10:7:24

Some notes on Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, which I finished watching last week. I will refrain from analyzing the real-life murder case. I don’t know enough about it and did not watch the trial when it took place. I was too young. Edited to add: The documentary, The Menendez Brothers (2024) that just came out on Netflix, is a much more interesting and deeply sad account of the case. I have my theories about why the brothers received their brutal retrial (where the abuse defense and the 56 defense witnesses were completely omitted) and final verdict. The powers that be wanted to make sure they spend their life in prison, without appeal. In my opinion, it is no accident that their father, Jose Menendez, was a powerful music and entertainment executive and head of RCA records, making him a prominent Hollywood player. Yet again, this a devastating story (link is for the 3-part documentary series, Menendez & Menudo Boys Betrayed 2023) about what happens to children in this world—both rich and poor—at the hands of the predatory elite class. In the case of Menudo boys, Egdargo Diaz’s handpicking and auditioning of the constantly rotating members, who were swapped out at age 16 for younger members, was the exact same playbook as Lou Pearlman’s behavior with Backstreet Boys and NYNC, and Diddy’s courting and grooming of Usher and Justin Bieber (48 hours alone with him, “unsupervised,” in an “undisclosed location;” the offer of a sports car at 15, etc.). Not to mention the (“DEN”) Hollywood sex parties thrown by director Bryan Singer and Marc-Collins Rector, who abused and trafficked underage boys and child actors, and which I wrote about two years ago on this blog.

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The “multiple perspectives” Murphy purports to be so in service to is actually a total demolition and gaslighting of the truth, both historical and interpretive. All of Murphy’s projects are perverse ugly head fucks against interpretive coherence, understanding, and shared meaning. His grotesque music video meta-worlds are sociopathic acts of cultural and historical manipulation and spin, spawning copycats and Satanic industry probes like The Substance (2024) and Blink Twice (2024), which are products of these industries rather than critical examinations. Murphy thinks that audience critique is synonymous with audience “confusion,” as he calls it. If we question or don’t like what he does, it’s because we don’t “get it.” We’re not sophisticated enough to appreciate his “vision.” Before him, there was no great cinema or popular art.

Murphy’s clanish casts function like Monarch programing. His creative dynasty, both on and off camera, is one big gross echelon of wealth and power. His collections of beautiful houses (all decorated by a former close friend of mine), his collections of art, his collections of bad actors, his collections of stories, his collections of children—3 boys all by surrogates (kids made via IVF and through surrogacy are always commodified). Like many Nouveau Riche “creators,” he is obsessed with the idea that he has taste because he doesn’t have taste. He buys other people’s taste. In the adderallic, psycho-sexual vampirism that is Ryan Murphy’s body of work, everything is homoerotized, and all women are Toxic Feminines re-branded into “female idols.”

All famous and overrated people are thin-skinned and narcissistic. It isn’t enough for them to be rich, famous, praised, and ubiquitous, they are always the victim of some mean critic, bad review, or insensitive online comment, which they then spend years talking about in public. They’ll take all the praise, anything else is an assault on their fragile ego. Chloe Sevigny is the Queen of this poor-me act. The examples of her complaints are countless, from not wining Oscars she should have won, to once being told decades ago that one side of her face is better than the other (something, by the way, every actor and model is told by photographers and directors, me included. Faces are not symmetrical. And it didn’t stop her from being constantly photographed for decades) to the injustice of aging on screen and what she may have to do about it cosmetically. This is the wisdom a now-50 year old woman has to offer the world. Her performance in Monsters is excruciatingly bad. The older she gets, the worse her acting is. In an effort to be a good (“real”) actress, her screen contrivance and self-consciousness becomes more and more apparent. It is painful to watch. The key to socially engineered “It” girls is that they don’t actually have any real talent, just networks of sycophants, press, and professional connections that run their engine of perpetual hype. The two male leads that play the Menendez brothers are also awful, as many actors of today’s generation are. They have zero essence, zero aura, zero interiority, which is what makes an actor interesting—not the role. As conflicted as I am about acting and actors, and what acting really even is besides Mkultra, besides knowing how to dissociate very well, besides having multiple alters, besides lying, some part of me still believes the only way you can be an interesting actor is if you are an interesting person, with an interesting face—at least on camera. It’s still a very bizarre thing to be able to do on cue, in front of other people, cameras, and light, but those are the terms. I don’t necessarily even think this quality or talent applies to American actors (are American entertainers acting or are they programmed?), at least not anymore. It’s really how I feel about British, European, and Latin American character actors, who do not work in the Hollywood canon or system. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that Hollywood actors are political puppets and their scripts no longer belong to the movies. Movies are secondary vehicles for the primary dissemination of ideology.

Back to the “multiple perspectives” approach: How can anyone come up with “their own interpretation” of the Menendez Brothers, as Murphy—who thinks he is Robert Altman making Short Cuts, a movie I always found sadistic and never liked —suggests, if all the perspectives he presents are completely contradictory and invalidated with each new episode? The brothers were abused, the brothers lied about being abused. Murphy wants you to believe them, Murphy wants you think they are liars. The parents were bad, the parents were good. The brothers were afraid of their parents, the parents were afraid of their sons. The father was abused, the father was gay. The mother knew about the abuse, the mother didn’t know about the abuse. Every so-called “perspective” is wildly subjective and unreliable. Not one fact or narrative thread is consistently true or shared between any of the characters. Murphy cannot even decide whether he thinks the mother, Kitty Menendez, was a pill-popping alcoholic. In some episodes she is, and can barely walk or talk. In other episodes, she is in full command and seemingly completely sober and as sadistic as Jose Menendez, the father. Likewise, in some episodes, she hates her husband, who is cruel and philandering. In later episodes, they are the perfect couple. None of these wildly opposing depictions are explained. They all coexist. Everything in Murphy’s world is POV. Everyone lives in their own bipolar narcissistic omnipotent universe. As long as he can promote chaos, abjection, dissociation, and degradation, he will use any excuse to create “monstrous” characters taken from “real life.” This is what I have been calling the rug-pulled-out-from-under-you entertainment.

The Menendez Brothers, 2024

The Menendez Brothers, 2024 

In traditional film noir, even neo-noir, as I have argued, it is the diegetic characters who are betrayed, gaslight, and mislead. Betrayal and gaslighting—a 1944 psychological thriller, Gaslight, by George Cukor, was even made to introduce the concept—had its own category. Noir was just what the word means: black, bleak, depraved; the result of the horrors and ravages of the industrial military complex of WWI and WWII. In recent contemporary film and television, it is the audience that is mislead and gaslit. This is a divisive and disturbing cultural shift, which I argue started after 2010. I first noticed it with the movie Up in The Air. It seemed to rapidly progress from there. In traditional noir, no matter the betrayal, the truth is eventually revealed. If we can’t believe or genuinely invest in anything that we see and hear onscreen, in anything any of the characters are doing and saying—regardless of genre—it makes art and entertainment meaningless and void of purpose. All that exists is the lie. I refer to this as the betrayal principle. If our investment in art is purely cynical and negative, predicated on expecting betrayal from everyone involved—including the narrative itself—why bother watching anything at all? Multiple perspectives for the sake of multiple perspectives leads to incoherence If none of the perspectives and points of view in Murphy’s series have anything in common with one another, if they never coalesce, if everyone’s narratives and realities are completely incompatible and at odds (a product of an MKultra culture and mass consciousness), there is no unity, there is no understanding—interpretively or diegetically. There is only conflict, incoherence, narcissism, fantasy, distortion, and chaos. And that’s what Murphy and his political vision of America gives us. America is the Tower of Babel. This Globalist debauched America is so buried in the empty “diversity” of perspectives, identities, and narratives, no one can see straight, no one can understand anything, no one knows why anything happens, no one knows what anything means, no one knows what the truth is, everyone suffers, no one can talk to each other without being offended and outraged.

Murphy’s Monsters is structured through a dishonest and highly subjective lens that is never rooted in reality or objective truth. Ever. How does one make “meaning” out of that? How does one come to conclusions about guilt and innocence, as Murphy instructs, from that? How can one form sound opinions about a story or legal case if everything is counterfeit—both art and life—and evidence is manipulated and caricaturized for entertainment? Turned into complete falsehood? Why deal with real-life material at all if that is your approach to it? Because the Menendez brothers were accused of being pathological liars, Murphy’s pathologically dishonest approach to their story/case only adds to this confusion. So why bring it to the screen 35 years later? Art is supposed to bring illumination and depth, not mock reality and degrade humanity. Murphy does the same thing with his 2022 series on Jeffrey Dahmer. Many families of Dahmer’s victims felt that Murphy, who never personally contacted any of them about making the series, exploited their pain for entertainment. Despite his claims, Murphy is not actually interested in questions or determinations about guilt or innocence, much less multiple perspectives—or what he calls “moral Agnosticism.” He is interested in making money and turning art into tabloid, not the other way around. Despite his pretensions, he ain’t no John Waters or Paul Morrissey.

Take this example: If, as Murphy insists in the short interview linked above, the rumor of incest between the Menendez brothers was just that, a rumor (one that he himself does not believe to be true) and an unpublished theory, mostly espoused by Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne, why does Murphy have the brothers making out at a afternoon party at one point, high on coke, in front of a room full of teenagers? What is that about? Why show us that unless you want it to titillate people into being aroused by the idea of open incest—apparently, now one of the most popular porn searches. Murphy doesn’t make this scene private, which he could have. He makes the incest public. If it’s just a theory, and one that he claims to not believe, why make the incest claim such a prominent one in his series—another perspective? Murphy features incest scenes between the brothers in other episodes as well, and the entire relationship between them is infused with this sexual energy. In all his work, he visually illustrates every gruesome detail and theory about a crime, creating a erotic libidinal cathection with these images. He wants the viewer to see these things, he wants them to be in your head. He wants you develop a taste and proclivity for these things, which he labels “true crime” stories—a kind of disclaimer— precisely for the purpose of making these criminal and deviant behaviors “normal,” likable, and desirable. If you can emotionally identify with it, maybe it isn’t so bad.

There is also Murphy’s much-discussed habit of making all the male serial killers in his shows “hot.” His leads always have muscular gym bodies that are tan, waxed, oiled, and on constant display. The point, of course, is to eroticize these bad men. He famously did this in his series about Dahmer by emphasizing Dahmer’s (played by Evan Peters, who spent months training for the part) jacked body throughout the series. In real life, Dahmer was not a stud. He was plain, geeky, and pretty ugly. As viewers have noted online, these Hollywood makeovers lead people to then make thirst trap videos about Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. Is Nicholas Alexander Chávez, who plays Lyle Menendez, a troubled young man, or a gay male sex cartoon? The same thing happened with Dahmer’s mug shot after Murphy released his gratuitous Netflix series, which relies heavily on eroticizing the clandestine normal-guy template and perpetuating the lone serial killer theory that people like David McGowan have brilliantly disputed in books like Programmed to Kill. With the release of Murphy’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a whole new generation of people began lusting after Dahmer, the “Monster,” on X. A culture obsessed with micro-traumas and the insult of words and pronouns makes an exception when it comes to sexually objectifying and fetishizing violent cannibals, killers, and rapists. As long as Dahmer wasn’t racist, Murphy tells us, anything goes. Case in point: when Ariana Grande, who admitted to not only being a witch but the “witchiest” of witches, was recently asked if she could have dinner with anyone, who would it be, she answered—I kid you not—Jeffrey Dahmer. It would be “I think it would be so fascinating,” she told the press. Fascinating in what way? The dinner context seems particularly bizarre and sinister given Dahmer ate his victims.

Murphy’s take on Dahmer showcases a disturbing social investment in negative and even suicidal attachment to bad men, all while Woke establishment discourse pretends to be mortally offended by traditional straight white masculinity and its “bad” identity politics. But now gay makes it okay, where once gay made it bad. Murphy’s version of Dahmer cloaks its bloodlust and fetishization of violence and cultural narcissism behind the problem of inequity. He claims he made the series to address Dahmer’s racism. The real sin, according to Liberal Hollywood, is not that Dahmer was a psychopathic cannibal, rapist, and killer, or that he may have been procuring boys for an elite Satanic sex trafficking ring, but that he preyed upon poor men of color (as opposed to only white men? Or everyone?), according to one of the richest and most powerful white men working in Hollywood. The focus on the “privilege” (despite fact that he was poor) of Dahmer’s race is exploitive virtue signaling. As I mentioned, the series greatly upset many of the victims’ families, whom Murphy did not contact or consult with before or after the series was made. So he hardly gave a shit about race and class when it came to exploiting these people’s lives for entertainment.

In his latest installment of Monsters, Murphy also prides himself on having the Menendez brothers describe “in great detail” the sexual abuse they endured at the hands of their father from the time they were children. Yes, this is true. In fact, he makes us listen to the brothers describe the same account of abuse over and over, in great detail, in numerous episodes. Again, as viewers, we are meant to both believe the brothers’ testimonies and believe they are liars. How does this work? Moreover, why subject us to the same graphic and disturbing details again and again throughout the series? Once (especially when it lasted an entire episode—one hour) was enough. No one wants to hear these horrors repeatedly described, especially people who may have experienced these terrible things in real life. But somehow Murphy delights in having his viewers imagine small boys being raped by their father with specific objects, no less. Boys he spends hours trying to discredit and pervert in various ways throughout the series. Boys who are presented, over and over, as liars and sociopaths.

Murphy doesn’t take any of his characters seriously, so why should we? That leaves us to ask: what the point of all this? The point is to lie. The point is not tell the truth, not deepen our understanding of this case.

Murphy likes to mix all these horrors and overlapping tragedies into one big party bag. His entire career is a soundtrack to nightmares that have no greater point besides breeding shallow (fake) empathy and shallow portrayal. As YouTuber IfaBukolaThePrizm notes, “Dysfunction makes money and drives the world markets.” And yet, despite the objections and complaints from the Menendez brothers and others, Murphy had the gall to declare: "My series may be the best thing that has happened to the brothers in 30 years.”  

While Murphy makes a fortune with his homo-aesthetics of corruption and violence—something the gay killer films like Cruising (1980), Silence of the Lambs (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992) were once maligned and boycotted for by gay activists—we get perverted and seduced into loving it now that we live in the gay regime. It seems the big problem was the sexuality of those earlier directors (they were straight, at least as far as we know). Despite Erik Menendez’s denial that he is gay, both during his trial testimonies and prison sentence, Murphy’s series insists that Erik is gay and spends a great deal of time convincing us of this (Erik gets Jean Genet-style blow jobs in prison, which he greatly enjoys). Erik’s gay relationship in Monsters, in real life was actually a straight relationship with a girl named Kristen Smith. Remember how much outrage ensued when the switch would happen the other way around? How dare we make gay people straight.

If you don’t think Murphy is sexually grooming his young audiences (remember he started his career with Glee, which was about kids and aired on network TV. I also just found out he directed and co-wrote Eat Pray Love, a movie I’ve always hated. Now I know why. I was also trying to figure out why Javier Bardem agreed to be in the series), just listen to this cooing Hollywood ET reporter refer to the Menendez’ brothers possibly incestuous relationship as “romantic"! A “romance,” by the way, spawned by years of both brothers allegedly being raped and emotionally abused by their father all their lives, and Lyle Menendez admitting on the stand that he molested his younger brother in the same way that his father had molested him. Some romance. Why call it romantic, why not use the word “supportive”or “trauma-bond”? That would make more sense for two young brothers in that situation, right? I would never use the word “romantic.” Unless you want to eroticize sexual abuse, pedophilia, incest, and trauma, and turn it into a seductive entertainment trope for the masses to normalize, fetishize, and consume. Seems like Murphy, and the media establishment that worships and enables him, want us to think that incest and pedophilia is warm, fuzzy, and fun. And gay and hot. In his own words, Murphy is a “provocateur.” We are living in a time when the frauds and talentless hucksters have full creative and political control of our culture. They believe they are geniuses because the real geniuses are all gone now. And apparently, there’s nothing we can do about it but believe them.