The Duke On "Aileen Wuornos - Life And Death Of A Serial Killer"

Poor old Nick Broomfield. What a carry-on his adventures turn out to be. First of all, Courtney Love is busy turning his Who Killed Kurt Cobain film into Let Me Make My Kurt Cobain Film, and next thing you know, the ever-so-dapper documentarian is being called up as a witness in a murder trial on account of one of his earlier films.

First up, lets get a bit of the old political sloganeering and so on out of the way, that we might then raise our toast or whatever and continue our enlightened debate of Filmic Affairs. Aileen Wuornos should not have been killed. There you go.

Now, neither should the seven men Wuornos shot, but executing an obviously insane individual, a woman mentally impaired in the extreme, was never going to accomplish anything, and reeks of hate-fuelled vengeance-seeking spite, and has very little do with the old justice thingy.

You might think to yourself, oh now Duke, we don't need this nonsense. Just tell us about the film. Did Nick Broomfield do anything funny? Was there daft shenanigans?

Well yes, Nick Broomfield was as entertaining as ever, and the shenanigans were, on occasion, remarkably daft.

But it's impossible to talk about this film with any degree of depth without mentioning the gross miscarriage of justice depicted herein.

Broomfield made his first film on Aileen Wuornos, The Selling Of A Serial Killer, way back in 1991. He kept in touch with his subject through the intervening years, and next thing he knows it's 2002 and he's been presented with a subpoena to appear as a character witness in Wuornos' defence.

Since he was half-way through making Biggie And Tupac with long-term collaborator Joan Churchill, Broomfield brought his camera and ever-present mike along to capture the proceedings.

Imagine his surprise when he discovers that Wuornos has, to paraphrase Morrissey, changed her plea to guilty. Wuornos wants to die, and she claims everything she has said over the last eleven or so years has been one big fabrication. Which would be fine, except that in an off-guard moment, she tells Broomfield that really, she isn't lying at all. It's just that the police are all in some vast conspiracy regarding serial killers, and plus there's folks of some-kind attacking her with radio signals from the TV, or possibly the mirror in her cell. She just wants it all to end, that she might get on the Mothership, "like in Independence Day".

Read that last bit again, there. The bit about the conspiracy and the radio-signals and the aliens. Because the day before that interview was recorded, no less than three psychologists claimed Aileen was perfectly sane, and as such, was fit to be executed.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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