At the beginning of the film we see Erin struggle: as a single mother, as a human being with potential, courage and individuality, and also as a sexual being. Erin is a white underclass Saint Joan, a Green Guerrilla, Mother Jones and Madonna all rolled into one. Unlike the image of second-wave feminism that distanced itself from any robust sexuality that it deemed reductive at best or degrading at worst, Brockovich's iconic status is post-"third-wave" feminist, i.e. eroticized, as it takes in borrowing heavily from underground Grrrl. culture, aware of being both a body and a mind, and of using them both to their fullest. When we see her at the beginning of the film, she is filmed against a city using the imagery of 1970s American realist cinema and the explicitly socialist poetics of Ken Loach or early Mike Leigh in the UK. Erin's supposedly frank comments express what many (women) in the audience feel, and her jokes serve as so many digressions in the Brechtian sense. During the film Erin explains how Capital works. He needs to eat and take care of his children and wants to contribute to society. Unlike characters in many liberal films, she is a rather static character. He does not become radicalized and his conscience does not rise. She begins the film as a radical. Its radicality derives from its unique synthesis of theory and practice in the Leninist sense; his practice is his real, material situation; and her theory is her ability to translate that situation in ways that connect her to the victims of toxic industrial pollution while organizing them. Everything Erin says on screen from start to finish is true, if a little hyperbolic, which gives the film its distinctive, epigrammatic spirit. The only time... at the center of the paper... the hospital's use and co-optation of an emerging and naively compliant women's movement (truth be told, for reasons of survival, not to mention dignity) to get the job done. Erin Brockovich uses a superficial narrative of fighting polluters to timidly get to her real topic, which is class. In other words, money and the lack of it. This is Erin's story, and after all, money is what she needs. The rest is up to the audience, if they will be so moved by a didactic film to organize it among themselves. This possibility has yet to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, the victims' health hangs between life and death. Erin Brockovich is a rare film that shows how our lives are at stake as much as those of the characters. It is a guiding light towards critical thinking, not only about what exactly is at stake, but how the situation has been created to manipulate the stakes..