Notes about Monster: The Ed Gein Story

 

I did a podcast about the Netflix show, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and because I'm such a tiresome big lick, I wrote up a few notes about it that I could read out and pretend were spontaneous wit. Also, it's very important to me that I have access to people's names, because I can't remember anyone's names anymore. Anyway, here are the notes. Read them, or don't. As always, I like to leave you with options. 

Monster: The Ed Gein Story.

 Showrunner – Ian Brennan

Credits: Glee – six seasons

Scream Queens – watched about two episodes of this. It was alright.

Jeffrey Dahmer – watched a couple of them. The Menendez Brothers, nah. Looked a bit Zoolander.

He was an actor, he played “Hippie in Tree” in the film Staten Island – I haven’t seen it. His script for Glee, originally written as a film, and apparently the first script he ever wrote, was given to producer Ryan Murphy by a producer who was a member of the same gym. Gyms are the smellier modern version of the golf course. Deals are struck over the moist peloton bike seats.

Producer - Ryan Murphy

His credits include Nip/Tuck, Glee, 132 episodes of American Horror Story, 132, who can be arsed? The Watcher, which I did watch and thought hilarious. Seven episodes too. Which seems like the level of commitment to wasting my time I can make. I mean, I’m old. I haven’t got 132 hours of my life to waste anymore.

He is often described as “the most powerful man” in modern television. His 2018 deal for Netflix for five years was worth $300, 000,000. So, any punching I do here must be seen as punching up, as I have NO deals worth $300,000,000 dollars.

None.

 

Charlie Hunnam – Ed Gein

Suzanna Son – Adeline Watkins

Laurie Metcalf – Augusta Gein

Tom Hollander – Alfred Hitchcock

Lesley Manville – Bernice Worden

Vicky Krieps – Ilse Koch

Olivia Williams – Alma Reville

 

*Weird. Ed’s Mickey Mouse voice. The fact that the show seems to be suggesting that all his problems were down to women. His mother was horrible but clinging and swamping. His girlfriend Adeline – who in real life did not look like that and was not really his girlfriend – pushed him further into taboo degradations, and gave him Ilse Koch, “the Bitch of Buchenwald” comics, which fuelled his interest in digging people up and turning them into furniture. If they’d just left poor Ed alone, he would have been fine. I mean, its bullshit, and its dangerous bullshit. It’s not like the Manosphere need a lot of assistance in finding new arseholes to revere – remember a few years ago when American Psycho was the Ur-text for cellar dwellers everywhere. Patrick Bateman was the standard. Well, why not Ed? He’s good with his hands, he’s self-reliant, he knows his way around a firearm, he has a sensible, masculine haircut, and by golly, does he love his mother.

* He looks a lot like British naturalist, Chris Packham. A lot. He’s the host of Autumnwatch. This was Awfulwatch.

*I saw Deranged. Which is a low budget 1974 film, made in Canada in 1974, and financed entirely by Led Zeppelin’s tour promoter, Tom Karr. $200,000 is a lot of money to spunk on a film about Ed Gein, so I guess he really wanted to make a film about Ed Gein, even though he’s called Ezra Cobb in the film. It’s a very straight forward telling of the Gein story and, because its cheap, and set in winter, it looks worryingly like the real-life Ed would have had. It’s the origin of the Buffalo Bill rooms from Silence of the Lambs: dirt, newspaper, random body parts all over kitchen furniture etc.

* So, you can see what’s happened here. You want the story of Ed Gein, but they don’t want to give you that, they want to do a video essay about how Ed Gein is the daddy of not only all American serial killers – debatable – but also a strand of American Horror cinema, so we’re then obliged to sit through a series of made up scenarios behind the scenes of those films, full of people in doubtful costumes and dubious prosthesis. It’s campy, it’s clever. It’s also jarring, tonally bizarre, often in incredibly poor taste and taking truly staggering liberties with the truth. I know it’s a story, and what they’re saying is that this is just a story, about stories, the actual stuff Ed Gein did was diluted to nothing: this is homeopathic TV. So, in that sense, it doesn’t matter that hardly any of the people depicted in the film actually acted in the way they are depicted. But it sort of does matter. Because it’s a true story too. So, there’s a tension there. Between real life atrocities and the showrunners wanting to do elaborate fantasy sequences where Charles Manson shows up thanking Ed for his service, or Ilse Koch chatting to him on a ham radio. And then the bizarre, but obviously a tip of the muzzle to Hannibal Lecter, where a benign, genial Ed helps the FBI catch Ted Bundy, whose crimes are detailed in genuinely horrifying detail at the start of the episode. Gein never helped the FBI. It never happened.

It's nonsense. Like Addeline Watkins’ entire story. Just bullshit. She claimed to have gone out with Ed for twenty years, and then said she barely new him for 19 of those years. She certainly wasn’t a small-town hottie running away to the big city to beat up a baddie landlady and get called talentless by Weegee. Played by Elliot Gould.

·       Tom Hollander as Hitchcock is one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen in anything. He can’t do the voice. He has these huge, rolling saucer-like eyes, he’s wobbling around in a Mr Creosote fat suit, like a Weeble that wobbles but won’t fall down. It’s astonishing. He’s a good actor. Was he stunned by falling masonry just before the cameras rolled? And why does his wife hate him and his work? Alma Reville famously spotted Janet Leigh swallowing after she was already dead, prompting a re-edit. She was his key collaborator, advising on the edit, the script, the casting. Here she’s just another angry woman, admonishing her husband for being a dirty old man. It’s just nonsense.