A Parenting & kids forum. ParentingBanter.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » ParentingBanter.com forum » alt.support » Child Support
Site Map Home Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

"Monster" -- the truth



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old February 9th 04, 04:28 AM
Kenneth S.
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default "Monster" -- the truth

People reading the piece below about the current movie "Monster" may
think it has nothing to do with child support. In one sense, anyone
reaching this conclusion would be absolutely right. However, I think there
is a connection, and it has to do with the way the two sexes are habitually
portrayed in the U.S. media, and its effects on all sorts of things,
including what happens in domestic relations law.

Sue Russell, the author of this piece, is making the point that,
although most people who see this movie will think of it as a virtual
documentary, in truth the facts have been seriously distorted, in order to
make Aileen Wuornos into a victim of men. The reality is too hard to
swallow.

In my view, that same thinking is a major part of the reason why men
come out badly in domestic relations disputes.



More of a Monster Than Hollywood Could Picture

By Sue Russell
Sunday, February 8, 2004; Page B03


LOS ANGELES

The movie's horrific rape scene is grueling to watch. In a car, a terrified
prostitute is bound at the wrists and tied to one of the door handles.
Already bloodied and beaten, she is viciously sodomized by the man who
picked her up by the highway. Somehow, she breaks free and, wild with rage,
bravely turns the tables on her attacker. She grabs a gun from her bag and
fires bullet after bullet into his chest. The audience, watching
breathlessly, feels a rush of sympathy for her.

So, as portrayed in the movie "Monster," begins the one-year killing spree
of real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, played by Charlize Theron. A
beautiful actress who stunningly transformed herself into a dead-on
facsimile of the chunky, rough-looking Wuornos, Theron is a top contender
for the Best Actress Oscar and has already won a Golden Globe award. The
buzz about her performance has brought the independent film significant
attention. What bothers me is that moviegoers will think that scene of
torture it depicts is true.

With "Monster's" sympathetic take, Hollywood has put its boot print on a
piece of history. And as Aileen's biographer, I find the movie's distortions
disturbing. The filmmakers acknowledge upfront that "Monster" is
fictionalized, that it is only "based upon" a true story. But will anyone
notice this disclaimer, let alone pay attention to it? Already, most people
seem not to. Reviewer upon reviewer has referred to Aileen's saga as
depicted in the movie as true.

To be sure, the hitchhiking prostitute who confessed to killing seven men in
Florida in 1989-90 and was executed in 2002 was no JFK or Malcolm X, two
other real-life figures whose stories were altered for the big screen. But
by retooling her into a victim who began killing to fend off a rapist,
"Monster" conveniently transforms her into something we can stomach far more
easily than we can a woman who's a ruthless robber and murderer. It
perpetuates the comforting yet erroneous belief that women only kill when
provoked by abuse. But women kill for other reasons, too, as Aileen's real
life amply demonstrated.

While we would rather not accept this, we should. When we change the story
of this wounded but vicious woman to make her more a heroic victim than a
coldblooded killer, we miss an opportunity. Far more valuable than another
cookie-cutter Hollywood defense of a downtrodden, abused woman would be a
film that confronted the truth of Aileen's life and rage directly, both for
the window that truth offers into the psychology and pathology of female
murderers, and for what it says about women's capacity for violence, as well
as American society and the culture of celebrity and fame it nourishes.

At first, I was hesitant to criticize "Monster " (might it seem like sour
grapes because writer-director Patty Jenkins didn't option my book?). But
after 30 years in journalism, I feel a deep attachment to facts. And the
movie's treatment of them is something I can't let go unchallenged.

I began studying Aileen soon after her 1991 arrest. She had gunned down
complete strangers, shooting them multiple times, sometimes in the back, as
they tried to flee. Her victims fought for their lives as desperately as any
female murder victim. Calculatingly, she covered her tracks, wiped away her
fingerprints and made off with their cars, cash and possessions. She
admitted that she killed to avoid leaving witnesses to her robberies, which
I believe she conducted when she felt that her relationship with her lesbian
lover was in peril, since she believed cash was a way of shoring it up.

But beyond this, Aileen craved fame. She had told friends that she wanted to
do something no woman had ever done before. She had repeatedly expressed
fantasies of leading a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style outlaw existence (though she
ultimately acted alone) and going down in history. She wanted a book to be
written about her life. She wanted society to view her as a heroine.

The source for the movie's rape scene is clearly Aileen's own jaw-dropping
court testimony. She first publicly aired this cinematically dramatic
account at her trial for the murder of her first known victim, 51-year-old
electronics shop owner Richard Mallory, a full year after her original
confession to police. Initially, she had told detectives that Mallory was
nice and that they had spent five fun hours together before she killed him.
She said variously that she shot him because he wouldn't take off his pants,
because he wasn't going to pay her, and because he'd paid her but she was
afraid he was going to take his money back. But she didn't say he'd raped
her until she took the witness stand.

Her rape account, however, simply didn't match the physical evidence. She
said Mallory was coming toward her when she first shot him, yet a firearms
expert testified that a hole in the back of his sleeve indicated the gun had
been fired from behind. Asked to explain why the bullet's trajectory didn't
match her story, she said, with chilling detachment, "I thought he was so
decomposed you couldn't tell." Mallory was found fully clothed, his pants
zipped, his belt buckled, and his pockets turned inside out as if they had
been emptied.

Even more important was the testimony of Aileen's lover, Tyria Moore, a
jovial, very hefty, openly gay woman with missing teeth who was often
mistaken for a man. (In another instance of Hollywood's romanticizing touch,
Moore is replaced in "Monster" with Selby, a rather whinily dependent young
woman struggling to come out as a lesbian, played by the winsome Christina
Ricci.) When detectives first caught up with and interviewed Moore, she was
very scared, and they were convinced she was truthful. When she later
testified against her lover, she stuck to the story she had told them. She
described Aileen coming home and casually declaring, as they watched TV, "I
killed a man today." Aileen drove Mallory's car when she and Moore used it
to move. She behaved normally. She made no mention of, nor bore any visible
signs of, an attack. That the volatile Aileen would not have cursed out a
brutal rapist to Moore simply beggars belief.

In "Monster," so pervasive is the sense of Aileen as a victim that any true
sense of menace is absent. No one I spoke to who had seen the film reported
feeling any chills of fear, of the kind you might get watching a film about
notorious male murderers such as Ted Bundy or Richard Ramirez. Since
"Monster" paints Aileen as the victim of her victims, it's hard to shake the
empathy one feels for her. Yet the real Aileen was so violently volatile
that I certainly wouldn't have wanted our paths to cross in a dark alley.
She could be scary -- and people trying to understand what she did should
know that.

I'm not without empathy for Aileen. Researching her childhood in Michigan, I
felt great sadness as I pieced together the misery of her life. Abandoned by
her mother before age 2, she was raised by her alcoholic grandparents as
their own. Though her accounts varied wildly, I do believe she was sexually
abused as a child. She began selling her body at age 11 or 12. It's highly
likely she endured rapes over the years; most prostitutes do.

But "Monster" suggests that her rage sprang whole from a brutal attack and
that she thereafter just carried on killing. In reality, her seemingly
uncontrollable furies first manifested themselves in childhood. With no
apparent impulse control, Aileen so scared or repelled her peers that she
was treated as a pariah. Her mother's sister, with whom she was raised as a
sibling, told me how the adolescent Aileen once terrified her by holding a
kitchen knife to her throat over a trivial babysitting dispute. At around
age 20, Aileen spent a couple of weeks under her birth mother's roof. The
woman was so petrified of her that she barely slept.

And what about her victims? The media routinely lump them together as her
"johns." Yet, excluding those whose bodies were found naked, it's just as
likely that some were simply good Samaritans lending a helping hand, since
Aileen's modus operandi was to hitch rides, claiming her car had broken
down. These men have been demonized in a way in which we would rarely
demonize female homicide victims. And that has brought incalculable pain to
some of their families.

After Aileen's conviction, it did come out that Richard Mallory had been
convicted of a sexual assault at age 19. But his record had been clean for
decades. Prostitutes whom he frequented described him as a nice man and a
generous tipper.

I know that Hollywood routinely whitewashes or changes the truth. But doing
that obscures the moral message of Aileen Wuornos's real life. I've got
nothing against Charlize Theron. Her physical transformation in "Monster" is
eerily good and her acting mesmerizing. I'd polish her awards myself. And
I'm not against the movie, either -- as entertainment. But fictionalized or
not, it's about a real person, and I can't help feeling that it's trying to
fit Aileen's story into a more politically correct mold than the reality
allows. It all but guarantees that she and her murders will end up on the
microfiche of collective memory in a way that is fundamentally inaccurate
but closer to what her own hopes for her legacy were.

I don't think she quite deserves that. I'll admit it was chilling to see her
sentenced to death. She was severely damaged goods and mentally flawed. Yet
many have endured far worse than she. Ultimately, she was irredeemably
dangerous. She killed in cold blood, cutting down men who had lives and
wives and families. That's a truth not even Hollywood should pretty up.

Sue Russell is a freelance journalist in Los Angeles and the author of
"Lethal Intent" (Pinnacle Books).



© 2004 The Washington Post Company



 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Veritas means Truth Todd Gastaldo Pregnancy 0 June 15th 04 11:58 PM
Review: Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (***) Steve Rhodes General 0 May 5th 04 08:15 AM
Review: Monster (***) Steve Rhodes General 0 December 13th 03 01:16 AM
Denial of truth in America (any 'PHleft' listers having babies?) Todd Gastaldo Pregnancy 0 October 6th 03 05:20 PM
Review: Party Monster (1/2) Steve Rhodes General 0 August 27th 03 10:08 PM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 01:28 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 ParentingBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.