It may have been the hottest summer on record but 2024 has, so far, been a spectacularly sunless year in the United States as its people endure the daily slog of an exhausting and gripping election campaign. On Thursday alone, Republican grandee Liz Cheney appeared with and endorsed Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, the town where her political party was founded, while in a rally in neighbouring Michigan, Donald Trump descended into another vile portraiture of all undocumented immigrants in a particularly dark speech peppered with outright lies. For light escapism, then, millions have leaned into a splashy, glossy retelling of one of America’s darkest and most infamous true crime stories of the past 40 years.
The new Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story has been blasted by critics and subjects alike as a hot mess, a pastel-saturated retelling of the wilful and shockingly graphic patricide and matricide, by gunshot, of a wealthy Los Angeles show business couple by their sons. The TV show recreates the night of the killing in an uneasy blend of ultra-violent slaying and lifestyle advert, capturing the preppy brothers marching to the front door of their mansion, shotguns in hands to the sound of Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House.
It’s a bleak story of privilege, ambition, the relentless pursuit and hollow pleasures of the American dream fable, and delves into the brother’s claims that they were sexually abused by their father while hinting at an incestuous relationship between the pair. The performances are terrific but the integrity of the storytelling is lacking and it’s all filmed with the frothy insouciance of a 1980s MTV-era video. One of the brothers, Erik Menendez, called out director Ryan Murphy for what he described as ”vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander”.
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The public can’t get enough of it.
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It was little surprise, then, that when Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón held a press briefing on Thursday to announce that his department are reviewing the Menendez case based on new evidence, he referenced the Netflix series and the resurgence of public interest. It has led to heavy speculation that a resentencing or possibly even a retrial is on the cards.
“We have not decided on the outcome. We are reviewing the information. But I think it’s also important that we recognise that both men and women can be the victims of sexual assault… We are seeing now in the allegations in the case of Sean Combs, according to the civil lawyers, about a half of the victims, and there could be way over 100, are men. So today, we are not saying there was anything wrong with the original trial. We have been given evidence… we have been given a photocopy of a letter that allegedly was sent by one of the brothers to another family member talking about being a victim of molestation. We also have evidence provided by the defence that one of the members of a [pop] band that he was molested by the father. We are not at this point ready to say that we either believe or do not believe the information. But we are here to tell you that we have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.”
Although the murders were committed in the summer of 1989, it took the legal system until 1996 to sentence the brothers to life, after two hugely publicised trials. The ”abuse excuse” was dismissed in an era sceptical of the idea that strong, athletic young men like the brothers could fall victim to abuse. But the conversation has changed, and the dramatisation has revived the public fascination with the facts and motivations behind the case. That the Menendezes killed their parents is beyond dispute. On Monday, with perfect timing, Netflix will broadcast the Menendez story from a different perspective: a documentary framed around in-depth interviews with the brothers.
It’s arguable that the US’s obsession with true crime began with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1965, established now as a non-fiction classic even if its veracity has been questioned – the book’s final scene, at the Clutter family cemetery plot – was invented by Capote, who moved with impunity between the lines of reportage and imagination. Since then, countless television series, films and, in recent years, a podcast phenomenon have retold and investigated the more macabre stories of US societies. While several podcasts such as Serial and Bone Valley have been defined by an empathy and concern for victims and their families, the commercial popularity of shows like Monster has led to accusations that the truth is too often cast aside.
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“The Menendez brothers should be sending me flowers,” Murphy responded this week to the criticism of his interpretation of what is, in essence, a terrible family tragedy.
“They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years. And it’s got the attention of not only this country but all over the world.”
And in what is a political summer of uneasy dreams for all Americans, there is much about the revival of the Menendez story – the ongoing belief in the American dream; the easy availability of guns; disputed versions of the ”truth” the mesmerising dominance of the television show – which contains echoes of the themes and tensions of an ongoing presidential election in which the stakes have never been higher.