Starring: Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci
Director: and written by Patty Jenkins
Rated: MA15+
IF you are an actress who really wants to win an Oscar then make sure you choose a film where the story revolves around graphic or implied sexual violence.
As long as you can act, that should do the trick. It did so in 1988 for Jodie Foster in The Accused; 1990 for Kathy Bates in Misery; 1991 for Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs; 1993 for Holly Hunter in The Piano; 1995 for Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking; 1999 for Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry; 2001 for Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball; and this year for Charlize Theron for Monster.
Monster is a profoundly grim story which most viewers would find disturbing and repulsive. It’s based on a real life story.
Nearing suicidal despair, Aileen Wuornos (Theron) wanders into a Florida bar, where she meets Selby Wall (Christina Ricci), a young woman sent by her parents to live with an evangelical Christian aunt in order to ‘cure her homosexuality’.
Wuornos, who is a victim of a tragic, abusive upbringing, quickly falls in love, and clings to Selby like a life preserver. Unable to find a legitimate job but desperate to sustain her relationship with Selby, Wuornos returns to prostitution. When one of her clients turns violent and rapes her, Wuornos shoots the man in self-defence – the first in a tragic string of six killings.
Last year Wuornos was executed by the State of Florida after being convicted as the USA’s first female serial killer. While she confessed to the six murders, including a policeman, she claimed to have killed only in self-defence, resisting violent assaults while working as a woman in prostitution.
This low budget ‘Indie’ film is hard going in every respect, but at its core it has a very strong social message and the title is instructive.
On one level Monster refers to a large ferris wheel which, as a child, Aileen couldn’t wait to ride. ‘I was so excited that when I got on it, I threw up.’ The ferris wheel is a metaphor for her life – too much, too soon with no boundaries.
On another and much more important level, monsters are fictitious characters created by our imaginations.
Writer and director Patty Jenkins believes that Aileen Wuornos’s monstrous behaviour was created too. Aileen was repeatedly raped from the age of eight, orphaned and homeless at 12, turned to prostitution at 13 and became a mother that same year.
In Catholic ethics, we are the choices we make. There is no objective excuse for the evil nature of Wuornos’s crimes. But there is every subjective basis on which to examine Wuornos’s moral culpability for her crimes, given her mental health and her tragic history. Even a created monster is not beyond God’s grace.
But this discussion is too late in this particular case because the state felt obliged to do to her what she did to others.
