Ryan Murphy’s Obsession with Likable Monsters
(Source: The Decider)
When you think of the word prolific, filmmaker Ryan Murphy is probably not the first person who immediately comes to mind. He likes to discuss how he arrived in Hollywood from Indiana with just $55 dollars in his pocket. With over a dozen shows and movies under his belt and a lucrative deal with Netflix, prolific is exactly what he has become.
The creator of American Horror Story (2011 — present) and Glee (2009–2015) is known for making campy, over-the-top works with a distinctive flair. You can recognize the hallmarks of a Murphy production before his name ever appears on screen: his characters have larger-than-life dialogue; his costumes and set designs have dazzling palettes; his characters’ motivations and desires are all intense as they claw their way to fame, mayhem, and maybe even a little murder.
Another quality often gets overlooked, though, and that is his obsession with glamorizing sociopaths. His most famous and endearing characters are figurative and sometimes literal monsters he lovingly renders for the viewer. Murphy has long been a proponent for uplifting marginalized voices both on-screen and off, but his fixation with highlighting awful people says something unsettling about his sense of priorities as a filmmaker.
Monsters are everywhere in Ryan Murphy’s work. They can be found directly in series such as American Horror Story — an anthology series that deconstructs a different set of horror conventions every season — and metaphorically in crime dramas such as American Crime Story (2016 — present). He tends to focus on people who would normally be the villains in a story and gives them portrayals that, although not always redemptive, are at the very least empathetic. As Willa Paskin writes of the serial killer Andrew Cunanan in the second season of American Crime Story:
“The Assassination of Gianni Versace does not justify Cunanan — he is, always, self-pitying and lazy, unwilling to choose a better course — but it does more than simply try to comprehend him. Occasionally it has compassion for him…Criss, [the actor who plays Cunanan], is brilliant, fully self-pitying, the loneliest, saddest psycho in America.”
We see this theme of empathy for the outcasts in most of his work. American Horror Story has a literal season called Freakshow. The series Pose (2018 — present) is all about queer, mainly trans New Yorkers, trying to thrive in the underground ballroom scene of the 1990s. Even Glee, his arguably tamest work, is about a group of high school outcasts and self-described “losers” (see the song “Loser Like Me”), struggling to find acceptance in the world of singing competitions. In a Ryan Murphy production, there is usually one sappy monologue about love and acceptance for every scene of gore and trauma.
This fixation on “freaks” is not that unusual for a queer man to have, especially for one devoted to film. There is a long history of queer people in media being branded as villains. The Motion Picture Production Code (1930 — 1968), also referred to as the Hay’s Code, and later the Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 — 1983) or the Television’s Code, infamously banned positive portrayals of “sexual perversions,” which LGBTQIA+ people were definitely considered at the time.
If a director wanted to have an LGBTQIA+ character in their production, they had to rely on stereotypical, queer-coding, and cast that character as a villain. This era of Hollywood is filled with wicked queer-coded characters such as the criminal Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and the serial killer Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960). Long after the Hays and Television codes were laid to rest, the image of queer villainy remained in roles such as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) in The Silence of The Lambs (1991) and Doctor Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in Dressed To Kill (1980).
The connection between queerness and horror has another more psychological foundation. Many queer people are also intimately familiar with the feeling of rejection that comes from greater society labeling them as monsters. When everyone treats you poorly, so much so that your own stories cannot even be shown with humanity, then you develop a sort of empathy for the disturbed and rejected. As Advocate editors wrote on why many LGBTQIA+ viewers have an affinity for horror:
“Since many of us have been demonized in our lifetimes, we have a special place in our hearts for the demons, monsters, and other outsiders who wreak havoc and revenge upon heteronormative society…Due to this dynamic, there are some horror films in particular that speak to LGBTQ folks.”
This love for dastardly figures can be seen as a defense mechanism for dealing with trauma. Numerous queer people have arguably embraced wicked characters such as Disney villains and the Babadook because many of them have felt unloved and reviled. It’s a decision to give out the love you were denied to people who also have been refused the benefit of the doubt. “That’s how it works for us freaks. We get blamed for everything,” says the character Pepper (Naomi Grossman) in American Horror Story: Asylum.
For this reason, there is a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching Ryan Murphy unapologetically reclaim this space. He takes horror — which is this genre that has had a decidedly queer subtext for over half a century — and places its queer messaging front and center. He dresses up his murderous ghosts in leather fetish suits (e.g., American Horror Story: Murder House) and gives his serial killer nurse a steamy tryst with lesbian icon Cynthia Nixon (e.g., Ratched). It can be cathartic to see the monster you have felt yourself to be for so long spotlighted and normalized in episode after episode of prestige television.
However, not all of his monsters serve these purposes. There are characters such as Sue Sylvester in Glee, who are only cruel and vindictive. While it's certainly fine to have one-dimensional characterizations of monsters, Murphy seems to have a fixation, not just on the ostracized but also on people who are irredeemably mean.
In glorifying these awful people and creatures, his works can sometimes come at the cost of obscuring the message of why many of us were drawn to monsters in the first place.
The thing about queer people is that they obviously aren’t monsters. They were made to feel that way by a cruel society. Queer people’s rejection meant that they often had to find acceptance in the margins, which in the case of media, meant latching onto subtextual representation like horror movie monsters. It was never about the monsters themselves, but what they represented — e.g., ostracization, rejection, and in some cases, vengeance.
A great example of a film that makes this subtext text is Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017). The movie is a reference to the 1954 horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which the climax has a group of scientists rescuing a woman (Julie Adams) abducted by a menacing Gill Monster. In Guillermo del Toro’s quazi-retelling, it's the monster who is abducted. The U.S. government has captured the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones) and placed them inside a secret facility. A cleaner there named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) falls in love with him.
The Amphibian Man is not really a monster, but a person being held against their will. The true villain is Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), who is in charge of studying the Amphibian Man to help America in the Cold War. Strickland terrorizes the Amphibian Man and intimidates the film’s queer, disabled, and BIPOC characters. He ultimately represents a cipher for the harm inflicted by U.S. imperialism on the marginalized groups represented in the film. As an outcast of the world Strickland represents, the main character Elisa identifies with the “monster,” and as the film comes to a close, she grows gills so she can be apart of the Amphibian Man’s world.
There are other interesting ways to utilize the “monster” angle. They can sometimes be figures of righteous anger enacting vengeance on a cruel society. The character Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) in Promising Young Woman (2021) may be hellbent on revenge, but she is one specifically targeting “nice guys” (and female enablers) who take advantage of women sexually. The mom (Kathleen Turner) in Serial Mom (1994) is also a serial killer, but her entire characterization is designed to skewer the norms of white, suburban America.
Ryan Murphy does have characters throughout his filmography who do hit upon these themes. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has a running theme about how the homophobia of the 90s contributed partly to the murderous entitlement of serial killer Andrew Cunanan. American Horror Story: Hotel (2015), conversely ends warmly with the Hotel Cortez's ghosts killing the character Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) so that they can stay together in limbo for all of eternity as one big, weird family.
This empathy, however, extends to a lot of ‘lovable’ villains as well. Ryan Murphy is also known for creating monstrous characters who we still like despite their awfulness. These are monsters who serve no other point than to be monstrous. They are not rejected by greater society like the Amphibian Man or enact vengeance like Cassandra. Like Colonel Strickland, they berate the marginalized, and they usually look cool as hell doing it.
One of the main characters for American Horror Story: Asylum is the domineering Sister Jude Martin (Jessica Lange). She is a person who takes a certain glee in torturing the inmates of the asylum, and yet we were not supposed to dislike her. She has some of the series most stand-out moments. When she ironically becomes trapped in the very asylum she once served, the other main characters go to great lengths to save her. “But Jude, whatever she was, she didn’t belong there any more than we did,” the character Kit Walker (Evan Peters) says to Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson) — a reporter Sister Jude had committed to the asylum to hide the negligence occurring there.
Another terrifying example is cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) from the show Glee. She is remembered for being devilishly funny when the show first aired, but a lot of her comedic lines are simply hateful in retrospect. “I’ll often yell at homeless people. Hey, how’s that homelessness working out for you? Give not being homeless a try, huh?” the character remarks on their fictional talk show. This line is supposed to be a joke and is by no means an anomaly. Sue uses her influence as one of the most powerful people in the school (and the state of Ohio) to bully the Glee club members. The series ends with her winning the Vice Presidency of the United States.
Likewise, the show The Politician (2019 — present) is centered on a rich trust fund kid named Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) as he tries to navigate his school’s election for class president (and later local politics) in a single-minded attempt to eventually be president of the United States. Payton has structured his entire life to reach that goal, and he does some truly detestable things in that pursuit of power, such as threatening to out a closeted classmate, culminating in that student's suicide. The narrative briefly punishes him for these indiscretions, but ultimately he skyrockets to political success. In fact, after one of his campaign operatives tampers with ballots, the story goes out of its way to tell the viewer that he would have received those votes regardless.
There are so many of these characters in Murphy’s filmography— Emma Roberts from Scream Queens (2015 — present), the doctors in Nip/Tuck (2003–2010), Evan Peters in nearly every one of his characters in American Horror Story. These villains are typically white, usually rich, and almost always hold more power than those beneath them. They may not be fully redeemed by the time their story ends, but they are often framed in a way that makes them desirable to the viewer. They have the most memorable moments or lines and are usually fan favorites.
Even when they lose, they look damn amazing doing it, and unlike figures such as the Amphibian Man, they are not empathetic to those around them. They are all mean, powerful white sociopaths, inflicting harm on the marginalized characters around them.
We should question the trend of making them “likable.”
People often identify with monsters because of what they represent in the narrative. When monsters are unfairly rejected by society, they can represent a cipher for various oppressed identities. We see this theme in works such as American Horror Story: Hotel or, far more directly, in The Shape of Water. Monsters can also represent the spirit of vengeance, satire, and a host of other useful things in a story. In the case of many Ryan Murphy works, they chiefly serve the purpose of being fun.
It would be unrealistic and unfair to say that no one should ever use monsters in their narrative unless they are perfectly well-rounded. Sometimes your story needs a one-dimensional villain, which is fine, perhaps a tad boring, but fine. We cannot dictate to people that they must only portray “the other” if it fits a certain function in the story. However, when you start to develop a pattern of awful “likable” characters who actively inflict misery on those around them, that speaks to your sense of priorities as a filmmaker.
Ryan Murphy is not a terrible person. He has uplifted many marginalized voices both on and off the screen, and that is worthy of praise. The creation of Pose — one of the most trans-inclusive shows in history — is an achievement that far exceeds what most of his powerful white peers in the industry are trying to accomplish. Still, at the same time, he is no longer that broke 20-something who has just moved to Hollywood from Indiana. As one of the most powerful people in his industry, he has blind spots that merit criticism, and what characters he decides to center and provide empathy for is one of them.
There will always be monsters in our stories, but as we come to reckon with our country’s past abuses, we should question uplifting abusive monsters for the sake of light entertainment.