Some thoughts about Monster<\/em>, the based-on-a-true-story in which Charlize Theron plays Aileen Wuornos, the so-called \u201cfirst American female serial killer.\u201d This post is about the movie; everything I know about the real person I learned from Riot Grrrl zines, so this post is not about her.<\/p>\n Everyone talks about how Theron gained weight and wore fake teeth for this movie. But what struck me was the way she moved. Her turned-down smile and her itchy, cadging, jockeying movements reminded me so much<\/em> of a hard-luck case I\u2019ve known for several years, a sometime prostitute whose speech and movement patterns are really similar to Theron\u2019s here. She\u2019s posturing and cajoling, sometimes openly manipulative and sometimes just achingly needy.<\/p>\n Christina Ricci, as Wuornos\u2019s lover Shelby (sort of based on someone with a different name), is a flatter character. She\u2019s a huge-eyed audience identification character, which: I was a teen lesbian in the 1990s, so Christina Ricci as self-insert isn\u2019t too tough for me. Her vocal inflections and movements also seem totally real, totally a persona I\u2019ve seen before. The Netflix sleeve describes the character as \u201cselfish\u201d but she\u2019s really more callow and needy, and then trapped.<\/p>\n I\u2019m surprised that this movie doesn\u2019t get talked about more as a specifically lesbian<\/em> movie, since it seems like the filmmakers made several choices which place it in that genre. (The most obvious one for me was the use of \u201cCrimson and Clover.\u201d Perfect and heartbreaking.) Ricci also plays miserable puppy love so, so well. You\u2019re really able to see Aileen\u2019s beauty through her character\u2019s eyes, even as you know that Shelby is cruelly naive about prostitution and about Aileen\u2019s life generally.<\/p>\n This is a brutally sad movie. Yes, the incidental music can get somewhat melodramatic. And you could argue that the dramatic-irony voiceover does too, but the story is just so painful that I can accept the director rubbing our noses in it a little.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s \u201cCrimson and Clover,\u201d<\/a> though not the version used in the movie; and here is Thistle Farms<\/a>, a place of healing for women leaving prostitution.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some thoughts about Monster, the based-on-a-true-story in which Charlize Theron plays Aileen Wuornos, the so-called \u201cfirst American female serial killer.\u201d This post is about the movie; everything I know about the real person I learned from Riot Grrrl zines, so this post is not about her. Everyone talks about how Theron gained weight and wore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[32,31,76,77,51,26],"class_list":["post-5906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-gayer-than-a-picnic-basket","tag-god-bless-the-1990s-because-no-one-else-will","tag-prayers-to-st-mary-of-egypt","tag-prepare-for-life-in-capitalist-america-play-class-struggle-the-game","tag-so-far-from-god-so-close-to-the-united-states","tag-suffering"],"yoast_head":"\n