Author: Robin Reinders

The diabolical exploitation of the Menéndez brothers.

Lyle Menéndez (left) and Erik Menéndez (right) during their highly publicised trial. / Associated Press

‘Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. As such, I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamour and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved.’ — Erik Menéndez in response to Monsters

If you are not familiar with the Menéndez brothers, I simultaneously feel very sorry for and very envious of you. The 1989 murder case of wealthy entertainment tycoon Jose Menéndez and his wife Kitty, fatally shot in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion, may predate bite-sized TikTok rundowns, long-winded docuseries and ‘white woman true crime podcasts’. But by no means could the trial of the brothers responsible be described as anything other than a media circus—one that dominated the televisions and tabloids of the early nineties and turned suffering into spectacle, their tragedy into tableau. Nearly thirty-five years have passed, though the echoes of that anguish refuse to fade.

The public’s fetish for this case — and discourse surrounding the brothers’ defence that they were sexually abused by their father — are once again brought into controversial conversation with Ryan Murphy’s newest instalment of Monsters. This is not the place for learning about the idiosyncrasies of the Menéndez brothers’ crime; this is a place solely dedicated to the scrutinisation of the heinous and invented story Ryan Murphy so bumptiously tells. It is a place for examining the wounds he has reopened and unpacking why this spurious and irresponsible distortion of the truth matters. In August of 1989, Lyle and Erik Menéndez, twenty-one and eighteen respectively, shot and killed their father and mother. It is crucial before watching and digesting the fiction of this programme you understand why. In 2005, Erik Menéndez would tell People magazine: ‘It’s as if there was kerosene all over the floor that a match could light at any time. And my soul was burnt to death. The way I reacted was so destructive to all. It was the most awful devastation.’

Cooper Koch (left) as Erik Menéndez and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (right) as Lyle Menéndez. / Netflix

I’ll come clean and admit to being borderline ecstatic when I heard there was a new series about the Menéndez brothers coming out. It’s a case that sits very close to my heart, and affects me to a degree no fictional tragedy could ever hope to inspire. But I was less so after seeing it was produced by Netflix, even less upon learning it would be spearheaded by Ryan Murphy and the next instalment in his ‘true crime’ franchise. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story. Shuddersome. I understand the title is meant to be ambiguous, a possible subversion of itself depending on what side of the fence you happen to sit on. The implication is still there; it’s still not right to even suggest these two men could stand on the same level as Jeffrey Dahmer. 

And this is where the cruel exploitation of Lyle and Erik Menéndez begins. Murphy takes off running from here and never seems to stop. There are a great many issues I take with this series, but I do believe its mindful and mannerly to mention the brilliant acting by breakout stars Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, poignant score by Thomas Newman paired with a captivating soundtrack that has reintroduced an entire generation to Milli Vanilli, and outstanding cinematics achieved by a talented team. It is a well-crafted and engrossing show; I will not shy away from admitting to that. Any fond remarks I may have about this series now come to an abrupt halt. 

Erik Menéndez takes the stand in 1993. / CourtTV

I boast no behavioural psychology qualification save the common high school course. Nor do I intend to imply that having an interest in true crime—no matter how intense—grants me any authority to make sound claims about the truth of this trauma. Still, I find it impossible not to mention the presence and manner of the Menéndez brothers in court; how their disposition and the details of their demeanour during their testimonies add nuance and colour to the words that come stuttering, hesitant and embarrassed, from behind their teeth. Though the pain and trauma these two men suffered throughout their childhoods is, I do believe it’s fair to say, nearly their entire defence case, there is an astonishing and noticeable lack of self-pity in their statements. The physical and sexual torture they were subjected to is presented to the jury by the defendants with the same straightforward candour a twelve-year-old boy may explain his process of long-division to a tutor. Step-by-step. ‘That’s just the way it goes, see?’ When there are tears, put them under a microscope. You will find no ‘poor me’s, no crocodile victimhood, only their wretched, childlike frustration at not being able to spit out the words they need to say. ‘My dad…my dad…my dad…’ is how Erik Menéndez begins when questioned by his defence attorney Leslie Abramson: ‘What do you believe was the originating cause of you and your brother … shooting your parents?’ It takes him minutes of frustrated brow-furrowing, aborted sentences, hard stares at his lap while he tries to get his tears and his breathing under control. There are shaky sighs and sharp exhalations blown into the microphone—too close, the pops filling the courtroom. He pulls his mouth, desperate to school his expression. This lasts for fifty-five excruciating seconds. ‘It was you telling Lyle what?’ Abramson prompts. He looks physically ill as he finally forces out the full sentence: ‘That my dad had been molesting me.’ The mic captures a sharp inhale as the defendant’s face twists in embarrassed agony. There is no vaunting present. This is not something spoken lightly, with an air of ‘Look, see?’ Erik Menéndez chokes these words out, his voice saturated with defeat and shame. To be eighteen, feeling smaller than nothing as you tell this to your big brother. To be twenty-three, even smaller as you admit this to a courtroom full of strangers, a camera crew, the whole world. Can you imagine?

Lyle Menéndez at trial. / Getty Images

This older brother Erik Menéndez confides in is hardly present in Murphy’s rendering. There are crucial facets of Lyle Menéndez’s personality he miserably fails to show. Take, for instance, his considerable emotional connection to soft toys. Lyle considered them family: ‘They made me feel safer,’ he would go on to testify, ‘Especially early on, but really all the way through my teenage years, sometimes they got me through the day.’ He took them to high school. When Erik would orphan his stuffed animals, having grown out of them, Lyle would take them in. He would impose different traits, roles, temperaments onto them, crafting highly complex hierarchies and social orders. Dr. Jon Conte, a psychologist specialising in child abuse and who worked with Lyle Menéndez during his time in jail, would remark of this behaviour: ‘In a way that I’ve never heard from another victim, he … was doing play therapy. When we see traumatised kids, we often ask them to act out with [toys] their bad experiences. The difference between Lyle’s [playing] and play therapy is that there was no therapist there to help guide the process.’ It is difficult to reconcile this Lyle Menéndez with Murphy’s brash, Janus-faced caricature, prone to violent threats and bratty outbursts.

Emerging talent Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Lyle Menéndez. / Netflix

Chavez’s disarming and ill-tempered Lyle swears at ticket agents, frightens children on Halloween, punctuates his immature shouting with wild gestures, banging on tables and slamming doors. Murphy even goes so far as to imply this awful imitation of Lyle is capable of deceiving the ‘audience’ of the jury, of putting on a performance of pain and misery so as to elicit profound, falsely-rooted sympathy. It is vile. Today, Erik Menéndez continues to fight on behalf of his brother, still defends him. In direct response to Murphy’s loud, violent, near bipolar portrayal of Lyle, he had this to say:

‘I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show. I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.’

A rare and raw moment of brotherhood Murphy delivers. / Netflix

We now arrive at the principal thing I take issue with. The great stain on what I genuinely consider to be an otherwise technical cinematic achievement. Ryan Murphy’s representation of Lyle and Erik Menéndez’s bond is nothing short of repugnant. There are moments where he almost captures it—tender and tearful apology met with easy forgiveness on the bow of a boat, the poignant contrast of Lyle paternally dressing his younger brother for the moment they hear their verdict, still finding ways to take care of him. All things in line with the real, corporal Lyle Menéndez, living and breathing outside of fiction at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. The same Lyle Menéndez who wrote to his brother in 1990 a letter from behind bars, containing the phrase: 

‘Never think for a second that I favor someone over my brother.’ / Netflix

But it’s all mangled, distorted, perverted by a sickening, intentional incestuous undertone. Ryan Murphy injects this poison for sheer shock value. This itself existing within the fictive vacuum of the show is nauseating enough to bring up, but when you consider that these are characters born from real people, real brothers, real victims of incestuous abuse still living and suffering today? It is unforgivable, and it inspires true rage.

You see, Lyle Menéndez was out, one could say. He had ended the cycle of sexual abuse between him and his father years prior; he was attending Princeton, he was in a committed relationship, he was on his way to forging a successful, independent life for himself. But when his little brother finally came to him, suicidal and terribly, terribly lost, it all went out the window. And that’s just the way it had to be. Witness of the prosecution and Lyle Menéndez’s former friend Donovan Goodreau would say of Lyle: ‘He takes care of his brother … It’s his biggest concern.’ When questioned by his attorney why he didn’t simply leave his younger brother to handle the situation himself, Lyle responded: ‘I would never say that to him, and he would never expect me to say that.’ When asked for a reason, the answer he provides echoes a sentiment Erik would repeat: ‘Just because we were brothers.’ Erik slept in Lyle’s bedroom that night, eighteen-years-old and terrified. Lyle testified he remained wide awake. He’ll come with me to Princeton, was planned, or I’ll figure out how to transfer to UCLA. There was confidence—misplaced confidence—but to Lyle Menéndez there was only one outcome: Erik would be safe, Erik would feel safe. And this he would make sure of; it didn’t matter how. Before Lyle Menéndez was a student, a partner, a businessman, an athlete and especially a son—before any other label, any other marker of identity, Lyle Menéndez was an older brother.

Erik Menéndez at trial. / Associated Press

And Erik? Well, when asked during trial if he ever considered running away, hiding or fighting extradition in any other manner, Erik Menéndez denied this. When questioned why, the answer was plain: ‘Because I wanted to be back with my brother.’ When presented once more with the question of why that was, he looked baffled, no answer prepared. In what world would any other scenario play out? In what world would any other truth come to pass? In what world would Lyle ever go through this alone? To Erik Menéndez, this question was stupid, undeserving of an answer, undeserving of consideration. This line of questioning was not taken any further.

This is who Erik Menéndez is. As stated by himself, standing behind Lyle was his ‘fixed position’ in life. It’s a core tenant of his identity; a marker of who he is, who he was and who he will always be. If it can be said that above all Lyle Menéndez takes pride and pleasure in his role as a big brother, then Erik Menéndez takes equal honour and comfort in his role as a little brother. ‘Erik Menéndez had always had few friends and fewer confidants, so his brother became, during that stage of his life and thereafter, the one person on earth it felt safe to love’: Leslie Abramson does a marvellous job of communicating to the jury how ardent a bond this is. She delivers its weight, its breadth—the scope and scale of its many nuances and shades of grief. This is a fraternal bond born out of fear and nurtured in an environment of great pain. It is built on a foundation of devotion, loyalty and shared torment. These two men are the only people on earth who will ever be able to entirely grasp what the other languished through. I cannot stress the importance of that enough. At the risk of sounding maudlin, it is the purest form of love I have ever witnessed, even from this great distance.

It is this very reason Ryan Murphy’s abashed exploitation of the Menéndez brothers’ story sends me into potent fury. Murphy sees two attractive young men in close proximity and makes the extraordinarily shallow decision to fetishise it, to suffuse it with surface-level suggestions of underlying brotherly incest, in an attempt to appeal to…whom exactly I can’t even say. If it is not intended to captivate a certain audience, then it must simply exist for equally surface-level shock value. To take a bond such as this and filthily taint it in hopes of a few gasps and shaking heads? 

The Menéndez brothers at their preliminary hearing in 1990. / Associated Press

When asked by Barbara Walters on ABC how he would feel should the two be sent to separate prisons, Erik Menéndez responded: ‘There are some things that you cannot take, and there are some things you can endure … With everything taken away, that’s the last thing you can take.’ Following this interview, the two were placed in two separate vans. In Alejandro Hartmann’s documentary The Menéndez Brothers, released earlier this month, Erik reflects on his reaction: ‘I started screaming.’ The brothers spent twenty-two years separated before both were finally placed at Donovan, where they reside today. On being reunited with his brother, Lyle Menéndez would say ‘I felt like it was finally a chance to heal, and I was starting on that day.’

To me and to many, it seemed the situation and circumstance of the Menéndez brothers was utterly, hopelessly lost. The release of this series and the consequences of the case returning to the public mainstream in this fashion only promised devastation. To have the sensationalism and media spectacle that so heavily infringed upon the first trial resurrected? It spelled disaster. To have it centred solely around this new interpretation so far removed from the truth? I couldn’t begin to describe the resentment I felt towards Murphy, Netflix and everyone who sat adjacent to this project. Lyle and Erik Menéndez are still alive and striving for their release; the weight of this programme’s influence cannot be understated.

There is, however, hope to be found in Hartmann’s new documentary The Menéndez Brothers, also bizarrely distributed by Netflix, which worked in direct collaboration with the brothers through extensive audio interviews. It is two hours of accounts, testimony and context; it is very difficult and very necessary to watch. For it to have been released so soon after Murphy’s farce is vital, ineffably so. I have hope it will instil in this new generation of interested parties a sense of obligation to the truth. I have hope it will counteract any damage Murphy has done to the public’s perception of this case. And I have hope it will prove Erik Menéndez wrong in his sullen belief that he has ‘taken the painful truths several steps backward—back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women.’

By Robin Reinders

December began with Saltburn. As someone reading English at a top three university in the UK, and one of Oxford’s foremost competitors, the atmosphere of the first act of this film really sat with me. Sacrificing air conditioning for the sake of ‘the fucking wood fucking panelling’, lonely evenings at the pool table, indoor smoking, and the awful anxiety of sitting at the dining hall on the first day of term – haunted by paintings of who-knows-the-second and three-quarter-portrait-the-fifth looming above. It’s terrible. Constantly surrounded by signet rings, sterling cigarette cases, the question of where do you summer? and what school did you go to? If you haven’t got a family crest or a father who knows a department head in some vague ritualistic clap-on-the-shoulder way, you’re sort of fucked. But sometimes, if you’re especially quick and clever, you find a way to worm yourself in. 

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is a cinematic tour de force. Grandiose, with a scale large and looming amplified by its aspect ratio, Fennell creates an opulent cinematic experience that reaches for the unthinkable and certainly doesn’t shy away from the perverse. Saltburn primarily functions not as a surface-level class commentary (as it’s doubtlessly going to be misconstrued), but as a character study – an intense experiment of empathy, as the narrative focuses on its paradoxically ambiguous and yet radical protagonist.

From the very beginning, we find that Saltburn is – essentially and at its core – a British film. The opening jingoistic anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’, composed by George Frideric Handel and used for royal coronations since the 18th century, sets this up fantastically. We find this British quality again in the tense, dissonant interplay between dialogue, action, and context in an unforgettable scene involving a pie. This here is particularly British, and particularly upper-class British. The refusal to acknowledge even the most terrible, soul-crushing thing and to simply carry on eating and drinking and politely confabulating is quintessentially British in a way that I think audiences from other cultural contexts might fail to appreciate completely.

A piece with so much personality, it truly is constructed and cemented by its influences. Pasolini’s impression is felt with lucid clarity. An homage to River Phoenix is paid in a subtle yet very present moment. There are faint hints of Hitchcock in the framing of a particular scene, along with long, dragging takes evocative of Kubrick. The literature that forms the foundation of this film is genius and marvellously curated. There are obvious traces of Waugh and Forster, with strains of Brontë and du Maurier in the gothic-romantic details. These all blend in a manner so rewarding, as if forming the bouquet of a particularly lavish vintage you might find in Saltburn’s cellar.

‘Quiet, harmless, drawn to shiny things’ is how Venetia (Alison Oliver) describes the central character and unreliable narrator Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan). He is incredibly obscure throughout much of the film; vaguely northern, amorphously working class, and ill-defined in terms of his feelings towards Felix (Jacob Elordi). His attitudes, desires, sexuality, and motives are always inexplicit and undefinable. His actions, however, tell a different tale. Beneath this pretence – and Oliver is well-versed in pretence – he is an incredibly radical character. Machiavellian in the pursuit of his object, whatever it may be. We see fierce, concentrated eruptions from him often when we arrive at Saltburn, as he is overwhelmed by what visceral affections he is constantly trying to conceal from character and audience alike. He is intense, almost militant in these actions. There is no presence of shame or regret – just base, perverse, urgent necessity; a heightened and somewhat violent ‘giving-in’ that engenders a lasting, grieving ache in us as viewers – as voyeurs. 

Voyeurism, exhibitionism – both lead to the discomfort of the audience. Uncomfortable art is always controversial, but it is also always adored by me. I will always advocate for art that makes us squirm, that arouses us in an unconventional and sometimes frightening way. Fennell takes what is normal and twists it into the abnormal, further the subnormal and further still the supernormal. It is a film preoccupied with fetishisation – fetishising mess, fetishising wealth, fetishising poverty and pity and misery and broken birds. Fetishises watching; from an ajar bathroom door, practically an invitation, to the very way the affluent and aristocratic live and move in their own home (dirty underpants discovered as the maids rifle through your luggage). A detail I’d like to highlight: the bathroom Felix and Oliver share has two mirrors positioned in an awfully clever way. Even when the two have their backs to one another, there is no scenario in which they can’t look. The film is obsessed with fervent, zealous, destructive yearning and desire. It explores how these feelings can mutate into self-loathing, further – into violent, intimate anger.

It is a film that asks us to look at our desires, look at them with both eyes and see them for what they are: grotesque and animal and writhing. Fennell argues that we as the authorities of our narratives cannot make something ‘frictionless and sweet and streamlined and easy; you have to make something complicated, and you have to make something that’s going to make people argue.’ Visceral and coarse and servile – these are things we find in Oliver. We see him reduced – bared and broken – in any number of contexts. His actions and our reactions are what Fennell plays with; she wants us ‘aroused and alive but also kind of freaked out.’ She nobly succeeds. We never hate Oliver. Never. We are always forgiving, understanding and terribly, terribly empathetic.

Saltburn is crucially a film obsessed with the beauty of stuff – mundanity as defined by the upper class. The stuff of life, the stuff of wealthy domesticity. The intermingling of Flemish tapestries draping the wall and half-smoked Marlboros dying in a diet Coke can on the desk just below. ‘It’s the kind of surreal and the kind of mundane – the kind of beautiful and the sort of silly, all together in one’, Fennell says. It’s really a glamourisation of opulent, tart’s boudoir filth. Crystalline reflections sparkling off crisp packets and Carling cans in the college bar. ‘The constant dismissal of beauty’, Fennell calls it. It’s this blending of the Edwardian stately home life and the languid, dripping summer haze of the late noughties that gives Saltburn its unique atmosphere. The bridging of the two is achieved through the efforts of production designer Suzie Davies, costume designer Sophie Canale, and their respective teams. The aspect ratio of the film allows us to see not only the vastness of the estate, but the height. Shots which include both floor and ceiling are common, with details strewn about everywhere (an old piece of flypaper hanging limp on a diamond chandelier). Something I’d like to note about the costume design is Canale’s clever use of material – particularly her penchant for sheer materials. By way of capturing light through linen and gossamer night dresses, we are further able to empathise with Oliver’s frame of mind; when you are in love with someone, you are constantly aware of their body, constantly distracted – as we see in the long-take of Felix’s tour.

I do believe that is Emerald Fennell’s main goal with Saltburn. I’ve seen many ask ‘What are we supposed to take away from this?’ And no, I don’t believe we are supposed to walk away with a tepid inner monologue droning about class criticism. Saltburn is less an ‘eat the rich’ film and more an ‘eat out the rich’ film (notice the fixation on bodily fluids, so far as to be assigned to each character with the same casual purpose as any other idiosyncrasy; Venetia and blood, Farleigh and spit, Felix and spend). Its commentary on the middle class – particularly the upper-middle class – and its relationship to the extraordinarily wealthy is present, but takes a backseat. Saltburn is fundamentally an interrogation of our relationship with our own desire and how destructive that desire can be. It’s why we empathise with Oliver. It’s why we connect as much as we cringe. The film has to be queasy and uncomfortable; it has to freak you out and grip you in order to show you how impossibly carnivorous, locust, and insane that desire can be.

‘I…I hated him. I hated him! Yeah, I—I hated him.’ Oliver sighs at the end of it all. His monologue to whom? A comatose witness, a nobody audience? Desperate to convince himself and him alone it seems. Convince himself that this is what he wanted—all he wanted all along. Defensive. Cagey and paranoid around his own self-failure (don’t look! don’t look!). Willing to turn himself inside out to cope with the grief of his mistake: ‘This was always the way it was supposed to go. I meant for it. I meant for it.’ The events of the maze mark the frantic spiral of it all. There it goes, down the drain. And Oliver meant to pull the plug, he did. You have to believe him.