Real Monsters


by Shari L. Rosenblum

On the outskirts of our world, at the edges, in the corners, there are creatures whom we barely see, living lives we can barely imagine, making choices we can barely fathom, and fathoming depths -- of desperation or depravity, hatred or horror -- that we can barely conceive. Invisible by fate or trade, they strike us as fictional frighteners -- like the monsters children know for sure are hiding in the darkness: unreal, but terrifying. When life snuffs them out, they are rarely regretted. But once they are gone, they do entertain us. We give them re-birth in our make-believe franchise of ghouls gone mild -- inventing logic, pointing fingers, finding justifications, crying victimization, and creating sympathies the real world cannot sustain.

Aileen Wuornos was one of these creatures -- a monster escaped from under the bed or behind the closet -- the first American woman to earn the title serial killer in the official standings. Monster, written and directed by first-time filmmaker Patty Jenkins, is the almost-possibly-near true story of her life.

The details of Wuornos's history vary, and were varied by Wuornos herself, with claims of rape and abuse made and retracted, asserted and denied depending on the moment. What's consistent is this: “raised” by her grandparents, she started trading sex for cigarettes and more before she reached her teens, had a child just past puberty, developed a sexual relationship with at least one woman, made her living as a roadside prostitute, sticking out her thumb and picking out clients from those who picked her up, and was sent to her death for ending the lives of seven men at the point of her gun (she claimed to have had 250,000 before the end of her run).

Jenkins wisely sets her film up as a character study rather than a catalogue of murders. And wiser still, she makes her character sympathetic, but not likable. She hints a bit at life's injustices and Wuornos's bad breaks, gives credence arguendo to Wuornos's most persuasive defensive testimony, and shows her fragile, lost, and in love -- but she does not skimp on the darker side. Her screenplay lays out the murders in human perspective, one by one, less and less understandably, more and more painfully, until the sympathies subside, leaving the viewers at odds with themselves over the character's fate. But her vision is made possible, plausible, powerful, even, by Charlize Theron, the lithe and leggy screen beauty, who plays Wuornos as if a revelation, in a physical transformation that makes her unrecognizable, and a feat of acting that turns performance into personification, stunning in its smallest details – posture, eye movement, even the shifting of her weight. She speaks every syllable from an emptiness within – resonating with swallowed anger, profaning the tenderest of moments. Vulgarity is on her tongue and in her stare.

Theron is not alone here, though. Her characterization is enriched by the roles set up around her -- Bruce Dern, heartbreaking as a sad witness and friend who reaches out to her in warmth, but is slapped away crassly, and in raw reductions -- Christina Ricci, carefully calibrated as the virgin seductress leading the jaded whore to love's salvation, naïve, yet encouraging, needy, then demanding, provoking, then treacherous -- and the series of men young and old, who come to life in short spurts before she chooses to spare them or cut them down.

Monster looks in from the outside – finding myriad ways to create connections between character and audience that do not invite us to forgive the unforgivable. It begins at what seems a point of no return, taunts with hope, and then unfolds to its inevitable conclusion. In this, it is as merciless as the woman whose story it tells. It is an admitted fiction, but it leaves us with larger truths.

On the other side of the equation is Aileen: the Life and Death of a Serial Killer, by documentarian Nick Broomfield (Biggie & Tupac, Kurt & Courtney). This follow-up work to Broomfield's 1992 effort, Aileen Wuornos: the Selling of a Serial Killer, is a mostly-manipulated self-serving refutation of Wuornos's own claims in her last days (as they contradicted Broomfield's earlier conclusions) tacked on to a poorly argued treatise against capital punishment with Wuornos as its ill-advised poster child.

In the early arguments after her arrest, Wuornos claimed that she'd been brutally raped and had killed in self-defense (seven times) -- and Broomfield was persuaded by her, using this to persuade us in his first filmed interviews with her. By the time of Wuornos's scheduled execution, over ten years later, she had recanted her claims of self-defense and confessed that her motive on each count was robbery. Broomfield was not pleased.

Rather than letting her tell her own story, Broomfield makes great efforts to find excuses for Wuornos's acts that she herself does not insist upon. He takes us back to the life she led, showing us the door through which her beatings were spied by others, the winter woods in which she lived, homeless, as a child, the testimony of men who watched as she served as her own brother's sex partner, the unremorseful curiosity of the mother who abandoned her, the paranoia to which she had succumbed before her death, and the friends who would bury her ashes, but could not save her soul. But most of all, he badgers her to recant her recantation . . .

As argument against capital punishment, Broomfield lets his film demonstrate over and over again Wuornos's insanity – never in dispute, but indisputable after this, but does not bother to understand, or let his audience know, why it actually does not rise to legal insanity, preferring instead to rely on his lack of understanding to assert ill will or error to those who carry out the sentence . It is a cheap and cheesy ploy, and it serves to diminish the value of his tale.

Wuornos granted her last interview to Broomfield , consumed with madness, and unlikely to be missed. He focused his energies on protecting his image rather than exploring hers. It does not do justice to his subject, or his audience.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene