Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

Yesterday, Gwen and I saw Aileen, a documentary about the eponymous woman immortalized in Monster (which I also want to see).

It is unfortunate that this story is in the hands of Nick Broomfield, the documentarist. He’s just not very good at his job. He’s clearly wrapped up in his subject, he asks leading questions and occasionally, he practically answers his own questions for the interviewee. He fails to follow up on potentially interesting points that his subjects bring up. He has too much face-time and is too much a part of the story. To some extent, this is inevitable: he made a previous documentary about Aileen Wournos, which was introduced as evidence at a hearing shown in this film, and he was deposed as a witness in it as well. Setting that aside, though, he’s still too much in the movie. Though he clearly takes a dim view of other people who exploited Wournos’ story for money (a group that included several cops who were on her case), he’s in the same boat, and we see him onscreen paying $25,000 to her onetime lawyer for the right to film her. The camera work is also shoddy (not that the camera is necessarily his hands).

But Wournos herself is the real story, and she’s plenty interesting to make the movie worth seeing. Like some other documentaries that focus on crimes, we are left unsure of what really happened. Wournos, a hooker, killed seven men in the space of one year. The first had a history of sex crimes, and her initial defense was that he had brutalized her, so she was acting in self-defense. By the time this film was being made, she had been sentenced to death, and had publicly recanted her earlier story, saying she killed all of them for the money and no other reason. When she thought she was off-camera, however, she whispered that it was her original story that was true–that each of the men she killed had brutalized her–and she just recanted to get her execution over with. She couldn’t stand being in prison anymore, and she knew she’d never get out.

Wournos was also clearly mad. She said the prison was using “sonic pressure” on her brain. That the police knew about her after her first killing, but that they let her continue to kill six more men to create a more sensational case, and that the subsequent killings were really, somehow, the fault of the cops. Despite this, she passed a psych evaluation to determine her competence a few days before her execution. The evaluation lasted all of 15 minutes. Certainly, as long as the evaluation was carefully constructed of questions like “do you know what day it is?” (ie, the kinds of questions they ask to determine whether you’ve suffered recent brain trauma) she would pass.

We were unsure what really happened, but we speculated anyhow. Wournos had a shockingly awful upbringing–her mother running away at 6 months, losing her virginity at 9, having a child at the age of 13 (probably by a pederast), her father dying, her grandfather throwing her out of the house, and her living in the Michigan woods until she hitchhiked down to Florida at 16. It is not hard to imagine this putting a person in a fragile state of sanity. And it is not hard to believe that she really was brutalized by the first man she killed. Perhaps that’s what pushed her over the edge.

After this, we needed something to clear our heads out, so we rented The Magic Christian, the sixties anti-war/anti-capitalism/anti-authority semi-linear hippy freakout starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.