Section 1:
Aileen was a sad documentary. We are shown in the documentary that Aileen is a killer and a prostitute. The director tried to show that Aileen had brain problems. Her mother said she may have brain damage when she was born. This might have started all of her troubles with killing people and being a prostitute. The director shows us that Aileen is not evil but maybe needs help instead. Her moods change fast and she almost seems a different person in different minutes. Her history is bad. The documentary said she was abused and ran away. She was poor. She sold herself to make money and eventually went crazy. She does not like that people call her crazy or a killer. She does not like that newspapers do not defend her or believe her. Aileen tries to tell people she is nice and a good person. People who read the newspaper think she is a killer and this makes Aileen angry and sad (0:25:12). Nobody wants to listen to her. She tries to tell the director that she never was mean to the people she killed. They were mean to her and that is why she killed them.
She tries to tell people that she is a victim. She blames others for her crimes (01:02:16). She said if she could do it again she would be a good person. If she could start life over she would be a policewoman or a firewoman. Her lawyer also says she is a victim. They both try to tell everyone that the evidence does not add up and that the police are lying because they do not like Aileen. Aileen does not like that people do not believe her. All she wants is for people to like her and believe her. Aileen has a lot of character traits. She is angry a lot and acts like an animal. She yells and has outbursts. She tries to be nice and sometimes is quiet. She keeps saying that she will go to heaven if she is killed. Her mental state is not very good. She does not think she did anything wrong. She says she defended herself. She says everybody has a right to defend herself. When people say she did something wrong or is a killer she gets angry.
Section 2:
Aileen in Monster is a little different than in the documentary Aileen. She is still crazy in Monster but she is sadder and the movie talks more about her killing to take care of her girlfriend Selby. Selby and Aileen fall in love and Aileen sells herself to buy them things and make Selby happy. She gets mad at a client and kills him. Then she starts killing all of her clients. Aileen does not have a family or anybody who loves her. Monster looks like she kills to get money to keep Selby happy because she finally has somebody who loves her. The director creates the character by showing how scared Aileen is of Selby going away. Selby does not always want to stay with Aileen but Aileen will do anything to keep her because she wants loved so badly (1:13:54). She has never had anybody love her. Her history in Monster is the same as in Aileen. It looks like she ran away and does not have any family. To get money she started sleeping with people. She would have started or not had a place to sleep if she had not done this. She did not finish school and could not get a job so this was all she could do to get money. In Monster Aileen still does not like being a prostitute (0:16:18). She does not like living the way she does.
She does not like losing Selby. She does like finding Selby and being happy with her. It looks like she is happy about killing the men who touch her also. Her character traits are a lot like the ones in Aileen. She is moody. She seems nice but gets mad fast. She acts like a wild animal in a cage sometimes (0:56:28). She cares a lot about Selby. I do not know if she did love her but she acted like she did care about her. She let her go when she knew she had to. That means she at least cared about her. She was a very angry person though. Aileen’s mental state in Monster also seems bad but not as bad as in Aileen. She is still acting crazy. She is moody and acts crazy. She acts like she sees and hears things that are not there. She gets paranoid and frightened. When she gets mad nothing can stop her and she kills people but she still said she did not do anything wrong. I would say her mental state was not very good in this movie either.
Section 3:
The characters in the movie and documentary are not that much different. Aileen in the documentary seemed to have more of a loving family than the character in Monster. Aileen in Monster seemed to be more caring than how she seemed in the documentary. She seemed crazier in the documentary but she seemed sadder and angrier in Monster. They were the same character because they were both prostitutes who ran away when they were teenagers. They also grew up and started killing people. They became prostitutes to make money and take care of themselves but Aileen did not make it sound like she had somebody like Selby while Monster had a lot of love in it even if Aileen was a weird and angry person. There are probably differences in Aileen between the documentary and the movie because one is real and one is fake. One was supposed to get a different audience to watch it so it needed different things to happen to Aileen. Monster made Aileen and Selby the main part because the director thought that would get more people to watch than just Aileen killing people.
The movie shows that Aileen is a killer but mostly she loves Selby. When she does murder somebody (1:00:00) and takes all of his money she uses it all to keep Selby happy. The movie makes it seem like she kills only to keep Selby around. Aileen wants to keep Selby safe, happy, and take care of her. It is also more interesting for Aileen to have no family at all like in Monster (0:2:15) when she talks about having nobody love her. She talks about how she ran away and has never known anybody who really appreciated her or wanted her around. In Aileen it seems like maybe people loved her but she had been damaged in her mind when she was born and her family felt bad about it and did not know how to handle her (0:35:50). There were some people in the documentary who supported her and felt bad for her. They did not believe that she was innocent or a victim but they felt bad for her and thought that maybe she was crazy. It seemed like they cared about her. This was different than in the movie. Specifically when her mother says that when she was born she may have had some brain damage (0:42:15) that may have made her a killer it makes it seem like Aileen killed because she had mental problems and not because she was trying to take care of anybody.
