did choose well when it comes to the acting, which is uniformly outstanding. Most of the portrayals have to navigate that same set of conflicts, letting you understand where the "character" is coming from even when that place is hateful, and Koch and Chavez do excellent work as the brothers, by turns slappable and sympathetic. (Chavez has a Jason Gedrick energy that got me wondering what Gedrick's BET-CRP might have looked like if he hadn't gone down that fictional-Mafia-don road twenty years ago.)

Ari Graynor is also perfect as Leslie Abramson, maternal and grating by turns and not leaning too hard in either direction; her flickering micro-expressions as she interviews Erik about José's (Javier Bardem) abuse contain multitudes. Like Nathan Lane as Dominick Dunne, she's not doing an impression; yes, they both nail the IRL figures' voices, but it comes from a felt understanding of the whole people they're playing. Lane's Dunne is sometimes bitchy and glib, but the real Dunne's feeling of having a calling to his VF columns was genuine, and Lane walks that tightrope confidently.

(I would really like Feud to tackle Dunne next, with Lane in the part. He feuded with many -- including RFK Jr.! -- and those casting updates would be amaaaazing.)

Bardem and Chloë Sevigny as the Menendez parents have to do a lot with a little – the writing does what it can, but there just isn't a lot to work with when it comes to José and Kitty that isn't cartoonish and/or inexplicable – but unsurprisingly, they make it work. 

And the production design is flawless without drawing too much attention to itself; you get a solid sense not just of the time, from the cars and the puffy collared sweatshirts, but of the isolation everyone in this family felt, and the difficulty of getting at the truth. Some shots feel claustrophobic; others are depopulated; still others whiz past, or push the action far enough to the edge of frame that you're not entirely sure what you're seeing.

Monsters isn't likely to change your mind about the case; it isn't going to lead to any updates. But the update the season itself represents – in how we think about trauma and survival; in a true-crime story's willingness to sit with ambiguity – is significant.