I’m the target audience for Ryan Murphy’s particular brand of television. Give me Sarah Paulson, a dysfunctional setting, disturbed women, a body count and a soundtrack that’s got zero business being as hot as it is, and my day is canceled for a bingefest. I watched Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment of Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix anthology in one sitting and discovered that the Lizzie Borden of nursery-rhyme infamy has been given the full Murphy treatment.
She’s gay. Maybe.
Historically, we’ve no idea. Borden was acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1893, and there’s no evidence she had a sexual relationship with the Irish family maid, Bridget Sullivan. There’s long been speculation about Lizzie’s sexuality, particularly because of her later close relationship with actress Nance O’Neil, but the affair with Bridget is speculation versus historical record.
Murphy and Brennan didn’t produce a documentary.
In Monster, Ella Beatty’s Lizzie and Vicky Krieps’ Bridget are lovers, and their sizzling romantic Victorian relationship becomes central to the story. One critic described the invention as turning Lizzie’s story into “a love story between two women,” while another rather less charitably called the whole enterprise “white lesbian rage.”
The queerification of Lizzie makes perfect sense in the Murphyverse. Long before practically every streaming service discovered LGBTQ characters, Murphy was putting them at the center of his shows. There was Kurt Hummel on Glee. Pose built a series around New York’s Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom culture. The Normal Heart tackled the AIDS crisis. The Assassination of Gianni Versace explored gay identity, shame and homophobia alongside murder. And American Horror Story has been gloriously queer practically since somebody first put on the Rubber Man suit. Murphy once explained his approach simply: “I made them the leads instead of the sidekicks.”
And then there’s Sarah Paulson.
Paulson’s been one of Murphy’s greatest instruments for creating complicated, frequently unhinged women. In American Horror Story: Asylum, she played lesbian journalist Lana Winters, whose sexuality gets her institutionalized and subjected to conversion therapy. In Cult, her Ally Mayfair-Richards is married to a woman. Then came Ratched, with Paulson’s Mildred Ratched falling for Gwendolyn Briggs. Now Murphy has handed her Aileen Wuornos, which is where Lizzie Borden gets really interesting. Episode four suddenly jumps forward nearly a century and introduces Paulson as Wuornos, the real-life Florida serial killer who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990. Wuornos really was in a long-term relationship with Tyria Moore, whom she met in a Daytona Beach gay bar in 1986.
The series imagines Wuornos visiting the Borden house and venerating Lizzie. Historically, none of that happened. Dramatically, however, Murphy and Brennan are building a lineage: Elizabeth Báthory, Lizzie Borden, Aileen Wuornos. Murderous women passing through history and mythology, each generation rewriting the woman who came before. And Paulson’s appearance raises a question: Are we being introduced to the next Monster? Netflix’s own interview with Brennan wants us to ask. Talking about Wuornos, he says, “She’s such a fascinating character. She could easily be her own season of the show.”
No Wuornos season has been announced, so I’m not engraving this prediction just yet. But casting Sarah freaking Paulson for what could’ve been a throwaway historical detour seems like more than stunt casting. And because this is a Ryan Murphy production, even the music is queer- feminist, strange and fabulous. The deliberately anachronistic soundtrack throws The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb,” Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love,” Wet Leg, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Lambrini Girls’ “Cuntology 101” and Bronski Beat’s gay anthem “Smalltown Boy” into 1892 Massachusetts. Co-showrunner Brennan said the modern music was intended to keep the period from feeling like a “diorama.”
The Guardian called the show an “utterly bonkers, blood-soaked, borderline-fetishistic fever dream.” NME called it “maniacal melodrama” while praising that Kate Bush needle drop. Historical accuracy? Bring your own. Axes, lesbians, Sarah Paulson and Kate Bush? Ryan Murphy knows where to find me.
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