Monster, director/writer Patty Jenkins's bio-pic of executed murderer Aileen Wuornos, is being released in New York on Dec. 24 and sometime next year in Canada, and the advance hype is as about as huge as the unlikely murderer's killing ground -- the highways and by-ways of north central Florida.
This advance heat is surprising, regardless of the film's star, Charlize Theron, and satellites: Christina Ricci and Giovanni Ribisi. Films about mass murderers or serial killers are generally relegated to television, as most people find it difficult to justify their fascination with outlaws unless they are presented as fictional composites or as both stylish and somehow, fatally, beyond reproach. Hence the appeal of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (mythologized in film and in the hideous Gallic dirge of Serge Gainsbourgh and Brigitte Bardot), whose je m'en foutisme captivated all of us who perceive passion to be essentially criminal. Hence, the rotating popularity of Ed Gein, who has been recast as Norman Bates, Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs's Buffalo Bill, his authenticity expunged through adaptation, and therefore palatable (never mind that his actual crimes make an afternoon of being yelled at, in the depths of Bill's well -- "It will put the lotion in the bucket!" -- seem like a pleasing alternative.) Criminals' stories, as seen on television, are freighted with the limits of this genre and designed only to elicit moral reactions through impoverished acting and ferocious reporting. Recently, in addition to John Walsh's America's Most Wanted, a spate of true-crime shows has appeared, including A&E's American Justice, Cold Case Files, and City Confidential (A&E), and Court TV's Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege & Justice (in which the Vanity Fair minted dullard, one assumes, continues to impersonate his Tor Johnson-like reaction to the O.J. Simpson decision, while recounting a luncheon of brie and bell peppers with Lee Radziwell). Such shows are so morally rigged, that the mere sound of American Justice's stentorian narrator has left me, more than once, to wish I could squeal on my unassuming, probable cannibal neighbours.
When killers' lives are dramatized, the B-actor pool is usually skimmed, resulting in such fantastically lurid and inept dramas, that it is hard to tell the difference between a profile of a felon and one of Valerie Bertinelli's latest attempts to find a blood-donor or good, challenged man.
Who can forget the sight of Farrah Fawcett, playing child-murderer Diane Downs, strutting her homicidal stuff in Sergio Valentes and thigh high boots? Or, and ultimately, Brian Denehey's portrayal of John Wayne Gacy, a performance larded with credible hubris and such compelling psychopathy, I am surprised the clown-killer did not go to his death praising the actor, in a macabre version of the Emmys.
Aileen Wuornos, "the Damsel of Death," who is best known as the first female serial killer -- she murdered seven middle-aged men, in cold blood, on a one-year spree -- died in October of 1992. Her last words were "I'll be back" and she was not just quoting The Terminator -- as she confided to her supporters, "I have hate crawling through my system," a hate that too many feminist commentators have tried to understand and justify, given the genuinely horrible circumstances of her childhood.
Wuornos made good of her final threat and two films, Nick Broomfield's Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Killer and Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story (a Jean Smart made-for-TV affair) were released, both of which focused on the "sensationalism" surrounding her criminality, warranted by dint of her dubious contribution to women's long-standing assertion that we can do anything as well as men.
Monster, by all accounts, is an earnest and sympathetic film, serious enough to have compelled Theron to gain 50 pounds and wear prosthetic teeth in order to capture a true likeness of the patently unattractive "Highway Hooker."
When an actor summons the dictates of Lee Strasberg, and actually lives on lard or deigns to work as a fish-gutter for one odious day, she means business: Method acting remains the last means of dignifying portrayals of otherwise distasteful figures, like the savage, gourmandizing Al Capone, or the more-fatuous-than-fat Bridget Jones.
While Monster may turn out to be as gritty a slice of American cyanide-pie as Boys Don't Cry (problematic in its own right, for reasons exceeding the wan likes of Brendan Teena); it will likely tell us the same cry me a river story that every serial killer sings, when apprehended.
Most multiple maniacs and the like have had venal, abusive childhoods, and while this explains a good deal of their squirming hate, it is simply not reason enough for us to forge case and effect arguments, arguments that imprison us all in the logic of the killer; that remove us, terribly farther, from the killed.
If feminist theory were still an active, vital force, we would have long exiled the likes of Wuornos from our ranks. This movement has failed us all because of a certain dogma that insists on parity, while demanding to be recused from its own logic.
Did Ed Gein's mother make him wear dresses and drown his kittens? I do not care, and care precisely as much about Wuornos.
In a poem to one of her most ardent supporters, Wuornos wrote: "You are way too kind/to get to know my kind of mind."
The Damsel herself knew how life forks, into surrender, or resistance. As Jenkins's ambiguous title implies, we are all monsters if we gaze into her tawdry abyss, but the last time I checked, I saw a dead woman, whose blank, cruel eyes could never imprecate me to commit like-evils; to consider her "kind of mind" beyond the scared abstract, where hope and mercy surely reside.