*Monstrous spoilers!Monster passes the Bechdel test within the first ten minutes of the film. It's a nice feat, but the romantic prelude is a stark contrast to the rest of the film. The tag line for this movie should have been "What one will do for love." Or whatever the character of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron) considers love. It's a twisted movie, and though passing the Bechdel test really isn't one that I would recommend to others.
Monster is a biopic surrounding a short period in the life of Aileen "Lee" Wuornos, a prostitute-turned-serial killer in which she meets the one and only love of her life Selby Walls (Christina Ricci). Selby is the first person to love or really just show affection towards Lee, and this connection between them sets off a rather catastrophic chain of events that ends in Lee sentenced to the death penalty for the murders of seven men.
The film does start out rather sweetly, and the romance and chemistry between Lee and Selby is earnest and almost touching. However, this fantasy is soon shaken when Lee goes to "hook" herself out on the streets to get money for a hotel room. She gets beaten up, raped, and takes her revenge rather instinctively as she takes shoots the man responsible before he can hurt her further. It's an incredibly intense scene, and one that invoked a lot of empathy, at least from me. However, the subsequent murders don't fit into this category.
The major flaw with Monster is that nobody, not even the makers of the movie, tries to understand the main character, and constantly paints her as a victim of circumstance. One can, of course, completely empathize with the various, grueling hardships of Wuornos' childhood. However, the film paints her murders as an all-too-simple inevitability. She has to do it for money. She has to do it for Selby. She has to do it for love. There's no hard eye to these claims, and it seems as though the movie is constructed to make the rest of the world pity the injustices against her.
There's a difference between analysis, understanding, and sympathy. Every male character in the movie (save one) is either a jackass or betrays Lee to the authorities. It's misandristic at best. Feminist film blogs aside, the elimination of men from the moral spectrum doesn't make a film any more representative of women. It takes the easy way out, making it a much less complex movie than it should have been. The relationship between the two women is equally strange to comprehend---it's nearly abusive, and I couldn't comprehend throughout the entirety of the movie exactly why Aileen Wuornos was killing these men for her, or why she took the fall. Was it simply because she let her in and showed her some affection? If so, it seems to cheapen the film as a whole.
Even though Monster passes the Bechdel test, it's not a film I feel is representative of women, love, or even Aileen Wuornos. A documentary would have portrayed her with more vision and clarity, and is really what is needed here. Thus, it gets the "Yellow Light" rating--a Bechdel test-passing movie that I would really not recommend to anyone.
The film does start out rather sweetly, and the romance and chemistry between Lee and Selby is earnest and almost touching. However, this fantasy is soon shaken when Lee goes to "hook" herself out on the streets to get money for a hotel room. She gets beaten up, raped, and takes her revenge rather instinctively as she takes shoots the man responsible before he can hurt her further. It's an incredibly intense scene, and one that invoked a lot of empathy, at least from me. However, the subsequent murders don't fit into this category.
The major flaw with Monster is that nobody, not even the makers of the movie, tries to understand the main character, and constantly paints her as a victim of circumstance. One can, of course, completely empathize with the various, grueling hardships of Wuornos' childhood. However, the film paints her murders as an all-too-simple inevitability. She has to do it for money. She has to do it for Selby. She has to do it for love. There's no hard eye to these claims, and it seems as though the movie is constructed to make the rest of the world pity the injustices against her.
There's a difference between analysis, understanding, and sympathy. Every male character in the movie (save one) is either a jackass or betrays Lee to the authorities. It's misandristic at best. Feminist film blogs aside, the elimination of men from the moral spectrum doesn't make a film any more representative of women. It takes the easy way out, making it a much less complex movie than it should have been. The relationship between the two women is equally strange to comprehend---it's nearly abusive, and I couldn't comprehend throughout the entirety of the movie exactly why Aileen Wuornos was killing these men for her, or why she took the fall. Was it simply because she let her in and showed her some affection? If so, it seems to cheapen the film as a whole.
Even though Monster passes the Bechdel test, it's not a film I feel is representative of women, love, or even Aileen Wuornos. A documentary would have portrayed her with more vision and clarity, and is really what is needed here. Thus, it gets the "Yellow Light" rating--a Bechdel test-passing movie that I would really not recommend to anyone.
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