The Automatik

Whenever I watch the show COPS (which is actually rather frequently), I’m amazed by the amount of time law enforcement spends on prostitution stings. These are executed in one of two formats: A) a female cop poses as a hooker in order to nab would-be johns or B) a male cop chats up a hooker in order to charge her with solicitation. My concern with this is not that I believe prostitution should be ignored or even legalized; what I object to is the way the police officers cheer as they tally up the day’s total, as if they’re somehow saving the world by throwing men and women in jail for participating in prostitution.

It’s scary that there are such staggering amounts of men willing to have sex with an absolute stranger, no matter how damaged-looking or potentially disease-ridden and dangerous. What’s more disturbing, and more crucial to the situation, is how these women got to this point in the first place. Yet none of the show’s participants ever indicates any attempts to rehabilitate them. You can’t just refer them to Narcotics Anonymous and hope for the best. These are women who have sold their bodies for a large portion of their lives so they won’t starve to death, be forced to sleep on the street, or worse, so that they can get a handful of crack. They don’t know how to live any other way.

With this reality in mind, Aileen Wuornos seems less like a Monster, but the bastard child of a monstrous world. This is not an attempt to soften the impact of the pre-meditated murders she committed or excuse her twisted rationalizations for committing those murders. Nor is it a misguided plea to lionize her as some sort of post-modern feminist heroine. Yet, if you’d been raped, beaten, and otherwise physically and emotionally abused for most of your life, you cannot say with utmost conviction that you wouldn’t become a murderer, too.

I wept for Wuornos in the sickeningly graphic rape and torture scene. Then, I became afraid of and for her, watching her transformation from petty criminal into bloodthirsty vigilante, one who exhibited the same sociopathic cruelty as her attackers. Forget about the makeup and the thirty pounds Charlize Theron gained to portray the most notorious female serial killer in history. The magnificence of her performance is that she doesn’t appear to be acting. Although the character was based on a real-life person, to me it was Wuornos herself up on the screen. Her face, her voice, and her mannerisms haunted me well into the next day, and at the grocery, I kept waiting to turn a corner and run into her.

Wuornos’s dreams of becoming a legal secretary or the President of the United States were real, no matter how foolish they seemed. It made me uncomfortable when nearly everyone in the audience laughed during the scenes of her everyday existence. She was uneducated and ignorant, with few social skills. You shouldn’t ridicule her because she unironically liked Journey, wore acid-washed jeans, and feathered her hair. Her life should not be subjected to mockery by people who think they’re better than that because they weren’t victims of circumstance or because they got lucky.

Hollywood’s typical glamorous stereotype of the hooker with a heart of gold insults the harsh reality of hundreds of thousands of women who have no escape. With Monster, there may not be a solution to the problem, but at least there is a reality check. Monsters aren’t born, they’re made. Wuornos may have been homicidal and delusional, but she was right about one thing: in the real world, people kill each other every day to survive. What’s frightening about Monster is not that Aileen Wuornos was an anomaly, it’s that there aren’t more women just like her.