You’ve seen Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, maybe you’ve even read the books that the first two films were adapted from – now come and meet the guy behind Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill and Leatherface! The one, the only Ed Gein! Yay!
The opening two seasons of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Monster dealt first with Jeffrey Dahmer (you gotta open with good name recognition, right?), and then with the Menendez brothers (bit classier, li’l bit more niche, get the real dedicated true crime fans to commit). Now it’s time for the Butcher of Plainfield – or, if you prefer, the Plainfield Ghoul – to take his turn in the spotlight. It’s only fair. He may not have the same brand recognition as Dahmer, Bundy or even John Wayne Gacy, and he only killed two people, but he desecrated so many female graves and corpses with such gusto and inventiveness that to this day if you find yourself watching anything involving mutilated corpses, flayed bodies or homewares made out of skin, the chances are it’s been inspired by this guy’s exploits more than 70 years ago. And they say that people don’t know history any more!
Do I sound flippant? Well, it’s clearly the way everyone behind Monster: The Ed Gein Story wants it. I’ve rarely seen a drama that lingers more gleefully or lasciviously over the worst depredations a man and – when it comes to the substantial narrative strand given over to Nazi atrocities – mankind can commit with little or no possible justification.
Structurally and stylistically, it’s great. Can’t fault the pacing, the clever interweaving of the past (in which Charlie Hunnam as Gein commits the murders, the grave robberies, and assembles his collection of female body parts) and the present (in which the details of his crimes are pored over again by Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bloch and Anthony Perkins as they create Psycho from Bloch’s Gein-inspired novel). The same applies to the real (Gein’s life dominated by his fervidly religious mother; his increasing obsession with women, dead or alive, who resembled her) and the unreal (lurid, fetishistic scenes of Gein’s other great passion: Ilse Koch, the Butcher of Buchenwald who was said to have killed Jews to make lampshades out of their skin). Those party scenes at the SS officers’ houses where the hosts’ children shave terrified prisoners’ heads and guests chase others round the house with whips are really well shot.
What it lacks, and unforgivably so – even if we in this country weren’t watching in the wake of the antisemitic murders at Heaton Park synagogue – is any kind of moral dimension or commentary to outweigh the lingering, loving shots of Gein’s own depraved acts. We see his vibrant fantasy life and how he is positioned as a man entirely at the mercy of first his mother on their isolated farm together, and then a would-be girlfriend who shares some of his early morbid fascinations and brings him some photos of concentration camp victims and his first Ilse Koch comic. What, seems to be the message, is a poor, schizophrenic guy to do? Over dinner with Hitchcock (Tom Hollander in a performance almost as bad as the prosthetics he is buried under), Bloch surmises that had Gein never seen the photographs “he would have stayed a small town simpleton”.
Now, you could argue that a drama from the Ryan Murphy stable (he is executive producer here – it’s directed by Max Winkler and written by Ian Brennan), known for its glossy, frequently high-camp productions, is the wrong place to be looking for insight into the human condition. But The People v OJ Simpson was a brilliant commentary on the transition of America into the media age and the ramifications playing out now. The Assassination of Gianni Versace had things to say about fame and the celebrification of culture. And Impeachment examined embedded and internalised misogyny, even if it didn’t entirely escape accusations of perpetuating it. So it can be done, and Murphy can do it.
But not here. The Ed Gein Story feels like it is interested only in bringing an underexploited piece of true crime estate to market, and in demanding sympathy for the man behind the skin masks and boxes of carved out trophies. It is not an exercise in understanding how he might have been created – beyond the glib and asinine “religious ma, whatcha expect?” offering – and therefore how new Geins might be prevented. It is nothing but a voyeuristic pandering to the basest instincts of viewers. Lovely lighting in the Nazi bits, though. Gotta give the boys that.
