Where's the Popcorn?

And now, how 'bout a nice movie review? 'Cause I normally don't do them, 'cause I haven't seen a movie in the theater since.. Wow. A very long time. But we had an assignment for my Soci class and so I went all Netflixy and watched a movie and now I'm comparing it to the Reproduction of Harm theory... and, well, here it is:

In the film Monster, Tom tells Aileen that she never had a chance. He means that her total life experience left her with no other option than to become as she is. Aileen's life is the epitome of Daly's Reproduction of Harm theory in that Aileen's history is one of victimization and abuse. Her method of coping with the brutality and violence she has been exposed to so relentlessly throughout her entire life, her strategy of survival, is to become a criminal. She never had a chance to do otherwise.

 

In the film, Aileen attempts to change. She is in love and she wants all the things that people in love want; a safe and secure place to be with the one she loves, a life devoid of violence and risk, the ability to plan a future and pursue happiness. She knows that her life of danger and crime is no environment for this love and she sets out to change.

 

Aileen, so ill-equipped and crippled by her childhood of sexual and emotional abuse, tries to give up her criminality and rejoin society as a law-abiding, contributing citizen. Society will not let her. As she was betrayed and cast out as a helpless child, she is failed once again by a society that offers no networks to help, no method through which she can overcome her abuse, recover and relearn her life. Once more, to survive, she has no choice but to resume her life of crime.

 

The fact that Aileen opted to turn the proverbial tables and become a murderer rather than a victim, reflects her rage against her oppression. Society is derelict; all her life Aileen is consistently set up to fail. The events of her life are stacked up overwhelmingly against her and she has no power to escape what she has become. When she is faced with the choice of continuing to endure her victimization or taking upon herself the power of victimizing others, she chooses murder. She's the monster society has created through marginalization and indifference. She is the sum of the parts society has constructed. She is the pain, the madness, the confused rage that results from the institutionalized traps society has set in place.