Less than an hour ago, I threw my copy of Monster into the bin (yes, the same place where I discard chicken bones, empty cans, my kids' chocolate-colored diapers, etc.). This isn't the first time I've "put down" movies I spent money on and, sadly, it probably won't be the last.

Monster, from an 'artistic' point of view, was of course bizarre, dark and provocative. It depicts the murderous habits of a woman (played to perfection by Charlize Theron, who won an Oscar in 2004 for this role which rendered her almost unrecognizable from the beauty in Mighty Joe Young, The Italian Job, etc.) raped in her teens, became a prostitute, and ends up finding love and seeking to give it (in/to another girl, played by Christina Ricci, of American Beauty fame). What this woman could not do, unfortunately, was earn money in normal, decent ways, leading her go around granting sexual favors to men some of whom had tendencies to violent depravity. So, she kills one in an act of raging, uncontrolled self-defense. One act of manslaughter leads to another one of theft, and on to self-deception, further hatred of society, more killings, more thefts until eventually things end in an expected tragic way.

The movie is depressing, not just for its many disturbingly graphic scenes, but also for its insight in to the tragedy of a way of life defined by death and personal/sexual violation at a young age. It gives no hope, no possibility of redemption. Man (and Woman) are violent, self-serving creatures who meaningless lives are usually filled with sorrow and degradation. And even the few who are self-less end up terminated by those desperate to hide their guilt even as they shore up even greater guilt and self-condemnation from the act (as per a scene in the movie when the woman receives extraordinary help and care from someone only to have her decline in a bloody way).

So why did I dump it? I suppose the best reason I can think of for doing so is that artistic or entertainment value isn't the most important thing to consider when collecting (and perhaps even watching) movies. It's difficult to explain (and impossible to be consistent, I'm sad to say) but I think I have to draw a line between enjoyment and self-devaluation. It's a fact that we retain whatever we see/hear/touch and there've been times I regretted 'letting in' certain scenes or themes. The least I could do, so I reasoned, was to disallow my movie collection to be a source of those scenes/themes entering someone else's fragile mind.

In the past, I've ditched Scarface (the famous Al Pacino movie which has him swearing in every other scene and going crazy in all), Basic Instinct (a movie I suspect even its sexpot star, Sharon Stone, regrets making), 8MM (one of Nicolas Cage's darker movies about real-time murder captured on film, so audiences pay to watch a movie about people watching movies about people actually getting killed as part of a movie!), American Beauty (Oscar Winner for 'Best Film' in 1999 and, whilst I enjoyed the movie, I can't say I enjoyed it enough to let it remain in my cabinet), Blair Witch Project (I'm not big with reality-like films anyway), American Psycho (despite a virtuoso performance by 2005's Batman, Christian Bale), American Pie (do I detect a pattern here?) plus a few others I can't remember.

Like I said, I'm probably not terribly consistent here. I can't entirely explain why I'm far from 'recycling' movies like Starship Troopers (with its violence, sex, profanity, and everything else a growing boy needs), Battle Royale (with violence, violence and more violence), Dumb & Dumber (whose 'moral message' one might find slightly difficult to decipher...), Mystic River (the 2004 Oscar nominee for Best Film with a theme arguably darker than those in Monster!) and so on. Maybe for now my enjoyment of such movies still outweigh any negative values I fear may impact others as a result of watching them...sigh, it's time to chill out with a Jackie Chan bonanza.