*TW - sexual assault*
*this piece contains spoilers about the film, Blonde, some of which are simply details of Marilyn Monroe's life, while others are unique to the film*
There is arguably no person, dead or alive, in the history of popular culture, who has been transformed from a real personality into an object of iconography more than Marilyn Monroe. 60 years after her tragic death at just 36 years old, she exists in the public consciousness not for her electric and charismatic screen presence, her biting talent as a comedic actress or her angelic singing voice. Instead, she is remembered through glossy glamour photography of her, scantily clad, and an innate awareness of her image; red lips, blonde bombshell curls and curvy features which solidified her, for better or worse, as perhaps the first true sex symbol of modern American culture.
If you were to interrogate the average living person about their understanding of Marilyn Monroe, the first thing their mind would conjure is likely not the fact that she was one of the first women in history to start her own production company, or that she was a dedicated fan of her craft who attended Lee Strasburg’s illustrious Actor’s Studio with the likes of Marlon Brando, and continuously pursued projects with many of the era’s greatest filmmakers like Laurence Olivier and Joseph Mankiewicz. It’s likely not even how funny she was in her witty and captivating performance in Some Like it Hot (1959) or winking and self-aware take on her own persona in iconic Best Picture winner All About Eve (1950). Rather, the first thing their mind would conjure is likely the image of her standing on the subway grate, giggling as her dress blows around her, exposing up her skirt. I would further wager that 9/10 people could not even tell you the context or origin of that image, coming from a scene in The Seven Year Itch (1955).
Her body and promiscuous presentations of sexuality became objects of public obsession, and have continued to be staples of popular culture over her performance, voice, intellect and professional agency. Images of Marilyn Monroe and her body are now so completely removed from the person and the illustrious career which they are plucked from. Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, before adopting her stage name when entering the entertainment industry after signing with Fox aged 21. Behind the equally glamourous and objectified persona of Marilyn has always been the real, talented and hardworking actress, producer, comedian and singer Norma Jeane, who has been long forgotten in the shadow of sexy and scandalous Marilyn.
All of this leaves the perfect open door for a film about Marilyn Monroe which could crack open the much-misunderstood mystique of both who Norma Jeane was and who Marilyn was, exhibiting how maligned she has been both in the industry and popular culture, highlighting how talented she was, how compelling her career was and commenting on the reduction of her to an image and how it does her a disservice both professionally and personally.
Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that Andrew Dominik was not interested in making that movie.
Blonde is adapted from a 2000 Pulitzer Prize-finalist novel of the same name by author Joyce Carol Oates. The hefty novel is described as biographical fiction, meaning that it takes much of the real details of the life and career of Marilyn Monroe but creates a fictionalized narrative or her life. Many real names are left out, for example both of Monroe’s famous husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller are referred to simply as ‘the ex-athelte' and ‘the playwright’, and Oates has continuously stated that the novel should not be taken as biography, and should be treated as fiction. But is that really a fair thing to ask of readers? Oates wants to have her cake and eat it too. The entire draw of her novel is that Marilyn is the subject. She is relying on the acclaim and prominence Marilyn brings and using that to platform her writing. However, by touting over and over that Blonde is not a biography ‘because I say it’s not’, Oates gives herself a free pass to make wild and often offensive assumptions about Monroe’s life that she has fabricated and forced into a narrative in conjunction with real history, with no indication where fact ends and fiction begins.
So perhaps it could be said that the original sin of Blonde (2022) is adapting the novel to begin with. However, I still think there’s an alternative adaptation of Oates book which could have been successful in its execution. Spencer (2021) is a recent example of a film which exists on a similar premise of twisting a biopic into a fictionalized narrative of an extremely famous woman who died tragically young. The semi-fictionalized take on Princess Diana’s Christmas break with the royal family, on the brink of marital collapse, is described by the text that appears at the start of the film as “a fable from a true tragedy”. However, what pushes Spencer out of morally corrupt territory, I believe, is that while chronicling some of the evidenced points of pain in Diana Spencer’s life such as her eating disorder or the cruelty of Prince Charles, it is ultimately a celebration of her strength and warmth, and a tale about her reclaiming agency. The ending is triumphant and sees director Pablo Larraín allowing Diana’s legacy to be recontextualized in the name of her life, rather than her tragic death.
I should say that I think Blonde has a level of impressive craftsmanship. It’s a little excessive in its creative exploits, with the film constantly changing aspect ratios, switching from black and white to colour and using different film stocks. However, there are definitely a handful of sequences where it really works to moving effect, and we get some compelling moments. I also do think star Ana de Armas gives a valiant performance and embodies the Marilyn persona well, though her performance is mostly one note because the film only allows her a single note.
On a purely cinematic level, I certainly don’t think the movie is terrible. So while I found it unpleasant and pretty repulsive morally speaking, I was initially on the fence about writing anything lengthy about Blonde. However, my feelings about it have only further soured as I’ve sat with it. Then I started seeing excerpts from interviews with Andrew Dominik on the film which truly chilled me. And that’s when I was pushed to a point of having to absolutely unleash about this movie. Because where Pablo Larraín has a clear admiration and fondness for the subject of his film, it has become adamantly clear to me that Dominik openly has no respect or admiration for Marilyn Monroe or her work, and is solely interested in her trauma and how she appeared in photographs.
I feel like the only way I can adequately express this fact, and preface all of my feelings about Blonde, is to present this short outtake from Christina Newland’s interview with him for BFI, which she shared on twitter. Here, presented without comment, is the unedited excerpt from the interview transcript she shared:
Andrew Dominik: She’s somebody who’s become this huge cultural thing in a whole load of movies that nobody really watches, right? Does anyone watch Marilyn Monroe movies?
Christina Newland: I mean... I do. A lot of my colleagues and friends do. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is one we watch a lot.
Andrew Dominik: Really? What is it about?
Christina Newland: It has a worldview that is quite cynical about men and gender relations in a way that I think a lot of contemporary young women like. And it affords Marilyn’s character the credit of her wit, she gets one upmanship on men. She’s not a dumb blonde, not really.
Andrew Dominik: It’s cynical about women, too, though.
Christina Newland: Yes, maybe. But its glamorous. It’s a fantasy.
Andrew Dominik: What, because they’re well-dressed?
Christina Newland: Sure.
Andrew Dominik: They’re well-dressed whores. I don’t know.
With an incredibly bloated, almost three-hour-long runtime, Blonde is a mean-spirited and exploitative revelling in both true and fictionalized horrors and challenges faced by Marilyn Monroe, that undermines and undersells her talent, career and agency, both personally and professionally. While clearly intrigued by the split between Marilyn the star and Norman Jeane the woman, Dominik doesn’t seem interested in awarding either much fondness, affection or complexity, nor is he interested in why it was that Monroe was such an on-screen sensation beyond her looks.
It’s not a wild assumption to think that Monroe was abused or mistreated in her life. There have long been some accounts that she was molested as a child while passing through the care of different foster parents. And because of the nature of Hollywood and how rampant sexual misconduct was with the legends of the ‘casting couch’, it is fair to assume that the basic idea presented in this fictionalization, with Monroe being sexually assaulted by a producer, leading to her getting her big break, is likely close enough to a real experience that Marilyn might have had. However, Blonde is not a thoughtful reflection on the systems that allowed for Monroe and other like her to be so mistreated, nor is it a story about her strength and perseverance through abuse. Blonde simply wants to render over-the-top, grandiose executions of harrowing experiences and batter the viewer with them repeatedly for 2 hours and 46 minutes. There are multiple scenes in this film where Monroe is sexually assaulted. And it is not just alluded to, we are forced to watch painstaking imaginings of them, along with multiple scenes of her being slapped or beaten up, that all ultimately serve little to no purpose other than to overly emphasize a magnitude of suffering.
Probably the most deeply offensive and horrendously upsetting cruelty of this film to both Marilyn and the viewer, is the way in which abortion and pregnancy loss are depicted. It is known that Marilyn, who never had any children, had several miscarriages in her second marriage to Arthur Miller. However, there is no evidence to suggest that she had an abortion, let alone that she was forced into one by studio execs, as is depicted in Blonde. The film features an abortion scene, a miscarriage and then a nightmarish re-rendering of the abortion later. And the abortion scenes in particular are some of the most despicable things I have ever seen committed to screen about a real person. Forgive how graphic this description is, but I am not exaggerating when I tell you that there is a camera angle from inside Marilyn’s body which literally show us the forceps entering her cervix and forcing it open. It’s used more than once. And if shots from inside the vagina of Marilyn Monroe wasn’t far enough over the line, one of my least favourite artistic decisions I have ever seen made by a director is the use of digital renderings of the foetus inside her body at multiple points in the film. It’s unbearably unpleasant and so utterly silly. At one point during her pregnancy with Arthur Miller, as depicted in the film years after she was forced into having the abortion, her foetus speaks to her. As a child actor voices the foetus, it asks her “why did you kill me mommy?” in surely one of the most horrific debasements of a real person you could ever imagine on screen.
I opened this piece talking about the reduction of Marilyn Monroe to an image and a sex symbol, that has happened in the decades since her death. Blonde claims to understand this, and has scenes clearly attempting to draw on the mass public objectification of Monroe. However, what is so frustrating is that while claiming to be aware of the issue, Dominik cannot help but participate in the objectification himself. It is his lens which consistently turns itself in on Monroe as a sexual object. Though vastly different texts, it’s reminiscent to me of the Cassie problem with Euphoria season 2. That being that Sam Levinson spun a multi-season narrative out of Cassie Howard being objectified by every man in her life and only valued for her promiscuity, while the show itself consistently makes Cassie’s body a point of focus and revels in erotic sex scenes where she is a commodity to be used and enjoyed.
Past watching her be assaulted and abused, it is clear that the main lens through which Dominik sees Monroe is as a sexual commodity, as evident in the repeatedly objectified and fetishized way she is presented as a sexual partner or object to be gawked at. Be it through a fabricated threesome with the sons of other Hollywood legends which Dominik’s camera savours every raunchy minute of, or a distasteful scene in which the same duo pleasure Marilyn in a public movie theatre while she is seeing the trailer for her movie Niagra (1953) for the first time, or even when Joe DiMaggio comes home to find her topless while she reads, an opportunity is never missed to linger on de Armas' body or obsesses over a fantasy scenario of what it would be like to sleep with Marilyn Monroe.
To further take focus away from who Marilyn was and shrink her down even more from a woman with agency, the other key piece of this bad-faith tale is how the entire thing is structured around an obsession with Marilyn’s father. It’s true that Marilyn never had a definitive answer on who her father was, as he was entirely absent in her life. However, in an again fictionalized narrative which feels cruel and vulgar, Marilyn’s entire pursuit through the length of Blonde, and specifically through her relationships, is essentially just trying to fill the void left from her absent father. All of her key relationships are quite nauseatingly portrayed as being linked to her ‘daddy issues’ and one can’t help but feel like what Dominik is feeding us is the absurd idea that had she had a father figure in her life, the trajectory of her life would have been so different. It’s insulting. It’s been a long running claim that Marilyn Monroe called Joe DiMaggio “daddy” as a term of endearment while they were married. However, in Blonde, even this fact is inflated into a running theme in which Monroe calls every man in her life “daddy”. And worst of all, it gives us a ridiculous fabricated origin of the term when she believes Joe DiMaggio to actually be her long lost father for a second, calling out “daddy?” before he reveals himself and she just sticks with it for the continuation of the relationships in her life. It's so transparent and reductive.
And leaving on a final note so insensitive I can’t quite believe it, a running storyline is that Monroe begins receiving letters supposedly from her long-lost father, which continues over years in the film, though the pair never meet. The film’s final scene sees Marilyn find out that these letters were never from her father, and instead were a ploy from ex-lover Cass Chaplin who knew that she had always dreamed of knowing her father. And immediately after she finds out her father has in fact never made contact with her, is when Marilyn Monroe takes an overdose, which has long been speculated as a suicide, and dies. To reiterate; yes, Andrew Dominik implies that his Marilyn killed herself because she realized that she would never have a father in her life. No further comment.
All of this sexual exploit and obsession with the men who circulated through her life might at least be salvageable if Domink’s Marilyn, or in fact Norma Jeane, were fleshed into some sort of compelling and intricate caricature. Shots of her boobs or her climaxing in a cinema or her killing herself because she’s fatherless might be at least marginally more easily forgotten if there was some level of focus on her electric screen presence, her commitment to the craft, her often undermined intelligence or her strength and integrity. However, none of those things are of concern to Dominik in his portrait of the battered victim who is struggling to keep it all together from her childhood to the moment she dies. He subjects us to countless presentations of her abuse and assault, as her bodily autonomy is stripped from her sexually and medically. She is never granted happiness or contentment, or peace. The direct opposite of a Hollywood fantasy, it's a gruelling journey through her life which reimagines it as a never-ending nightmare.
Some Like It Hot is featured for only one scene, and rather than celebrating arguably Marilyn’s best film or her funniest performance, the only thing we are shown is her completely breaking down on the set, screaming at crew members in a totally unprofessional manner and making the experience unpleasant for all those around her. And while the iconic ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ number is shown in its entirety, it is placed in the middle of the premier night when Marilyn’s sole concern plaguing her mind is about the fact that she thinks she will be meeting her father for the first time after the premiere. Even the iconic Seven Year Itch scene on top of the subway grate is used for a plot about how her husband DiMaggio violently beats her up after seeing it, upset by her increasingly promiscuous reputation.
Blonde is not a tale about Marilyn Monroe as an on-screen presence and formidable industry legend, nor is it about Norma Jeane Mortenson as an intelligent person who overcame extreme disadvantages and challenges throughout her life through her strength and resilience. Blonde is a mean-spirited exhibition of suffering and exploitation at the hands of a man who, just like the men he presents in his film, views Marilyn/Norma as nothing more than a mindless vessel for sex and violence to be projected onto before she is broken down enough to end her own suffering.
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