And An Adjunct

Monster is not a film about environments that ferment disabling conditions so much as disabling rationalizations that fall apart for Aileen Wuornos as soon as she creates them. It is interesting to note, however, that Jenkins' framed the prostitute's remorse over the killing of the retired officer with the jump cut of Theron holding his wallet and realizing his wife was most likely paraplegic, exciting Aileen's pity, to the extent that her girlfriend's narrative is factual.

Aileen's Arc

I have not researched Aileen Wuornos much beyond scans to see if I would enjoy the Patty Jenkins' film, and I am not sure what it would do for me as a writer to engage in such research. Patty already took this up as a cause celebre and made her critical impact, not to detract from the performances of Theron and Ricci, but the film unsettled me. I know it is not due to the execution, nor the rather soft lesbianism, (I did not feel threated by it, in other words, and my archives will have the low down on this) and my welfare life with my mother was not that close to the narrative, merely almost as bad. Losers pay a brutal price in this country, maybe that is it, but I have tried all my life to do the right things to succeed, and my life nearly amounts to an ugly hooker's table turning rage. I know I am disabled, but I shouldn't have to settle for this near inability to experience anything else except a poverty paradigm for the defeated. Yes, Monster shows that Aileen tried to go straight after she killed the pathological misogynist, but Patty Jenkins had an agenda, whatever her fidelity to the truth, that truth seems still murky to me.

I was nearly a victim of date rape, and I bear some blame for it, for moving to the inner city to prove a point, maybe for letting my emotions get the better of me, but I never sank the way this prostitute allowed herself to sink, and here I am at the half century mark, nearly short of cracking because I want better options than passive compliance. One of Liberty's now retired coordinators, who knew me when I was still active at Liberty, said during my spiral down the drain to where I am now, that "You shouldn't have to work," in that usual condescending fashion these case managers have, but everyone should be respected for wanting to be of use as long as we can. Many CIL consumers make excuses, and you've read me falling into that, in relation to bus routes, Paratransit, and while I do not mind doing grunt work in this studio for an hourly sum, I do not want to set myself up for more failure. I am not a good receptionist, and lousy at typing, and trying to compete for those positions isn't in my best interest at my age. I'd rather modify my writing skills in between freelancing jobbers. And if I can't?

The film eclipses how hard Aileen actually tried, and maybe that is what's nagging me about the gaps in her biography. She looks a little like my mother's lesbian welfare comrade Kmac. Not exactly, but there is an echo of resemblance in the smirk, the flush of the skin in the shot, at least in this Wiki photo. My mother regretted telling me that Kmac courted her, as I wrote in some earlier posts, and I regret knowing, not simply out of revulsion, but because this woman made the few safe havens of my childhood a lie, and yes, I had an attachment to her as the more stable figure then, between the two of them, my mother and her butch buddy. There were issues between this woman and her deceased daughter, whose obituary I also posted when I was still active on the now fabled literature network forums.

You know what? I actually do want to enjoy a bit of life in the little time I have left before I get locked back in some real cage under another name. I don't have much in the quality quiver before I physically weaken into that reality, and yet in a very real sense, I have been punished much like Wuornos, battling with some of the same negatives that led her onto her desperate bid.

Ennui's Last Omelette

The sad thing is any American woman could wind up becoming Aileen Wuornos. My mother came closer than I did to this type of existential tragedy, but her pregnancy with Benjamin, for those of you keeping score, my half brother who now like my sister has ceased talking to me, screwed her brain back on temporarily, and she pulled up just enough, at least just enough to see my other brother to his death, then her father, and she survived just barely long enough to see me end the Italian wedding gala to Frank. Part of me wonders if I killed her because I did not marry the poor ugly  bastard, and my sister feels the same way, guilty, because granny had to give her money for the brood. That is how my mother's life ended, with Stephanie's dependency. My sister is a weak and shallow mother, expecting hand outs, and the last time she and I spoke, she screamed at me that I hated her, and no, that isn't quite the case, but I don't like her very much, and don't miss her angst and its primacy, honestly, even though I myself have lost every social extension except for my online relatively impolitic interactions, or meeting new editors in email and then failing them. With a sniggered gut curdle, I am not sure this counts, not that I am actively going to make a proactive save attempt today. Maybe a passive one, due to the weather.

I streamed Monster on a whim, and my initial reaction is that I did not need another welfare white trash story on top of all the others that have pissed on my life. I am not faulting Charlize Theron. She pulls out a master habitation with her B-grade actress larger than life bravado. The reviewers are right, and Patty Jenkins indicts this country more than Aileen Wuornos herself. The story just hits too close to home, too close to my own sense of desperate strain against the feeling of the noose around my neck, and I have no desire to pump bullets into tricks, good bad or sick, and know it is late in the day for justice to ease my circumstance, and my education is no longer enough, perhaps, against encroaching physical vulnerability. I am going to rest now before the second to last episode of my favorite network show airs this evening. I was going to post a LiveJournal poll asking if anyone wanted to party during the last episode next week, but did not want to put myself in the position of not getting any responses.