The murder biz
Hell is America in Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.

By Johnny Ray Huston

SAY WHAT ONE may about Nick Broomfield's ethics as a documentary filmmaker or his skills as an interviewer – he's always willing to brave the deepest recesses of prison and stare down a murderous American mystery. The dead ends of Biggie and Tupac direct Broomfield to a courtyard confrontation with Suge Knight, who professes love for the "kids" while his stony expression, boxed in an increasingly extreme close-up, hints at a scarier story. Twice, Broomfield's ambivalent fixation on female outlaws – Heidi Fleiss, Courtney Love – has led him to a face-off with another woman, whose vagabond life spread across states before finally reaching "home": a nine-by-six cell.

During her final interview – shortly after she accuses prison officials of using satellites and intercoms to place sonic pressure on her head, and just before she erupts into rage when asked about the mother who abandoned her at birth – Aileen Wuornos tells Broomfield to "put a big question mark" on his latest film. She needn't have spelled it out; she has already spun a ready-to-tear web of contradiction. On-screen, she has refuted the self-defense claims that functioned as faulty armor throughout Broomfield's 1992 portrait, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. But deceived by Broomfield into thinking all recording devices are off, she mutters that she did – sometimes? – resort to self-defense in killing seven men. Her isolation now governmentally sanctioned, she just doesn't want to postpone her inevitable last date, with the Florida state executioner.

There are many barbed-wire phrases to latch onto during Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. One comes from Wuornos's childhood friend Dawn. At age 13, according to Dawn, Wuornos had to "prostitute to keep herself warm." There it is: a literal American version of hot sex, taught to a junior high girl who – if she couldn't find a trick – had to sleep outside in the snow-covered woods at the end of the same street where the remnants of her family were housed. With Dawn as their tour guide, Broomfield and codirector Joan Churchill survey the scene. Wuornos's neighborhood in Troy, Mich. – rows of houses doubling as drug dens – is one vision of "hell on earth" (to quote Wuornos). Hell can be as cold as a Midwestern winter. It can also be hot as a Florida summer, as countless close-ups of her wild-eyed and sun-baked face prove.

"Hitchhiking, hooking, I was a homeless person all my life," Wuornos says during her first interview reunion with Broomfield. She was trading sex for cigarettes by the time she was nine. When she became pregnant four years later, the baby's father might have been a member of her family or the local pedophile, a man who liked to pick open chicken eggs just before they were ready to hatch. These sharp, broken bits of information don't come from Wuornos – quick to testily dispute any embarrassing detail about her childhood – but from the people who grew up around her. A few, like Dawn, open their homes to Broomfield and Churchill's mordant observation. (Ironically, Dawn's search for Wuornos's will spills the strongest evidence of her right to life – childhood pics and recent artwork – into the movie.) Others uncomfortably take the stand at Wuornos's final appeal; only one witness, a woman, can look her in the eye while describing how she was abused and ignored.

Life and Death begins with a picture of Wuornos at age four that gradually fades to black; the title credit places her scrawled name over font. But that final courtroom appeal is the true entry point for Broomfield's follow-up. After being subpoenaed, he arrives in the Ocala County Courthouse to discover that he's been called to testify about the weed-smoking habits of Wuornos's former lawyer, one of the money-hungry throng depicted in The Selling of a Serial Killer. As her codirector is cross-examined, Churchill surveys the proceedings like a wiser judge. When Broomfield reaches to shake Wuornos's cuffed but outstretched right hand, a prison guard yanks it away.

A handshake is permitted at the start of Broomfield and Wuornos's next meeting. Their uneasy, shifting bond – charged by differing agendas and, crushingly, a genuine affection – is Life and Death's pivotal point. Broomfield's modus operandi doesn't sync up with the detached, seamless style and reality-TV insinuation that have become dominant doc trends. He's an old-school muckraker, a bumbling gumshoe drawn to film noir territory. The queasy twang of guitar on the soundtrack suggests David Lynch's wicked games gone seriously awry. With his on-camera presence and penchant for voice-over, Broomfield alternately implicates himself and verges on grandstanding. Yet Life and Death differs from his past pulpy biographies in terms of compassion. As he strives to understand Wuornos's shooting spree, his failures – plainly exposed – also reveal hers.

In a world that wasn't hypnotized by Hollywood, Life and Death would take precedent over Patty Jenkins's Monster, which draws from Broomfield's work and benefits from Charlize Theron's wrenching portrayal of Wuornos. (Those who dismiss Theron's performance as "stunt acting" for an Oscar should consider her family background.) While Jenkins certainly enters the dramatized true-crime realm with a sense of screen history – one of Monster's doomed johns is played by Scott Wilson, whose first starring role was that of Dick Hickock in the screen adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood – in re-creating Wuornos's crimes, she takes a liberty that Broomfield repeatedly questions. Throughout Life and Death, Wuornos asserts she was in "the murder biz" and "the robbin' biz." Broomfield's first doc prophetically showed how that biz has proved more lucrative for others; a different measuring system is weighed in the title of his follow-up. When he returns to Wuornos's self-defense testimony at her first trial – testimony that Jenkins's film partially re-creates – Wuornos dismisses it as the "the lyin' biz." The courtoom footage they're contesting is eerie because it might depict a lie that contains truth. Wuornos's account on the stand doesn't ring hollow until she describes firing at Richard Mallory (who had a rape conviction on his record). It's entirely possible she grafted a past experience onto him so she could justify taking his life.

"I'll always remember you and love you," Wuornos blurts to Broomfield at the end of their penultimate interview. When their final meeting arrives, her parting gesture, directed at society, is a bird of a different feather. Fifteen guards, some shackles, and a rope separate filmmaker and subject, and the gulf grows even wider as Wuornos launches into rants about hidden televisions and recording devices. ("Oh, you are lost, Nick!" she yells when he fumbles yet another attempt at specifying her crimes.) It isn't difficult to locate the sources behind Wuornos's paranoia. Both the police and the love of her life had book and Hollywood deals in mind when they wiretapped the confession that convicted her. Even Broomfield has resorted to similar duplicity, albeit in an attempt to help her.

According to the mental-health experts who determined Wuornos was fit for execution, her visions of nuclear apocalypse were perfectly sane. "It really was pretty incredible that Aileen sailed through her psychiatric test the day before," Broomfield says via voice-over, a tinge of sadness invading his posh, laconic drawl. "It makes you wonder what you'd have to do fail." Less than 24 hours later, he and Churchill enter the arena that has formed outside Florida State Prison. The October early morning is pitch-black, and the masses of lit-up vans, buses, and tents resemble spaceships on a nightmarish alien planet. "Keep going, man. Don't stop," a man's voice yells as the camera stares through the window of a vehicle moving forward. If only.

It was Jeb Bush – someone else who knows a thing or two about having blood on his hands – who signed the papers that sanctioned Wuornos's execution. While Bush hasn't matched his brother's record-breaking pre-presidential, pre-Iraq death count (40 people were executed in Texas in 2000), he had his reasons for speeding Wuornos's meeting with (in his words) "her creator." He was up for reelection in less than one month. Life and Death's closing credits are paired with Natalie Merchant's "Carnival," the song Wuornos requested be played at her wake. "I've walked these streets," Merchant sings, the grave undertow of her typical airy-fairy delivery apparent because Wuornos's fate is attached to the words. "All the cheap thrill-seekers, the vendors and the dealers, they crowded around me." Aileen Wuornos died Oct. 9, 2002, but the carnival is far from over.

'Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer' opens Fri/30 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.