Death in Black and White: A Reading of Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball

Using the conflicted reception history of the film Monster's Ball as a way to track the workings of white liberal ideology, which would, for example, sanitize racism, Holland offers a reading not only of the interracial desire that is this film's most spectacular element but also, and more provocatively , of the association explored in this film between death, whiteness, and women. In doing so, she begins to sketch the psychic life, the unconscious, of the prison-industrial complex.