According to Netflix’s companion website, Tudum, the latest season leans into widespread speculation that despite her acquittal, Borden was actually guilty of the murders.
This is relevant because of the bizarre reaction to the recent Lindsay Clancy trial, which should raise a big, bright red flag about the deepening degradation of human life taking place in Western countries at present. Clancy admitted to killing her children, and yet for many, those three little lives took a backseat to the real and imagined trials and tribulations of Clancy herself.
That moral movement did not emerge out of a void – it is mirrored in the focus of TV shows like Monster. It is the product of a culture increasingly obsessed with excusing crime rather than punishing it and of dark fascination with human extremes rather than a more appropriate sense of horror.
Nothing about the latest Lizzie Borden season does anything other than vindicate this view, from the promotional material to the cast and crew's own explanations of their work.
A Sensual Take on Savagery
The image spread far and wide in the run-up to this week’s launch features Lizzie Borden (played by Ella Beatty) gazing at the viewer with a look that would not be out of place in a Calvin Klein advertisement, the bloodied axe with which she presumably murdered her parents resting on her lower lip.
Coupled with the glamorous shots of the stars on the red carpet and the use of playful axe emojis in the social media posts, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the subject matter is a story that culminates in two people having their heads shattered into pieces.
But perhaps those people, Borden’s father and stepmother, had it coming? Or if not, perhaps such a fate was unavoidable given the oppressive circumstances within which Borden was expected to live her life? Once again, Tudum sheds light on the warped worldview behind the anthology.
In an article about the artistic license taken with Netflix’s portrayal of the Lizzie Borden story, readers are told that as Monster imagines it, Lizzie’s alleged murder of her parents was the “inevitable result of a stifling Victorian life under the thumb of her father Andrew … and stepmother Abby”.
“When new housemaid Bridget 'Maggie' Sullivan … is hired, she sweeps Lizzie off her feet and encourages her to embrace her dark side”, it says. “But just how dark will surprise both of them”.
It outlines a world of corsets and “uptight” dinners that confine Lizzie and “symbolize the psychological and societal constraints she felt”. The actress who plays Borden, Beatty, goes so far as to say that these physical elements were indicative of the origins of Borden’s emotional life, and that in her interpretation, this was where “a lot of that rage and strength emerged from”.
The language used to describe an axe murderer, for that is what the show takes her to be, is almost indistinguishable from that which might be used to describe a woman who triumphed over another, less bloody, challenge. It is the feminist playbook: women, even in murder, can do no wrong. And when they do, it is because they were wronged first, by society as much as by the people in their lives.
Traumatic Retellings
While Borden’s story is distant enough to be akin to the stuff of fiction – which is what Netflix has decided to make of it – the exercise itself is not a victimless crime. When the show made its debut telling the twisted tale of the aforementioned gay serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and dismembered 17 men and boys over a 13-year spree, engaging in cannibalism and necrophilia along the way, critics and families took it to task for profiting off their trauma.
The Los Angeles Times quoted Eric Perry, a relative of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey, as saying that he wanted people to understand that it was not “just a story or historical fact”, but involved real lives.
“[Lindsey] was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father, someone’s friend that was ripped from [our] lives”, he told the LA Times on that occasion.
While Monster is hardly the primary culprit behind the growing desensitization to the value of human life, it is a concrete example of how it comes about. The foundational, sacred concept of the imago Dei – the image of God in man – is set beneath man as a spectacle and as entertainment.
That being the case, it should be no surprise when the media attempts to stimulate darkened sensibilities with ever more dehumanizing shock and horror.
