Sympathy for the Devil: The Menendez Brothers in Monsters
You don’t walk away from Monsters feeling clean. It doesn’t let you. The story of the Menendez brothers is too messy for that, too full of conflicting truths that rub up against each other until you’re left with something uncomfortable sticking to you.
It’s easy to have an opinion about Erik and Lyle Menendez. They killed their parents. And it was brutal. And planned. What else is there to say? But then Monsters comes along and says, wait. Look at their childhood. Look at the abuse, the fear. Erik crying in court, telling the world what his father did to him behind closed doors. The weight of those moments pulls you in, and before you know it, you’re sitting there, caught between horror at what they did and something that feels too much like sympathy for comfort.
There’s no clean way to feel about it. The show lays out the trauma, the ugly details, and the privileged life that was supposed to protect them but didn’t. It’s impossible not to ask yourself how you would have survived that kind of upbringing. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the series is telling us that you don’t survive something like that. Not really. It warps you. Changes you. And yet…
They killed their parents. They could have left, right? They could have gone to the police, gotten help, anything but that. The brothers were…
