Monster portrays the life of
a female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos.  She was abused as a child and lives by
prostitution.  She meets a young woman called Selby who hates her strict family
and is longing to get away.  The two have a kind of affair.  Aileen kills her
first man in self-defense, motivated largely because she wants to get back to
Selby.  If it weren’t for Selby, she says, she would have let the man kill
her.  Then Selby starts to want more money and Aileen can’t get a job, so she
starts killing more men.  She justifies her actions by telling herself that all
the men she kills are dangerous and rape women, but the facts contradict her. 
It’s easy to see that Aileen is confusing these men with the men who raped her
when she was a child.  She is desperate and miserable, scared that Selby will
leave her, and yet she goes on killing.

The most remarkable aspect of Monster
is Charlize Theron’s acting.  She has a look on her face that conveys how damaged
she is.  In her relationship with Selby, she yearns for love but she isn’t able
to be in a relationship.  Her explosive rage at men and her inability to cope
with the world are crystallized in Theron’s performance.  While to say it is
convincing is not quite right, since there’s a slightly theatrical quality to
it, it is still astonishing. 

Christina Ricci’s performance is
also good, although compared to Theron’s it seems a little wooden.  It is hard
to convey the combination of naivety and willing duplicity in the crimes that
Selby must have had.  Ricci does best in showing how young and confused Selby
is, and she seems entirely self-centered and even lacking in any sense of guilt
in finally betraying Aileen when she wants to reduce her own risk of prison
time. 

Maybe the most unresolved aspect of
the film is Aileen’s sexuality.  She starts out insisting that she is not into
women, but when a prospect of some kind of real romance with Selby opens up,
she is eager to be with Selby.  So it seems that lesbianism is a choice for her
as a result of hating men so much.  While the film isn’t judgmental about this,
it does seem to hint at some association between lesbianism and emotional
damage.  It doesn’t portray any relationships in a very wholesome light, so it
does not really single out lesbianism as a target, but it does at least leave
itself open to confirming some people’s prejudices. 

The story does raise the question
whether, even if we accept that the death penalty can be justified for some
murderers, it should be used in the case of people like Aileen Wuornos, who
were so abused as children.  The plot is careful to show that at least some of
her murders were of men who had no intention of exploiting her, and were simply
trying to help her, and this helps to reduce the sympathy of the viewer for
her.  Nevertheless, by the end of the film, given her childhood and her
emotional problems, it seems that her execution was inhumane. 

The DVD has very few extras and so
it rather disappointing.  A special
edition DVD with commentary and many more extras is due out in 2005.

© 2004 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Movies