Episode 5 of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is a powerful episode that will have people talking come awards season. "The Hurt Man" is unusual in that it was filmed entirely in one shot. As the episode plays out, the camera moves closer and closer until it's in Erik's (Cooper Koch) face, and it feels like the audience is a fly on the wall during an interrogation. Let's dive into everything that happened in The Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story episode 5 recap.
The entire episode takes place in the prison interview room as Erik faces the camera while he waits for Leslie (Ari Graynor). When she arrives she sits with her back to the camera and asks how he’s doing. Erik says it has been hard since his brother left, and then the only friend he had moved out without warning. She’s sorry to hear it and she’s sorry that they have to talk about what they’re talking about today.
Leslie outlines what she knows Erik discussed with Dr. Vicary and she relates what she heard from Lyle about the abuse he suffered. She asks Erik if he believes what Lyle said about the abuse. He does. Leslie says that Lyle believes Erik had it way worse than he did. “Yeah,” Erik admits quietly. “It was much worse.” She asks him to tell her everything.
Erik says he was always afraid of his father so it felt like the abuse was always happening. He never feared his brother, though. He recalls being five and trying to run away to his aunt’s house a few blocks away. He realized, though, that running away only made it worse so eventually he stopped running, prompting Lyle to ask if he liked what was happening. Erik remembers that the massages started when he was six and they “didn’t start out bad.”
He knew his father didn’t like him. His father loved Lyle, but he didn’t like him. He called him names all the time, which made Erik try to impress him to no avail. His mother did it too. They even locked him in the basement, knowing he was afraid of it to toughen him up. Knowing that his father didn’t think he was tough enough, and knowing that his father was always mad made the times when he wasn’t mean seem nice. The times when his father was abusing him were his favorite memories because it felt like his father loved him.
Erik describes how things changed, and the abuse advanced to a new level. There were things Jose requested that Erik didn’t want to do. He talks about the four kinds of sex with his father and how some things made him feel really dirty, but his father always praised him for it and it made him think his father loved him. His father used objects to get him “ready” for more, but first Erik had to use those same objects on his father to learn the process. He talks about how orgasms were confusing to him, and eventually the abuse turned to rape. He’d cry from the pain of it, and his father kept asking why Erik couldn’t be more like Lyle. Suddenly everything Jose ever said about loving him was gone.
The Hurt Man
It happened two or three times per month, beginning in junior high school. Leslie realizes that Eric was raped “hundreds of times” by his father. Erik says it’s just about surviving and living for the time when it’s not happening.
The camera continues to pan closer as Erik seems to revert to a young child, describing horrific abuse in childish terms. He becomes more and more agitated as he talks about Jose’s ideas to make his son tougher. The things that Jose said to him hurt him even more. He wondered why Jose kept using homophobic slurs with him when Jose was using his son to perform sex acts with him. Erik wonders if he can love his father for the first time since he’s no longer hurting them. Maybe he’s in heaven thanking them for stopping the abuse and freeing him.
We can’t see Leslie’s expression, but Erik slowly smiles at her as she praises his bravery. The smile fades as she calls him an incredible person. She tells him her father was awful, too, but he was nothing like his father. “You don’t have to forgive him,” she says.
Leslie wants to know where Kitty was while all of this was happening. He gets defensive and says that his father was cheating on her and he’d even raped her too. He explains that she used to get naked with them and look at their naked bodies. He knew his father had girlfriends and so it was awkward. She insisted that he had a girlfriend and then she said she was inspecting his penis to see if he had AIDS; Leslie can’t understand her reasoning but he says that she looked at him because she might be able to tell if his father was sleeping with women who were sick. Leslie stops him and says that Kitty was not a good mother. “You deserved better than her,” she says.
Leslie goes back to what Erik said about having AIDS. She wants to know why Kitty thought he could have AIDS. He says she yelled at them and called them sociopaths, but he points out that with so much going on, he had no idea what was right or wrong. She “inspected” him at 16 because he was in love with another teen who was male. Erik refuses to say the teen’s name but he was always into guys and when they had sex, Erik enjoyed it.
Erik says he doesn’t know “what [he] is” or what he was. He doesn’t know if he’s a sociopath or not because his dad abused him all his life and he doesn’t know about girls or anything else. Leslie asks about “the hurt man” and Erik says that’s what he’s called himself “since forever.” The hurt is never going to go away because he killed his parents and he’ll never know who he is unless he gets out of there. “I’ll never know.”
The entire season of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is available to stream now on Netflix.
