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Party Monster
Director: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
Starring: Seth Green, Macaulay Culkin
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Director: Patty Jenkins
Starring: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci
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It's almost a relief that two of the most publicized queer movies of the past few months-- now just out on DVD-- were about gay and lesbian murderers. Finally, you might think, some queer characters with intrinsic dramatic interest. But, alas, neither Monster, with its Academy Award nominations and overly-praised performance by Charlize Theron, nor Party Monster deliver on the promise of their premises.

Party Monster is the more interesting of the two. Starring Macaulay Culkin, the movie is based on the real-life story of Michael Alig, a queer out-of-control New York club kid who commits murder in an attempt to sustain his fab life of drugs and publicity. Based on the trashy memoir Disco Bloodbath by James St. James-- Alig's friend and accomplice in most things but murder-- the film details, hyperbolically, the Manhattan drug-and-club scene in the late 1980s and early 90s. It's party, party, party as these characters' lives fall apart. Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato give the film energy and suave that's compelling, if not completely plausible. There are giddy moments between Alig, played by Culkin, and James St. James, played by Seth Green, that have fizz. But unfortunately their performances overall are just weirded-out, bizarro stunts lacking emotional center or psychological depth. Of course, they are hardly helped by a script that seemed to have been written more with the background music in mind than the interests of advancing plot or providing point-of-view.

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The problem is that Party Monster, for all its "wild and crazy guy" stuff, manages to be totally conventional. At heart the film has a pedestrian message-- people who act irresponsibly with drugs and sex end up badly. The two leads are cute-- Seth Green, as usual, is very sexy and has a sublime, under-the-wire perverse aura; Macaulay Culkin mostly just trades on his continuing good looks (the film might have been called Homo Alone). But both leads' outré queeniness feels false.

Monstrous in 2-D

Doubtless on paper, Monster's slightly fictionalized story of Aileen Carol Wuornos, executed in Florida several years ago, seemed like great material-- a prostitute driven to sociopathy by abuse and poverty takes to killing her johns and eventually is caught and murdered, in turn, by the state.

The potential here was great-- this story could have been told in a tough realistic style à la The Honeymoon Killers, or as a 1940s noir, or even in a bitter, blackly funny Brechtian mode. Wuornos is a tremendous character-- at once horrific and sympathetic, she embodies the two traits Aristotle defined as essential to tragedy: pity and terror.

But writer-director Patty Jenkins opted for the worst possible interpretation-- the sentimental, if-only-people-understood-me narrative.

Beaten down so badly by society, Aileen is at the end of her rope. Her life consists of hooking along highways and being homeless and abused. Played by Charlize Theron, Aileen takes up with one of the few people who's nice to her, a friendless lesbian named Shelby (played by Christina Ricci, in her first non-wisecracking role). Basking in Shelby's love, Aileen wants suddenly to improve her lot-- she even looks for a regular job. But soon she's back to prostitution. When she's raped by a john, Aileen kills him. This unleashes her pent-up rage, and soon she's killing her clients routinely and stealing their money and cars. She's caught, and during the trial, Shelby turns against her, but not before we've heard a number of voice-overs by Aileen that point out every easy irony and every obvious point of the story.

By the end, we realize that Wuornos didn't have a chance in real life to become a fully realized person-- and she hardly had a chance in this film either.

Alas, Jenkins and Theron didn't trust their great material. In attempting to show Wuornos as a real person with real feelings, they reduce this complex "monster" to a cheap feminist sob-story. There's no doubt that Wuronos was one of those people society chewed up and spat out, but this is the uninteresting part. Better to show us the beauty and strength in her refusal to fit that part. Whenever Wuornos has a fit of anger in the film-- almost always causing her more trouble-- we're expected to say "Oh, no." A better film would have given viewers permission to relish her anger, understand it, and empathize.

No doubt Jenkins and Theron wanted to be respectful and sympathetic to Wuornos. But by reducing her life to a simplified tale of a battered woman and making her just-a-victim, they've deprived her and us of a great film.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com