This article discusses the full season of Monster: The Ed Gein Story.Somewhere around the halfway point of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the title character stares into the camera and warns: “You shouldn’t be watching this.” In a literal sense, he’s talking to a pair of strangers who have interrupted him in the bloody aftermath of a murder. But the head-on closeup makes it clear that the so-called Butcher of Plainfield, played with eerie gentleness by Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam, is also speaking to his rapt audience of Netflix viewers. Then he revs up his chainsaw and starts chasing the men. Of course, we keep watching. In the next scene, Ed treats his first fan—his sometime girlfriend Adeline Watkins—to the spectacle of a dead, nude woman, eviscerated and strung up like a carcass in a slaughterhouse.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]It’s a short sequence that might easily get lost amid the parade of violence, gore, warped sexuality, and heavy-handed social commentary that makes up this and every season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology. Yet it encapsulates the creators’ attitude towards the millions who devour this kind of entertainment. Like the two previous installments, on Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers, Ed Gein retells in lurid—and largely fantastical—detail the legend of a notorious murderer, with the aim of discerning what our collective obsession with and inevitable misunderstanding of each case says about society. In taking on Gein, America’s ur-serial killer and the inspiration for some of our most disturbing works of art (not to mention crimes), Monster seizes the opportunity to indict the very audience that made it one of TV’s most popular shows. The upshot of this contempt is a season that layers hypocrisy as well as sanctimony over the grubby, tedious nihilism that made Dahmer so miserable to watch.Disdain for the viewer has been part of Monster’s DNA since the beginning. Each of its first two seasons opens with multiple—some might say too many—episodes reenacting the central crimes with a level of self-aware salaciousness that makes the typical TV-MA docudrama look like children’s programming. Then there’s a turn, when the human impact of the case comes to the fore and what the creators presume to be our uncritical fascination with murder schlock is challenged. In the case of Dahmer, Murphy and Brennan shift focus from Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters) to the dozens of queer men and people of color whose marginalization enabled him to make so many of them his victims. Menendez is practically a remake of American Psycho for its first three episodes, following young preppies Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik (Cooper Koch) as they execute their parents, then guzzle Chablis at a food festival, sing along to pop hits on the car stereo, and indulge in a six-figure shopping spree. But Episodes 4 and 5 are almost entirely devoted to the brothers’ harrowing accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their father (Javier Bardem) and, to a lesser extent, mother (Chloë Sevigny). It’s as though the show is saying to viewers: You wanted all the horrible details? Well, here you go, you monster. Enjoy them.Ed Gein works somewhat differently from its predecessors. Filtered through the perspective of Ed, a diagnosed schizophrenic whose inability to separate reality from his hallucinations introduces uncertainty around facts as basic as how many people he killed, the season drifts between places and time periods, real crimes and scenes that exist solely in his imagination. Treated with a sort of pitying kindness by his neighbors in 1940s Plainfield, Wisc., Ed is torn between his perverse instincts (there’s an autoerotic asphyxiation scene within the season’s first few minutes) and his devotion to an austere, religious mother, Augusta (Laurie Metcalf), who abhors sex, sin, and women; one of the latter has already taken her favorite, elder son away from her. Ed is left alone on the farm after impulsively killing that brother (whose actual death might have been accidental) for breaking up the family unit and, the next year, losing Augusta to complications from a stroke. He keeps her decomposing corpse in a rocking chair and starts robbing graves to further fuel his “hobby” of crafting with human flesh. To the two murders Gein is known to have committed, Brennan, who scripted the entire season, adds many others, though we can never be sure what’s real and what is only happening in Ed’s mind.A traditional interpretation of Gein’s unraveling is that his isolation, psychosis, and longing for Mother, along with a fixation on Nazi atrocities, combined to make this otherwise soft-spoken Midwesterner the, yes, monster he became. But Brennan adds a catalyst in Adeline (Suzanna Son), depicting her as his soulmate and the person who most encourages his violence, in a characterization built almost purely on speculation. Beautiful, sexy, ambitious, and depraved, she is Mother’s worst nightmare. And just about everything unspeakable Ed does can, in this telling, be traced back to her. It’s spying on a lingerie-clad Adeline that gets him worked up in the opening asphyxiation bit. A connoisseur of morbid media, she shows him concentration camp photos and gives him comics about the sadistic Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), a.k.a. the Bitch of Buchenwald, who inspires him to make lampshades and belts out of human skin. (Adeline’s obsession with the crime-scene photography of Weegee leads her to New York, where she becomes a murderer in her own right.) In one awful scene, she goads him to try necrophilia. “Nothing human can disgust me,” she tells Ed. “I think if a human can do it, it’s fascinating.” This sentiment identifies her as the show’s audience surrogate—the archetypal true crime fangirl. Adeline pores over the most gruesome documents of human experience available; she gets off on her proximity to a man who is killing people and defiling dead bodies. Yet her relationship with Ed is entirely selfish. After his arrest, she dolls herself up to give interviews in which she claims they were merely acquaintances and tries to change the subject to talk up her own dubious charms and talents. Like a fan geeking out at CrimeCon, she derives vicarious pleasure from real people’s pain but has empathy for neither the victims nor the tortured villain.Adeline is a forerunner of the hordes we see flocking to Ed once he is a celebrity—the line of gawkers who tour his home and bid on his belongings, without realizing the man running the auction is the son of a victim; the patrons at sold-out screenings of William Castle’s exploitative “sex horror” flicks; serial killers of the ’70s and ’80s who riff on his methods. Adeline is a point of comparison, too, for artists influenced by Ed. Brennan blurs his story with iconic images and tall tales from movies based on it: Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs. But the filmmakers’ motivations for glomming on to Ed are depicted as being noble. “I wish to change cinema to reflect how we are, not how we wish we were,” Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) declares, launching into a Freud-inflected monologue about repression. A generation later, Chain Saw director Tobe Hooper uses the Gein-esque Leatherface as a commentary on the Vietnam War. “I wanna scare people,” he says. “I wanna wake everybody up.”Ed Gein isn’t wrong to note that great art has arisen from engagement with true crime (though Chain Saw’s inclusion in that canon is debatable). But its insistence that the people who consume this stuff are the real monsters, more than the well-compensated storytellers who cash in on the ravenous appetites of that audience, seems mighty convenient for Brennan and Murphy—longtime collaborators known for serving up prurient thrills in shows often (quite loosely) based on real events. Monster has, itself, been the target of criticism from people like the Menendezes and the families of Dahmer’s victims, who feel their traumas have been milked for sensation rather than sublimated into high art. I guess it’s possible that Brennan identifies more with Castle than with Hitchcock. In that case, Ed Gein is also a show that hates itself.Still, in the end, it’s not the sleaze peddler or even the eponymous murderer who comes off looking the worst. Portrayed throughout the season as an unholy fool of sorts, free of malice and premeditation and utterly harmless once properly medicated, Ed redeems himself to a certain extent. From the asylum where he’s confined, he helps the FBI capture Ted Bundy—a flourish that has no basis in fact. And as he approaches death, he escapes the phalanx of creeps who idolize him in an imagined (or cosmic) reunion with the mother whose love and approval he craved. “You really made a name for us Geins,” she says. “And I couldn’t be more proud.”We see Adeline once more in the finale, when she visits Ed after decades of estrangement. He asks why she never wrote to him and lied about their relationship. “It would have been nice to have a person care about me,” he tells her. “Instead of all those killer guys.” Her explanation suggests that she is bipolar but unwilling to be medicated; she prefers to embrace her darkness. Also, she’s brought a list of “people I’ve gotta get rid of.” It repulses Ed, and though he still loves her, he leaves her behind. In the world of Monster, a person who takes lives and desecrates corpses might someday be capable of redemption. A fan of Monster, though? No such luck.