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The new controversial Netflix series MONSTER: The Ed Gein Story offers a window into the devouring mother archetype, a transformation fantasy gone horribly wrong, and the human capacity for monstrous behavior. Gein’s crimes inspired the Hitchcock movie Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs. It challenges the audience to confront its fascination with evil and begs the question, where do the monsters hide in our own Psyche? To help us wrestle with these questions we’re joined by Joey Pollari—actor, musician, director, editor and the man who plays Anthony Perkins in the show. We’ll explore how intimacy with darkness affects a performer, how public persona and private pain intersect, and why we continue watching when the camera reveals what we’d rather not know. Trigger-Warning—this episode discusses violence, death, and conversion therapy.
Archetypes and Family Dynamics
We start on the Gein farm with an image that tells you everything: Ed Gein pulls his mother’s underwear from a wooden chest and presses it to his face. After her funeral, he returns at night, digs up her coffin, carries the corpse home, and bathes her in the family tub—combing her hair, speaking softly, acting as if she were alive. In another scene, he puts on a bra and wig and rehearses the polite phrases she drilled into him. These are not shock gags; they’re a record of how a parent’s abusive voice becomes an inner rulebook. Domestic routines infused with rage—chores, mealtimes, scoldings—repeat until they feel like law, and the show keeps cutting back to them so you can see the pattern. Later harms don’t come out of nowhere; they follow that script. The point lands simply: when sadistic control is the only lesson at home, imitation becomes a way of being. Gein’s acts are driven by the negative mother complex at its archaic pole: with the paternal differentiating function absent, the ego regresses to the uroboric matrix so that smelling the underwear, opening the grave, and washing the corpse operate as anti-separatio rites. It is an attempt to undo birth and return to the chthonic container. Because the mother-imago never transforms into a relational anima but remains a numinous, supra-personal Power, libido cannot move toward a living object-love; it fixates in necrophiliac caretaking and fetishistic imitation and repetition that appeases the Terrible Mother while suspending individuation.
Shadow and Moral Psychology
The premier of the movie PSYCHO makes the audience’s bodies part of the story: a violent reel plays, and people faint, retch, or shout while the camera holds on their faces. Elsewhere, townsfolk pore over news clippings, and we’re shown a locked room of keepsakes, including odd trophies lined up on shelves. Meta-communication tells us that curiosity is no longer abstract; it has a place, a look, a weight. The series treats shadow as ordinary human material, not a circus act. By tracking who watches and what they collect, it draws a line from private fascination to public behavior. It doesn’t scold; it provides a process: notice the pull, gauge its strength, and act before it runs you. When the audience faints and retches, the shadow has crossed from projection into participation mystique: archetypal affect seizes the collective body, demonstrating that evil is not merely observed but constellates within the body. This is an encounter that demands ethical reflection, not voyeurism. The locked room of keepsakes symbolizes concretized libido because it was never symbolized: trophies replace symbols, adoration becomes imitation.
Actor’s Craft and Intuition
Onscreen in MONSTER, we watch Anthony Perkins (played by Joey Pollari) in a modest hotel room wearing a bra, wig, and gown; he walks in to tease his boyfriend Tab Hunter, who reacts with shock, and leaves. In the later analyst scene, the camera stays tight on Perkins’ subtle shifts of breath, jaw, gaze, and posture, allowing us to see how he manages himself within a coercive world that demands masking. Those specific beats make the identity strain concrete: the series is showing the cost and precision of a public persona built under pressure. Offscreen, Pollari, the actor, describes a separate layer of his craft: he studied archival Perkins footage to set a baseline for voice and movement, then lets small bodily cues lead during filming, and ends the day with a brief breathing ritual so the role doesn’t stick. In auditions, he often succeeds on cold reads, trusting his instincts when there’s no prep, so the work stays original. First is story; second is method. The distinction matters: the series dramatizes a man mastering a mask under cultural pressure, while the actor uses research, body-listening, and simple rituals to keep the performance truthful and remain intact. The hotel-room dress and the analyst’s close-ups reveal an ego overidentified with persona (the social mask): the micro-adjustments of breath, set of jaw, and quality of gaze are the body’s subtle protests, where the Self strains against coercion, revealing how fear diverts eros into compliance. Offscreen, Pollari’s method aligns with Jung’s symbolic attitude. Pollari’s research constellates the image, allowing kinesthetic impulses to let the transcendent function bridge the conscious aim and unconscious image, which shape the scene. A brief closing ritual then resets the boundaries. His craft becomes an act of individuation.
Myth and Fairy Tale as Tools
The series aligns with a Bluebeard theme: a closed place is opened, and something horrifying and hidden is brought into view. We watch Ed Gein slide open a drawer and pull out a pornographic pulp magazine that eroticizes a female Nazi, Ilse Koch; the camera lingers on his hands and the page, so the secrecy of the stash is unmistakable. Later, he performs a magic show for two children, shuffling real human skulls like shell cups, revealing a severed finger as the prize, and then reappearing with Mary’s flayed face strapped on. The unveiling that turns his private fixation into a public performance. When the police search the farmhouse, they meticulously go through closets and boxes one by one, and the camera tracks each latch and lid, allowing the discovery process to unfold step by step rather than in a single jump and scare. Across these scenes, we’re shown how a dangerous boundary is approached, breached, and made to yield its contents under witness. The forbidden room is an autonomous complex under taboo; the boundary serves as a safety device, keeping overwhelming material at a distance until the ego can tolerate it. Opening, therefore, is a psychological operation. The show employs slow reveals, allowing Psyche time to register what is found; this is the symbolic attitude in action, as it treats the image as something to relate to. Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird fairytales dramatize why the drawer must be opened: what is hidden rules from the dark, so bringing it to light is the first ethical act. The bloody key motif stains the user and tells the secret by leaving a trail. Ed Gein’s trophies serve a similar role: the finger, the human skin mask show where libido is fixated and will not stay buried. This can be understood as a distinction between concretization and symbolization: when Psyche fails to create a symbol, libido hardens into tangible things and acts.
Cinematic Language and Intertext
A close‑up of Augusta Gein tearing into a Cornish hen, cuts to a restaurant where a Hitchcock‑like director does the same. Staged archival clips, including a Nazi club with Ilse Koch, trace how atrocities can contaminate Psyche. A soundstage replica of Gein’s house is cross‑cut with the real farmhouse, so reality and fantasy are blurred. Photographers shoot crime scenes and sell the pictures, much like the show series that monetizes trauma. The finale strings posters and movie clips from later horror films into a short history of what Gein’s crimes inspired in Hollywood. The question is who profits from these images, and who pays the cost when they circulate? By matching Augusta’s hen with Hitchcock’s and cross cutting the replica house with the real farm cinema, it transforms private acts into archetypal images, charges them with mana through intensity and staging, and forges a modern myth that binds spectators in a shared psychic field. The crime-photo market and recycled horror icons demonstrate how shadow can be sold. When images are not symbolized, Mercurius turns libido into a commodity, so profit accrues while the community pays in numbness, contagion, and identification with the aggressor. Alchemical Negredo demands a symbolic attitude and ethical containment. Because these images circulate as commodities, they constellate Trickster and the mana-personality. Only ritual limits, clearly naming shadow, making restitution, and refusing inflation, will help a community carry the psychic charge without tipping into the psychological epidemics Jung warned of.
Cultural Stakes
Wartime headlines and nuclear‑age footage set the mood at the start of the show: mass violence feels close, and ordinary people look dangerous. The series argues that art can train our attention so that looking doesn’t turn into numbness or thrill‑seeking. It models a short routine you can actually use: notice what hits you, name the feeling, ask why it came up now, choose one safe, concrete action. It also suggests institutional guardrails that help, such as post-shoot debriefs, clinical supervision, and agreed-upon privacy rules for public figures. The closing images of staff reading Gein’s story in an institution and vandals attacking his grave inspire a final question: how do we revisit monstrous violence without feeding on it? The symbolic attitude is the modern antidote to mass-mindedness, making individuation a civic vaccine against psychic epidemics. To remember violence without feeding on it, the image must be transformed into symbols that bind collective shadow and prevent Wotan-like possession by joining insight to choices and behaviors. A culture remembers violence without feeding on it only when it suffers the opposites into consciousness and then binds them to new choices, so the numinous image becomes symbol rather than repetitive fate. Absent that symbolic and legal temenos, archetypal energy returns as scapegoating, conspiracy, or spectacle-addiction; culture-level individuation means holding the tension of opposites in institutions until insight hardens into responsible action.
Learn More about Joey Pollari:
Listen to Joey’s new song, I’ll Be Romance
