Monster · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Monster is organized around an act of sustained, unsentimental looking — at a face the world has decided not to see. Steven Bernstein's camera stays in unsparing close-up on Charlize Theron throughout, letting Aileen Wuornos's prosthetic-laden, hard-lit face carry the full weight of a life: this is the affection-image in its most literal Deleuzian sense, the close-up as a site where feeling accumulates before it can ever become action. What arrests us isn't the violence but the expression pooled in the instants before and after — hope curdling into desperation, love calcifying into compulsion, grief arriving too late to be legible as grief. Jenkins simultaneously reorients the gaze: where the serial-killer genre typically aligns the camera with investigators tracking a monstrous other, Monster refuses every vantage point except Aileen's, turning identification into the film's primary ethical act. There is no pursuing detective, no aestheticized crime scene — only the flat Florida light of highway shoulders, motel rooms, and parking lots that Bernstein photographs as any-space-whatever, stripped of the genre's usual dramatic charge and rendered in a sun-bleached, jaundiced palette that makes the landscape feel as foreclosed as Aileen's options within it. The film's most particular formal debt runs to Terrence Malick's Badlands: the flat, affectless female voiceover that runs at emotional remove from the violence it narrates, lending events the fatalism of a life already concluded — Jenkins borrows this device wholesale, so that Wuornos's resigned first-person account becomes an elegy delivered from beyond the verdict.