CW: Sexual assault.
In a true Ryan Murphy curveball, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story not only features Borden but one of history’s most infamous female serial killers, Aileen Wuornos.
In the fourth episode of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix series, we take time away from the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892 to meet Wuornos (played by Murphy regular Sarah Paulson). Hitchhiking in Florida in 1988, she’s picked up by a man, introducing herself as Lizzie Borden. “Like the axe murderer?” he asks.
In the scene, Paulson’s Wuornos gleefully sings Suzi Quatro out loud then negotiates sex work with the driver. However, the encounter ends in bloodshed. Taken to an empty lot, Wuornos is sexually assaulted by the man, after which she shoots him dead with a pistol. In real life, Wuornos testified that she was raped by one of her victims. (A warning, this is not the only rape scene in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.) But Monster doesn’t stop with the man’s shooting, Paulson’s Wuornos suddenly hacks at his penis with an axe in a blatant Borden association. It’s gratuitous as hell.
Aileen Wuornos stays at the Borden house?
Credit: Netflix
During the series, Wuornos is also shown as finding comfort and conviction in Borden’s story, reading her biography aloud in a hotel room with her girlfriend, Shelby (Jessie Lee) — not Tyria Moore, Wuornos’ real girlfriend. In a furious monologue in episode 4, Wuornos not only celebrates Borden as a feminist icon but as her direct inspiration for the seven killings she would go on to be arrested, jailed, and executed for.
“She gave the world a warning that women shouldn’t stand for this shit anymore,” Monster‘s Wuornos declares. “The way women are treated, still, to this day, that’s why I’m gonna do something about it.”
Mashable Top Stories
Monster goes even further into Wuornos’ Borden obsession, with episode 5 seeing her staying in the Borden house, a 134-year-old crime scene which is now a macabre bed and breakfast. There’s no evidence Wuornos visited the house at all. In a deeply inappropriate Ryan Murphy moment, Wuornos hallucinates Abby (Borden’s stepmother) during sex with Shelby on the couch where Andrew (Borden’s father) was murdered.
Disneyland for Aileen Wuornos.
Credit: Netflix
Later in the episode, Wuornos takes heroin in Lizzie’s room as a moment of “shooting up” solidarity. “Lizzie did, and so am I,” she says, in a jaw-droppingly ridiculous moment. And in episode 6, Shelby and Wuornos celebrate their anniversary with a pizza on the dining table where Abby and Andrew’s bodies were placed by police, before Wuornos has a ghostly fan encounter with Borden herself.
If all this sounds messed up, it is!
The connection between Wuornos and Borden is one forced by Monster, as a means to bring two notorious female killers (one acquitted, one executed) together in one show. The show champions both as murderers whose hands were forced by their treatment, particularly by men. It could also be a means for the showrunners to shoehorn Wuornos’ story into the Monster series, instead of running a separate series like the controversial chapters on serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein.
Considering Charlize Theron won an Oscar for portraying Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’ 2003 film Monster, the titles will now sit side-by-side in streaming catalogues at least.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix.
If you have experienced sexual assault, you can call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access 24-7 help online by visiting hotline.rainn.org.
