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By David Ansen
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AILEEN WUORNOS, A HITCHHIKING prostitute who murdered seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990 and is now in prison facing the electric chair, is no one's idea of a heroine. Tough, foulmouthed and unglamorous, she throws the finger at the judge who sentences her to death and curses her enemies: "May your wife and kids get raped . . . " Yet one of the several astonishing things about Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer is that this self-confessed killer is the most sympathetic figure in it. At the New York Film Festival, where the film was shown last fall, audiences actually cheered her.
Broomfield went to Florida not so much to pursue her personal story as to investigate the media feeding frenzy that surrounded the case, a big-bucks circus that led to a TV movie ("Overkill"), book contracts and myriad tabloid TV and magazine stories. He discovers a jaw-dropping carnival of greed, betrayal and bad faith. At the center of the story is Arlene Pralle, a perky horse breeder and born-again Christian who legally adopted Wuomos-six years her junior-after she She claims that she can "read people's eyes" and knew Wuornos couldn't have done the things she was accused of. Pralle asks the filmmaker for $25,000 for the story-later reduced to 10 grand. Her cohort/agent is a rotund, bearded, guitar-strumming lawyer, Steve Glazer (his TV ads urge you to "Dial Dr. Legal"). He startles the legal world when he convinces Wuornos (with Pralle's consent) to enter a no-contest Plea to four other murder charges, resulting in more death sentences for his client. "Why not go for it? She could be home with Jesus," the bright-eyed Pralle coos, while the viewer is left with the clear impression that her "daughter" is worth more to her and Glazer dead than alive.
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Allegations emerge that local cops were negotiating to sell movie rights to the story even before Wuornos was arrested-and the one cop pursuing this trail is harassed and demoted. It's to everyone's financial benefit that Wuornos be seen as a man-hating serial killer-it's a narrative that sells-though she repeatedly claims that she was acting in self-defense. (Her graphic account at her trial of her rape by her first victim is hair-raising.) There is also reason to suspect a second woman was involved Wuornos's lover Tyria Moore, who betrays Wuornos by persuading her to confess, and is never charged with any crime herself
Not exempting himself from the charge of checkbook journalism, Broomfield participates in the cavalcade of sleaze with open eves and mounting frustration: he has an angry confrontation with Pralle when she throws him off her farm after collecting money from him. Much of what we see evokes grim laughter. But the portrait that emerges of Wuornos, a brutalized woman victimized at every turn of her life, is sad and haunting. The movie doesn't exonerate her, but it does shed appalling fight on how she came to kill, and raises troubling questions about the conduct of her case. Wuornos's blunt, enraged honesty makes her the most human figure on the screen.
"Aileen Wuornos" is raw, fascinating and less than ideally organized. But as a portrait of a world obsessed with cashing in on tragedy, it couldn't be more timely. Though he shot it well before the travails of Michael. Tonya and the Bobbitts, Broomfield has stumbled on the perfect metaphor for these trial-by-media times. And just as with those other stories, you can't turn your eyes away.
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