“It’s like your mind is a mirror that somebody dropped on the floor. So everything you’ve ever seen or heard or read or imagined — there are all these shards reflecting back at you, and you can’t tell what’s real and what’s a fantasy.”
This is how the psychiatrist (Randall Newsome) treating Ed Gein at the mental hospital where he has been institutionalized describes Ed’s condition. It’s schizophrenia, he says, and it’s caused him to remember commiting crimes he never committed — like killing the new head nurse for bullying him, in a scene that may or many even have been real itself — he didn’t do, as well as forget ones he did — like killing Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, the latter of whom at least he considered a friend. (He does eventually remember killing Bernice and Mary, the only two victims every officially linked to Gein, and he’s devastated to realize it.)
It’s also writer-creator Ian Brennan’s approach to this material. The titular story is only partially about Ed Gein the man; it’s largely about Ed Gein the myth. Covering both his official victims and those he is suspected of killing, it’s working through the entire American Gein gestalt. As such it ricochets back and forth from the past to the future, from fiction to reality.
We’ve seen how it treats Adeline Watkins’s recanted story of being Ed’s long-term love interest as real. We’ve seen a feedback loop between Ed’s crimes and his comic books, between Adeline’s involvement in the carnage and her love of the gory crime scene photos of real-life photographer Weegee, who shows up for a fictional cameo in order to denounce her.
Adeline’s in this episode two, helping drum up business for the increasingly drunk and depressed Deputy Frank Worden’s auction of Ed’s “estate.” (Someone burns the place down before he can go through with it it, but he gets a lot of lookie-lous in the run=up.)
We’ve already seen how the show has tied in Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, films inspired in part by Gein’s crimes. Now it links up with The Silence of the Lambs and the character of Buffalo Bill, a skinsuit-wearing serial killer played by actor Ted Levine (here played by actor Golden Garnick). Like Ed, Bill “becomes” a woman by wearing women’s skin.
As Dr. Hannibal Lecter puts it in the film, Bill is not a transgender woman — he’s a man who “covets what he sees every day,” i.e. women he stalks, abducts, murders, and skins. He’s about as trans as Ted Bundy, not that this has stopped morons and bigots from associating Bill with trans women for ages now.
It’s with this in mind that the show gives Ed Gein a ham radio, with which he has a pair of wholly imaginary conversations.
In the first, he contacts Ilse Koch, still in prison for her depredations during the Holocaust. The woman is an utterly unrepentant anti-Semite, but denies her lurid behavior in Ed’s comics — from riding around in her bra on a donkey to making human-skin lampshades. Her denials echo Ed’s own at this time.
They do her no good, as we later see the “real” Ilse hang herself in prison after being warned by a Jewish guard that she can’t stop the golem of revenge that’s coming for her. A golem is a creature of clay given magical life to protect Jewish people and wreak havoc on their enemies — yet another blurring of the border between having a body and being alive that Ed can’t seem to wrap his mind around.
Ed’s second imaginary conversation is with an altogether different class of person: Christine Jorgenson (Alanna Darby), the pioneering American trans woman, currently living a life of luxury with a crisp mid-Atlantic accent. (Darby is a hoot in the role, making fantastically funny ‘I’m sorry, I’m trying to be patient with you, but what?’ faces at all of Ed’s admissions and confessions.)
In the end, she rejects entirely the idea that Ed is a transgender woman like she is. He may enjoy dressing up in women’s underwear and singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” but this is a man trained from birth to see femininity as sin incarnate. Ever notice how everyone, including Ilse Koch, refers to him as “naughty” or a “naughty boy” when he wears lingerie? It’s a kink, not an identity.
Christine suggests that Ed suffers from an extreme form of gynephilia, defined here more or less as sexual obsession with the female body. When Ed kills women — he has a violent fantasy here of ramming his chainsaw in and out of the head nurse that echoes the deliberately penetrative drill attack in Brain De Palma’s Body Double — and wears their skin, he’s acting on a simultaneous fixation on and disgust with women. They mean nothing to him as people until he can claim them as his own, right down to their literal flesh and bone. (It’s misogyny, in other words, even if Ed remains far too polite to actually give voice to it.)
This raises a thorny issue. In some anti-trans circles, the term “autogynephilia,” distinct but linked, is often employed to allege that there’s a class of trans woman out there who are actually just weird deluded women-hating men playing dress-up. This, of course, is what transphobes believe about all trans women. Given that there’s no evidence that Ed was an admirer of Jorgensen, and little evidence to suggest he dressed up as a woman in, you know, the traditional way, the show is playing with fire here.
But boy oh boy is it making an effort. Monster is saying, as explicitly as possible, like in so many words, that Ed Gein was not trans, and that trans women are exponentially more likely to be victims of misogynist violence than commit it. It’s linking his killing of women with the hatred of women both drilled into his head and evoked by his mother, seen here grabbing his genitals so hard after catching him masturbating as a teen that he was afraid she was going to tear them off.
Since trans women have been dragged into the Ed Gein story over the decades, and since that legend is what this show is really about, The Ed Gein Story raises the issue in an attempt to debunk it. (While I prefer to evaluate what’s on screen rather than what filmmakers say about what’s on screen, it’s worth reading Brennan’s own words on what he was trying to do here.)
The episode even ends on an up note, if you can believe that, with Ed taking his first round of meds and hugging the nurse he genuinely thought he’d murdered earlier. The show really leans hard here into how fucking miserable Ed’s insanity makes him, and this moment of grace is a moving one despite it all. Of course, that’s nice for Ed and all. But a lot of other lives were shattered by his own fractured-mirror of a mind. Their grace notes never come.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.