Sarah Paulson plays Aileen Wuornos in the Lizzie Borden season of Netflix's Monster
The Lizzie Borden season landed on Thursday with a second woman inside it: Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos, in scenes set decades after the murder trial. Wuornos was executed in Florida in 2002, and there is already a film called Monster about her — the one that won Charlize Theron an Oscar.
Netflix dropped all eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Thursday, and the presence people keep stopping on is not Borden. It is a woman who was executed in Florida in 2002.
Sarah Paulson is in this season as Aileen Wuornos, a casting first shown in the trailer. She shares no scene with Borden, because Borden was acquitted in 1893 and Wuornos was born in 1956. Paulson appears in later-period scenes, as a cross-era framing device. Netflix's own copy sets the device up without explaining how much of the season it covers, and nobody has said whether it doubles as a tease for the next one.
The link the show reaches for is thematic rather than factual: two women, a century apart, and what the public did with them. Ella Beatty, who plays Borden, has described the makers as interested in "mapping and exploring" that connection.
Roger Ebert, on Charlize Theron as Wuornos: "one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema."
There is already a Monster about her, and it won an Oscar
Monster came out in 2003. Patty Jenkins wrote and directed it as her first feature, on a budget of 1.5 million dollars; it took 64.2 million. Theron played Wuornos and won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2004, along with the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award. Christina Ricci played Selby Wall.
So Wuornos is now the subject of two separate things called Monster, twenty-three years apart, played by two actresses who have each built a career on transformation. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan did not invent the association between that word and that woman. They inherited it.
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Most people know the case through the film, not the file
That is worth saying plainly, because the film took a liberty the anthology may now inherit. Selby Wall, Ricci's character, does not exist in the record. The woman Wuornos lived with was Tyria Moore, a motel maid she met in a Daytona Beach bar in 1986, and who was granted immunity in exchange for drawing out the confession. The girlfriend most people can name is the invented one.
The record itself is not ambiguous:
- 30 November 1989 – 19 November 1990 — seven men shot on Florida highways with a .22 revolver
- 9 January 1991 — arrested in Volusia County; she confessed a week later
- January 1992 – February 1993 — convicted of six murders, sentenced to death six times
- 9 October 2002 — executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, aged 46
Asked about Moore before the execution, Wuornos called it "love beyond imaginable."
One acquitted, one executed
Put that beside the season she has been folded into and the arithmetic of the anthology changes. Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted. The Menendez brothers were convicted. Ed Gein was found guilty and committed. Lizzie Borden was acquitted after about ninety minutes of deliberation. Wuornos was killed by the state. One season of Monster now holds both ends of what the law can do with the same charge.
What Netflix still has not said is how many episodes the framing device runs through, or whether the fifth season belongs to her.
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