Through his attorney, Alex told People that Fuller and Carr’s series “mischaracterizes Alex’s relationships with his wife Maggie and his son Paul, both of whom Alex loves so dearly.” To that, Fuller tells VF: “I do truly believe, to whatever extent I can understand, that he did love Maggie and Paul. I think that’s one of the reasons he can’t open that door of monstrousness to acknowledge what he did.”
In one final, prescient twist, Alex used a visit to his elderly mother, Libby, then suffering from dementia, as an alibi for the murders. “After the most dehumanizing, monstrous thing someone could do, he went and sat there with his mom,” Fuller says.
Like Alex fleeing from the darkest moments of his life and into the arms of his mother, Fuller ventures that the rocky last few years have led us back there culturally too. “We’ve been through so much in the past 10 years, particularly the past five. The collective psyche has just been so traumatized, and there’s so much uncertainty when we’re dealing with AI, what the economy’s going to look like, climate change—all these massive things,” says Fuller. “We dramatized [Paul’s older brother] Buster Murdaugh saying at the end of his father’s murder trial, ‘I just want my mom.’ There is something fundamental that a mother in the most general way provides. But what we’re seeing, with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Die My Love, is the burden of that on the individual.”
Die My LoveMubi/ Everett Collection
In a year where men channeled their inner demons into vampires (Sinners), gods (Superman), and even a new Frankenstein, motherhood served as a trippy catalyst for many writer-directors. “We are thinking about ourselves as mothers, but also our own mothers. If you have a good enough mother, those problems and demands and terrible feelings that we’re putting forth in these movies are all behind the scenes,” says Bronstein. “Those are mommy’s little secrets. Kids go to bed, wine comes out or whatever it is, but we don’t see that as kids. We don’t see all the work that goes into even something as simple as a birthday.”
The unflinching portraits of maternity have had a profound effect on mothers, but also on young people deciding whether or not to procreate. “Women are really openly expressing a total disinterest in marriage and children,” says Gallagher, citing a recent Pew Research Center study that found a 22-point drop over the last three decades in teenage girls’ desire to get married. As of 2025, teenage girls are officially less likely than teenage boys to say they want to get married. “So, it makes sense to me that we’re finally free enough perhaps to explore and say out loud that having kids isn’t for everyone, and/or you can love your kids to death and still acknowledge that the life of having kids is really hard,” she continues.
