It doesn’t matter who wins the Oscar for best actress next week; the film everyone’s going to be looking out for is Monster, and the actress most film buffs have their money on is Charlize Theron.
Monster is billed as the true-life story of America’s first female serial killer, which isn’t entirely true. Aileen Wuornos was one of the few women to have received the death penalty for murder in the history of the US; she admitted to murdering at least six men, which also makes her one of the relatively few women serial killers in history, but she was not the first woman serial killer in America.
Wuornos had a terrible childhood; she was abused by her stepfather, suffered burns on her face in an accident, and stumbled through a violent adolescence. Looking for a career in the movies, she wound up as a prostitute living off the truck trade; she was brutally raped by at least one of her clients, and beaten up several times. The only kindness in her life came from her relationships with other women. She claimed self-defence not just in one of her murders, but in all of them. Her story kept changing; first she accused all her victims of having assaulted and raped her, then she claimed that just one had raped her but that the rest had threatened or assaulted her. Given the conditions that prostitutes worked and continue to work in, this is not as implausible as it sounds — what emerges as inescapably true, though, is that Aileen Wuornos nursed a bitter hatred against men, and none of the men she met did anything to change that opinion.
The film portrays Aileen Wuornos’ miserable life with tender sympathy. It’s Oscar-winning material all the way, for several reasons: Hollywood loves serial murderers, women get to play the victims of serial killers far more often than they play the killer herself, and besides, there’s the make-up thing.
Here’s key make-up artist on Monster, Toni G, talking about Charlize Theron’s make-up for the role: “She’s got this beautiful face, but she’s a very brave woman, because you’ve got to have the weight in order for the jowls to look right ... And she let me mutilate her eyebrows, which changes the whole look of her eyes. It’s an hour-long process just to get the skin discolorations and all. You could never do something like that with an actress who isn’t totally willing to go for it.”
The applause for Theron comes from the fact that she’s willing to play such an unappealing character; the actress’ bravery and dedication is best showcased by the fact that she’s willing to embrace physical ugliness.
It made me think of another bitter woman with blood on her hands. Phoolan Devi survived repeated abuse and rape and turned her guns on a world of powerful men, as the only way she could see that offered some kind of redressal. Just as Aileen Wuornos, warped and mutilated by the violence in her life, eventually turned that violence outwards against any man she could find.
And when Phoolan finally emerged from the ravines, how was she judged? We looked at the Bandit Queen and marvelled that she could be such a nondescript, mousy, even plain woman. As if, in order to either suffer abuse or to turn against it, however destructively, you must be an icon of a different kind, represent a certain image of fierce but attractive vengeance. Neither Phoolan nor Aileen is alive today; they would have slightly different ideas on the subject.