Monster · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two women skate in slow circles under the bad fluorescent light of a Florida roller rink while Journey plays. Aileen, hulking and scarred, lets herself be happy for the length of one song. It's the only scene in Monster that breathes upward. Read the rest of the film against it and you understand what Patty Jenkins actually made: not a serial-killer thriller but a study of a person sliding down a slope she didn't choose and can't climb. Deleuze had a name for cinema built on that slope. He called it the impulse-image, and Monster is one of the purest American examples of it ever filmed.

The impulse-image sits between two more familiar things. There's the close-up, where a face registers a feeling that hasn't yet become a deed — Deleuze called that the affection-image, and Theron's ravaged face under Steven Bernstein's hard, unflattering light is full of it: a single quality (need, grandiosity, hope) held immobile in the frame, what Deleuze names a qualisign. And there's the action-image, the genre engine where a character sizes up a situation and acts to change it — the procedural, the cat-and-mouse, the investigator closing in. Monster refuses that engine entirely. There is no detective, no aestheticized killer-genius, no plan. What's left is the thing in between: a person pulled by appetites and wounds beneath the level of choice, on a gradient that only runs down. Deleuze found this in Stroheim and Buñuel and called it naturalism — not realism, but a world where raw drives erupt under the social surface.

That surface is everything Bernstein's camera photographs: highway shoulders, motel rooms, gas-station fluorescents, the parking lots of low-wage Daytona. Deleuze would call this a derived-milieu — a concrete, particular setting that turns out to be the skin over what he called an originary world, a savage substratum of pure drive. Aileen's Florida is both at once. It's a real, documented sociology of poverty, and it's the originary world made visible: a place where survival is already violence, where the body is the only thing left to sell, and where the difference between a trick and a predator collapses. The spaces themselves stop being backdrops. Drained, marginal, interchangeable — Deleuze's espace quelconque, the any-space-whatever — they no longer frame action so much as soak up affect. A motel room in Monster is not where something happens. It's a fragment of a world that has already decided how this ends.

Which is the film's deepest formal choice, and Deleuze gives it a name: the line of slope, the irreversible descent toward exhaustion and death. Aileen's voiceover comes from a life already concluded — we know she was executed — so the slope is a fact before we watch a single step of it. This is why the killings don't read as plot points but as symptoms. The first, the rapist, is survival; the film frames it as rupture. Each one after is harder to justify, and the editing knows it, compressing the later murders into bleak, hurried beats. They're not decisions. They're discharges of a drive — to provide for Selby, to hold the one good thing — that has nowhere good to go. The cruel irony the script foregrounds is pure impulse-image: love itself becomes the appetite that drives her down.

This lens earns its keep because it explains the film's most controversial move without excusing it. To "understand without absolving" is exactly what naturalism does — it shows you the originary world producing the act, holds causation and culpability in one frame, and refuses the genre's usual exit, which is to make the killer either a genius or a monster. Jenkins makes her neither. She makes her a person on a slope.

The craft debts are specific. The flat, affectless voiceover running counter to the violence is lifted straight from Malick's Badlands — fatalistic narration that doesn't comment, only resigns. The observational, thrill-withholding treatment of murder descends from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which first stripped the serial-killer film of its genre pleasures. The whole project rests on the transformation-performance discourse that Raging Bull founded and Boys Don't Cry refined for the indie prestige biopic — the actor's body becoming the film's literal subject. And the sympathetic staging of women who kill men who assault them comes through Thelma & Louise, which reframed gendered violence as causation rather than pathology. Monster gathers all four and pushes them into territory none fully entered: total identification with America's first female serial killer, sustained for two hours, with the camera never once looking away from the face.

That face is the significance. Theron's transformation works because it never becomes the subject — it dissolves into biography written on a person, so the close-up can hold Wuornos in pitiless light without the artifice reading as costume. Monster took a genre organized around the action-image and the knowing audience, and emptied it into the slowest, saddest register Deleuze named — the cinema of drive and descent. It proved the monster was always a milieu wearing a human face. Watch the roller-rink scene again, knowing the slope. That one upward breath is the whole tragedy, and now you can see exactly how far down the rest of it goes.