The nuclear family is radioactive. That can be hard to accept, especially for people who had basically happy lives growing up. For others it’s like being born into a prison from which you can never escape, where the guards know you better than anyone, and can hurt you all the worse. You don’t have to be a family abolitionist to recognize that this is a tragedy we’ve all just kind of learned to accept, like the tens of thousands of deaths that happen every year from cars or from Covid. You just have to multiply the violence inflicted by family members on family members past the dawn of the pandemic, past the invention of the car, all the way back to as long as there have been small groups of people living in intimate conditions where some are bigger and stronger than others. Every so often one of those bigger, stronger people will deal with whatever they’re dealing with by inflicting pain on the smaller ones. As with radioactivity, they’ll carry that contamination with them.
That radioactivity has a long half-life too. In “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” another breathtaking episode of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story, main characters José and Kitty Menéndez both recount the details of their own abusive households growing up. Kitty’s father beat her mother, beat her and her siblings, and then left; she says there was no sexual abuse, though with Kitty, who can tell. José’s father beat him, too, badly enough to repeatedly concuss him. (This may explain some things about José.) His mother molested him — as a joke, he insists to Kitty, but when he finally talks to her about it, he’s not laughing. He’s crying. Crying like a little boy.
So the hazardous waste that is abuse gets dumped from one generation to the next as soon as the opportunity to break free of containment presents itself. Keep in mind: José was not always a monster. As a young man (played by Orlando Pineda), he and Kitty (Belle Shouse), a literal beauty queen, meet cute when they literally bump into each other on campus. It’s love at first sight. (Director Max Winkler just whisks us through their early life together, using cuts to black that last a second or two before returning to the action after a time jump as they grow more and more committed.) He sweeps her off her feet. They have real chemistry. She stands up to her racist parents, and he to his abusive ones, to get married young.
If there’s a sour note to any of this, it’s in something José himself articulates to Kitty many years later. It does seem as though young José is capable of giving and receiving love, and that he’s attracted to and cares about Kitty. But he’s also attracted to just the concept of Kitty, a blonde beauty who can give him the family he craves so desperately. It’s the dream of a wife, the dream of a family, the dream of a life in the U.S. that he’s really after.
There’s a key exchange in this early sequence, as the pair romp in bed.
“You’re just so…American,” José marvels.
“And you’re just so nuts!” Kitty jokes back.
They’re both right.
“I hate my kids.” This is what we hear from Kitty the moment we move away from this blissful prologue. We’re not in Kansas anymore, in other words. We’re back in hell. And for the rest of the hour, that’s where we stay, watching the increasingly nightmarish behavior of José and Kitty as they systematically destroy their children, and as José systematically destroys Kitty in the process.
The writing here, by series co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, has a power of an entirely different sort than that indelible one-take interview of Erik in Episode 5 (“The Hurt Man”). That was tight, focused, restrained, in every way — the performances, the camera movement, the absence of cuts, the visibility of only a single character. This one? It’s all over the map, because that’s the only way you can capture José and Kitty. You follow their berserk mood swings wherever they lead.
Is Javier Bardem scarier as José than he was as Anton Chigurh, the No Country for Old Men villain who made him a star? Yes, honestly. With Chigurh, you know what you’re getting: a taciturn fellow in a bowl cut who will never stop until he gets the thing he wants. If you cross him, he’ll kill you; you know it, he knows it, no need to belabor it. He himself may come from out of nowhere, as he does for that poor fellow who has to call the coin toss at the gas station, but as a viewer anyway, you know what he’ll do when he arrives.
Not so with José. There is only once constant with this man: He will do the thing that makes you and his family most uncomfortable and least able to think straight for even thirty seconds. He can laugh in a way that’s scarier than when he shouts. He can plant a maddening little peck on the head of a woman to whom he has just said “I never loved you.” If he has a bad day, he’ll buy a new house. If his sons mess up, well, he’ll just have to become a U.S. senator in a state he doesn’t live in to maintain the American Dream. Even his legitimate successes, like signing the Mexican mega-pop act Menudo to their first American record contract, happens despite his admission that he doesn’t actually know anything about the music business at all.
There’s one other thing you can predict about José: He’ll never think he went far enough. When Lyle brings up his physical and emotional abuse, or when Kitty finally stays sober and summons up the courage long enough to ask him directly if anything sexual in nature is happening between him and the boys (not like she didn’t already know in her heart; she carries on like they’re two of his many mistresses), he apologizes only for not hitting them harder, not being crueler. As he explains to some poor sex worker he picks up on a business trip (he wears Caesar’s laurel during their hookup), it’s only by teaching each other real pain that men can truly bond.
No one has a scarier smile, either.
To be able to shine in Bardem’s shadow is a tall order, but not for Chloë Sevigny. In part she’s revisiting the sort of “materialistic housewife with a family secret and an abusive past” role she already nailed on Big Love. But coming from a woman two decades older, there’s nothing the least bit cute or funny about it. This woman has been broken into little pieces by José, pieces she reassembles on a daily basis with booze, enough pills to give her seizures, and the comfort of straight-up hating her sons. Easier to do that than to actually open the door to Erik’s bedroom when José drags him in there to see what they’re doing. Easier to do that than to really think about why José’s only suggestion for their house’s renovation is a shower the size of a Roman bath.
The key to this kind of performance, in terms of maintaining even a semblance of audience empathy, is to emphasize how someone like Kitty, for all her wanton cruelty and sexualization of her own relationship with the boys, is tap-dancing as fast as she can. All of her self-indulgences are ways to avoid really looking at the state her life is in for a few minutes at a time. Otherwise, she thinks of suicide. Every day. She can’t even remember the last day that went by without it. Christmas a few years ago, maybe?
I won’t lie and say that the final shot, of muzzle flashes through the glass-paned door of their house as the sons put an end to all of it, didn’t feel darkly satisfying after this episode and the ones that preceded it. Lyle and Erik spent every day of their lives having their faces smashed in by their parents, until they responded in kind.
But I feel bad for the Kitty who still feels connected to her children when they sleep, and thus present no threat to her. She didn’t have to become this woman. I feel bad for the José who calls to confront his mother about not just the way he abused her, but, as he found out from the older sister who’d tried to protect him, the abuse she suffered from an uncle.
Are they monsters? Yes. But they weren’t born that way. They were turned, like vampires. To put it another way, they were healthy, until they were exposed to their families’ nuclear waste. José can cut the boys in and out of his will however often he wants: He has already passed on their true inheritance, and the sickness is in their bones.
If you or someone you know needs to reach out about sexual abuse or assault, RAINN is available 24/7 at 800-656-HOPE (4673), or online at RAINN.org.
Can’t get enough of the Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story? For more insight, analysis, GIFs, and dance routines, check out some highlights of Decider’s coverage:
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.