With FX’s The Beauty on the horizon, Ryan Murphy is on a serious run, with six shows released in barely a month. No one can accuse Ryan Murphy of being sedentary.
However, rapid-fire releases and controversy seem to go hand-in-hand with him, and The Beauty is no different.
Right now, most of the controversy centers on Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.
But The Beauty is bound to deliver its own set of contentious moments in the near future. Why? Because it’s the status quo with a Ryan Murphy project. It’s practically expected.
Murphy has been accused of everything from racism to some sort of eldritch fascination with turning LGBTQ characters into monsters.
There’s no shortage of representation in Murphy’s projects. It’s what he does with the characters that often elicits a negative reaction.
With The Beauty focusing on sexually transmitted diseases that result in permutations of exquisiteness and beauty before killing the victim, well, you can imagine where this road will take us.
Whether it’s heavily eroticized and overly gratuitous violence or more generalized and inimical fixations on culture, Ryan Murphy’s work certainly keeps people talking.
So…What’s the Deal with the Menendez Brothers?
Despite the hoopla over The Beauty’s interesting premise, the big controversy right now is between Ryan Murphy’s documentary and the subjects of the work — namely, the Menendez brothers.
If you follow Ryan Murphy, even on a fairly limited basis, you probably know most of the relevant details. However, for those of you who do not, there’s a lot to unpack without giving my fingers early-onset carpal tunnel.
If there’s a single primary criticism that applies to Ryan Murphy, it’s gratuitousness. He doesn’t hold back, even when it’s the sensible thing to do.
In the case of the Lyle and Erik Menendez documentary, there’s a decent probability that Murphy didn’t just fail to hold back but also engaged in some embellishment.
For those living under a rock, the Menendez brothers were found guilty of murdering their parents in the mid-90s. Most of the controversy revolves around Murphy’s portrayal of a sexual, incestuous relationship between the two brothers.
Of course, both adamantly deny that anything like that ever happened.
Even more disconcerting, Murphy never spoke to the brothers throughout the entire filmmaking process. That’s kind of something you expect the director of a documentary to do.
After all, there are two sides to every coin, and even if the brothers lack any and all credibility, you still have to allow their voice some air time as well. If nothing else, it avoids a sense of bias.
The same can be said about another Murphy docudrama, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Murphy again did nothing but embellish and create overly dramatic scenarios that don’t exactly match the facts on the ground.
Murphy would call it “artistic license,” though others will call it “co-opting a real-life tragedy in the name of personal gain.”
Desirable STDs?
Anyone who spends their life creating anything of value understands the mental roadblocks that occasionally metastasize from nowhere.
It’s best to describe the current Ryan Murphy as one wading in a pool of decrepitude.
From such apathy, we get the usual: Over-the-top violence, silent scenes that drag on forever, doldrums permeating throughout the story, and sex. The concept behind The Beauty should come as no surprise.
With that being said, do we get the prolongation of the first few Grotesquerie or something more substantive and entertaining?
It’s obvious that a sexually transmitted disease, which happens to make the recipient beautiful, is the shock value enticing viewers to tune it.
But will there be anything more than archetypal Murphy or more ponderous, bloated scenes of sexual depravity and/or gore?
If that’s what viewers want, a few minutes of streaming Shudder will suffice. It’s not that Murphy is not creative (he has quite a storied career).
Everything has its breaking point, and such scenery typifies the Ryan Murphy experience. The whole idea, of course, is to create an analogy of societal demands for bodily perfection.
But we’ve experienced this song and dance before, especially if one spends more than five minutes daily on social media.
Murphy also tends to cerement corpses in gold-laced vicuna. The appeal is there, but the content never completes the delivery.
It’s like waiting on an exciting Prime package only to discover that the Amazon driver’s delivery is two neighborhoods over.
The Doldrums of Dystopia
I wrote an article on the superfluous use of dystopian settings in recent times if only to articulate the idea that, well, there are no more ideas in that genre.
Unfortunately, the dystopian virus has the entertainment industry firmly within its grasp.
Time after time, funereal shows riddle us with bleak landscapes or barren souls, slogging through austere political times or some post-civilization imaginings.
Fallout is fantastic television in so many ways, but you can only deliver the same platter so many times before the enamoring effect falls away.
The Beauty is churlish when it comes to details, but the synopsis indicates a more functional society similar to our own.
This will certainly help, though it’s hard to imagine “functionality” in a civilization that places an emphasis on STDs in exchange for beauty.
Or, perhaps I’m being cynical, and The Beauty will be a more refreshing and continuously innovational series. However, Ryan Murphy is churning out docu-dramas, continuing series, and new series at an insane rate.
Even the most creative of us reach a point where excess breeds self-indulgence and mediocrity, not to mention the fact that The Beauty has a good deal of competition, all working from entrenched positions of popularity.
One point in Murphy’s favor is casting, something he’s genuinely good at, both from the audience’s and the critic’s standpoint.
So far, The Beauty has Evan Peters (a mainstay in Murphy’s various projects), Ashton Kutcher, Anthony Ramos, and Jeremy Pope.
Hopefully, The Beauty will bring some much-needed creative scope to the genre without repeating the more tiring aspects.
If things continue apace, however, the crescendo of fireworks will come at the beginning, with moody, semi-atmospheric silence superseding it.
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