D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Bill’s Review
Before she was helping Charlize Theron get an Oscar nomination as a Monster, Aileen Wuornos had already been the subject of a made-for-TV movie and a documentary subject for Englishman Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac, Kurt and Courtney) in Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Broomfield returned to Florida to chronicle the final days of the doomed murderess in Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Much as in Monster, the movie is rarely instructive or enlightening and more often just pathetic.
There is a wonderful sequence in Manhunter (the original version of Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon) in which the FBI’s top unknown subjects man (played by a pre-CSI William Petersen) is questioned that he seems to feels sorry for the murderer they seek. He replies, “As a child, my heart bleeds for him. Someone took a little boy and turned him into a monster. But as an adult… as an adult, he’s irredeemable. He butchers whole families to fulfill some sick fantasy. As an adult, I think someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks.”
And it certainly seems applicable to the story of Aileen Wuornos. If you had wanted to construct a sociopath, you would be hard-pressed to invent a better recipe than the one used on Aileen. Born and then abandoned to her grandparents (including a grandfather who may have been her father as well). Sexually abused and later turning tricks for the local lads; pregnant at 13 probably courtesy of the local child molester; and finally running away while still a minor to her life’s career hitching/hooking in Florida. Further, there is little reason to dispute that the first murder (the scene most detailed in its description by Wuornos) of an oft-convicted sex offender was committed in self-defense. But then came all the others. Whether you agree with Monster’s theory that all of these murders were committed in self-defense, you are left with the fact that she kept on going out. She is by any reasonable yardstick insane and she would definitely kill again given a chance. Throughout the movie, we see her going back and forth on whether it was self-defense or robbery with the conclusion that she probably never knew herself.
The advantage of being an absolutist on the question of the death penalty is that no matter how heinous the crime, your conclusion is the same. Society should permanently deprive these people of liberty until God decides he wants them—no parole, no rehabilitation just a lifetime’s atonement until the prison releases the body to whoever wants it. With the increasing findings of innocence after conviction, inept legal representation (Aileen’s first lawyer seems a particularly vapid and incompetent representative of the Florida bar), and failure as a deterrent, it is amazing that people are so overwhelmingly in favor of it.
The total effect here is what a pathetic waste of humanity. What Aileen Wuornos has in common with Florida Governor Jeb Bush is that both are in an uncommon hurry to get her killed. As Broomfield archly observes of her 15-minute sanity hearing, “You have to wonder what she could have said to fail.” Interview after interview in the movie show her as a wild-eyed ranting incoherent. For every scene Broomfield shows of the totally unhinged Wuornos screaming her revenge, there is another of someone trying to exploit her for their own desires.
She may have given up prostitution by the end, but people were still using her—even after the body is cold. Actually you might be able to convince me of the death penalty as useful in stopping this kind of necrophilia.

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