The Ed Gein Story’ Episode 5 Recap: “Ice”

To paraphrase The Lord of the Rings, you are watching a show about how history becomes legend, legend becomes myth. That’s the whole point of Monster: The Ed Gein Story. It’s very much the literal text of the show, which traces the lineage of Gein’s crimes and “bogeyman” reputation through its pop-culture course directly to Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. (Chianti, anyone?) It’s about how the facts regarding Gein’s case are distorted, distended, sometimes even retroactively grafted on.

Why wouldn’t the show itself follow suit?

As best I can tell from some cursory research and several decades of interest in serial killers (I had a phase during the ‘00s, I was extremely depressed, what do you want from me), very little of what happens in this episode of Monster actually, you know, happened. I can’t find anything indicating that Adeline Watkins, Ed Gein’s “girlfriend” whose conflicting statements call the whole relationship into question from the start, interviewed for a job with legendary crime photographer Weegee (legendary actor Elliot Gould), then mugged her landlady for her back rent and returned home to Wisconsin with her tail tucked between her legs. 

Does her relentlessly chipper and narcissistic affect have any basis in fact? Beats me. What about her presence at some of Ed’s crime scenes? Before I watched this show I’d certainly never read or watched anything to suggest that Ed Gein had a female accomplice to any of his crimes, and brother, I read and watched a lot. (I was very depressed!) And I’m sure not convinced a tear actually froze to her face.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that historical inaccuracies don’t fluster me much right now, as long as they’re not, y’know, designed to make morally dubious claims. I don’t mind when shows like House of the Dragon or The Wheel of Time or The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power deviate from their source material, but of course that’s one thing, and real-world events involving real-world deaths are another. 

Yet I don’t mind when shows like Shōgun reskin the actual past for a fictional story, or when shows like Chief of War turn real-world events into Kurosawa-style pageants of color and violence, or when, I don’t know, fucking Downfall shows the very human disintegration of the spirit of Adolf Hitler, the worst person of all time. I reserve the right to change my mind if, in the end, Monster: The Ed Gein Story makes the case that a perfidious jezebel, or Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby), or the demon Pazuzu inspired Ed Gein to kill. That would be an insult to his victims’ memories and an ethically irresponsible distortion of his motives.

Unless and until that happens, though? I welcome the flights of fancy, the embellishments, the impossible inventions. America has always encountered this particular bogeyman, as a young Tobe Hooper called him last episode, on the borderland between fact and fiction — from lurid reports that simultaneously exaggerated some of his crimes and bowdlerized others, to the sick jokes known as “Geiners” that spread through schoolyards and workplaces nationwide, to the films that have proven to be the killer’s sole positive legacy. Further blurring of that line towards artistic ends doesn’t faze me.

Neither does necrophilia.

Which is to say Jesus Christ, the necrophilia sequence is excruciating. Encouraged by the increasingly cocksure and unhinged Adeline to fuck dead women while she’s in New York, Ed has sex with the corpse of the obnoxious woman who was head of a sort of ladies’ club Adeline’s mother (the great Robin Weigert) insisted she join. (He serenades her with “La Vie en Rose” on the accordion first.) Watching her come alive at his touch, as he whispers sweet sexy nothings into the ears of a dead body…it makes you shrivel up inside, which is exactly the intended effect. It would be cowardly of the show to shy away from showing us this, when showing us this is the show’s whole raison d’être.

And there’s more than one of them, for god’s sake. The second one involves him picturing Ilse Koch as she was in prison after the war, head shaved, unrepentant and insane, pregnant by a prison guard. (To show how little the reality of World War II entered into Ed’s fantasies, note how shocked he is to discover, via the latest Bitch of Büchenwald comic, that the Nazis lose the war.) It’s awful, which is as it should be.

If there’s a throughline that connects every aspect of this episode — which is Adeline’s more than it is Ed’s — it’s misogyny. Adeline flees her hometown because its only future for her is as a housewife and mother. The women’s circle is a punishing group of judgmental hypocrites who question Adeline’s womanhood even as they make excuses for their rapist sons. She’s half-forced, half-intrigued into indulging Ed’s blue balls like they’re a matter of life and death, going so far as to help dig up a corpse to take care of them.

After Weegee indulgently looks at Adeline’s photography, he first mocks her as a no-talent, then makes crude sexual comments about her until she flees. Even the landlady she savagely beats suggests finding a man is her main option. When she finally returns home, her mother — in a magnificent monologue by Weigert, one of our very best — viciously berates her, suggesting Adeline’s in some way defective because she threw herself down the stairs multiple times in an effort to end the pregnancy. 

The legal lack of reproductive freedom, like contemporary anti-trans measures that seem a million miles removed from the friendly newsreel footage of Christine as a compelling curiosity, is the ultimate state expression of woman-hatred, turning women against one another in the process. In many ways this is the most grim thing about watching The Ed Gein Story right now. Across the country, and at the highest levels of government, men are working to return the country to the benighted state it was in when Ed and Adeline went insane because of it. 

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.