Entering the Darkness: Rhetorics of Transformation and Gendered Violence in Patty Jenkins's Monster

Abstract

The 2003 film Monster depicted events in the life of executed murderer Aileen Wuornos. While many gender theorists describe the Wuornos case as a site of gender trouble vis-à-vis violence in public culture, discourse surrounding the film focused primarily on Charlize Theron's portrayal of Wuornos. Her performance was largely framed as a temporary voyage into an amorphous “darkness” that physically and emotionally transformed her. The resulting narrative of transformation subordinated oppositional readings of the film to an emphasis on a beautiful actress who came to embody a hideous murderer. I argue that this narrative produced rhetorics of decontextualized violence by dissociating Wuornos's acts from their rootedness in patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism. While this framing of the film is problematic, I nonetheless argue that Monster retains the potential to function as a transgressive text on gendered violence capable of mobilizing communities of struggle.

Keywords:

• Aileen Wuornos
• Charlize Theron
• gendered violence
• Monster
• oppositional readings
• rhetorics of transformation
• women and cinema

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Meredith Bagley, editor Joan Faber McAlister, and the anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback on this manuscript. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2006 and 2013 meetings of the National Communication Association.

Notes

In making the distinction between “corporeal” and “emotional” transformations, I do not intend to reinforce problematic dualisms or gendered discourses of emotion. Rather, these categorizations reflect the emergent themes in discourse surrounding the film in general and Theron's performance in particular.

These shows and films include the television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (“Law and Order: SVU”); the film The Brave One (“The Brave One”); the book and film series The Hunger Games (Barnes); and Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (“This Week's Cover”).

While Wuornos confessed to seven murders, she was tried and convicted for only six (“Wuornos’ Last Words”).

However, during a filming of his documentary about Wuornos's case, filmmaker Nick Broomfield generated an admission from Wuornos (while she presumably thought the camera was off) that the first murder, as well as others, was in self-defense.

While mainstream legal and popular discourse rejected the image of Wuornos as a damsel in distress, her modus operandi often entailed posing as one to gain entrance to men's cars. In other words, the state interpreted the damsel narrative as a deliberate ruse designed to lure victims, many of whom the courts believed were not interested in sex (see “Motorist Details Threat”).

Aside from principled objections to Wuornos's claim, investigators also questioned the likelihood that all seven victims had attempted to rape her. Wuornos replied to this argument by stating that, as a prostitute, she had had sex with thousands of men, making her seven victims statistically more likely to have attempted to rape her (Schilt).

In fact, while Ted Bundy, another high-profile Florida serial killer who raped and murdered at least 30 young women, was offered a life sentence without parole, Wuornos never received such an offer (Burkeman).

The United States presently incarcerates a higher proportion of its adult population than any other nation (One in 100). Women are currently the fastest growing prison population in the country. According to the advocacy organization the Sentencing Project, “The number of women in prison increased by 646% between 1980 and 2010,” or 1.5 times the rate of men during the same period (1).

A LexisNexis Academic search for the terms “Theron” and “Wuornos” since 2009 produced either articles focusing on the quality of Theron's performance or exploitation pieces about Wuornos's status as a serial killer (see McGrath; Quigley; Ramanthan; West).

Such male performances include Robert De Niro's portrayal of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, in which critic Keith Uhlich claims De Niro “leeches LaMotta of soul and conscience,” and Christian Bale's “beyond-the-call-of-duty” (Travers, “The Machinist”) performance as an emaciated drill-press operator in The Machinist. In both cases, reviewers emphasize the actors’ agency in their transformations.

On the role of DVD features, such as making-of documentaries and audio commentary, in suppressing resistant readings of cinematic texts, see Brookey and Westerfelhaus.