“White trash:" Abject skin in film reviews of monster

Abstract

This paper is about abject skin and passionate disavowals in reviews of Patty Jenkins’s 2004 film Monster, starring Charlize Theron. I focus upon how troubling knowledge about the life story of Aileen Wuornos, unaffectionately dubbed America’s “most notorious female serial-killer," is refused through preoccupations with white skin and body transformations. I am curious about the extent to which the film does not incite public debate about corporal punishment (as did films like Dead Man Walking, starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon), or the class, gender and sexual specificity of incarceration in the US, as evidenced in the film reviews. Instead, the film evokes a fetishistic interest in the white, angelic skin of actor and model Charlize Theron. Fixation on Theron’s transformation from beautiful blonde Hollywood sex symbol to “ugly blasphemous whore” is worthy of psychoanalytic and cultural critique because it provides an occasion to think about female monstrosity. Using film reviews as a case study, I show how white female skin is either fetishized or seen as abject: a point of fixation and desire, or disturbance and revulsion.