[Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Andrew Dominik’s film
Blonde ignores the assertive and hardworking real-life Marilyn Monroe
and instead gives us a lurid tale of perpetual victimization.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BLONDE IS MARILYN MONROE ABASED ALL OVER AGAIN  
[[link removed]]


 

Eileen Jones
September 30, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Andrew Dominik’s film
Blonde ignores the assertive and hardworking real-life Marilyn Monroe
and instead gives us a lurid tale of perpetual victimization. _

Ana de Armas plays Marilyn Monroe in Blonde., (Netflix)

 

By now the Netflix film _Blonde_ is notorious for its length, it’s
NC-17 rating, and its cruelly narrow view of film star Marilyn Monroe
(Ana de Armas) as a relentlessly abused and exploited waif from early
childhood through her death of a drug overdose at age thirty-six.

Joyce Carol Oates, whose 2000 novel
[[link removed](novel)] of the same name was
adapted into the film, claims that she was allowed to watch various
rough cuts of the film but finally had to stop because “the film is
emotionally exhausting.” But accurate, she says
[[link removed]]:

Oates argues that _Blonde_, which vividly depicts miscarriages,
abortions, and sexual assaults, is “probably closer to what she
actually experienced” than other films about Marilyn Monroe; “The
last few days of her life were brutal. . . . The real things that
happened to Marilyn Monroe are much worse than anything in the
movie.”

Oates’s high-literary ghoulishness, which made her significantly
fictionalized novel _Blonde_ such a nasty read, is faithfully
translated into the film medium by writer-director Andrew Dominik
(_Killing Them Softly, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford_). He’s opted for representing Monroe as continually,
horribly abased in an aesthetically fancy style that shuttles between
different aspect ratios as well as color and black-and-white film,
elaborately recreating scenes from Monroe’s movies,
like _Niagara_ (1953) and _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ (1953), or
digitally blending footage of Armas as Monroe into existing scenes of
films such as _Some Like It Hot _(1959). Dominik recreates famous
photos of Monroe throughout the film — the one of Monroe and Joe
DiMaggio sitting together in a window seat in intimate communion, for
example — as if they were the lynchpins of truth that allow for
wildly speculative fictional narrative in between, including
Monroe’s supposed thoughts, narrated by Armas.

In interviews, Dominik indicates his indifference to the facts of
Monroe’s life, claiming that his goal is primarily aesthetic:
“I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in images.”
Besides, “Nobody really knows what the fuck happened. So it’s all
fiction anyway, in my opinion.”

He also repeatedly underscores how accurate the film really is:
“I’ve read everything there is to read about Marilyn Monroe.
I’ve met people that knew her. I’ve done an enormous amount of
research…”

Then he tops it off by insisting
[[link removed]] he’s
really just adapting Joyce Carol Oates’s book:

But in the end, it’s about the book. And adapting the book is really
about adapting the feelings that the book gave me. I see the film, in
some ways, as Joyce’s vision of Marilyn, which is also really Joyce
. . . Joyce is trying to understand how it expresses a certain female
experience, or a certain human experience. You have to play fast and
loose with the truth in order to have a certain narrative drive.

Regardless of what Dominik thinks he’s doing, the main point that
needs to be made about _Blonde _is that it’s a damn silly film.

At one point, a fetus in Monroe’s womb rebukes her for having
aborted an earlier child, speaking in — you guessed it — baby
talk. At another, we’ve got a toilet bowl’s view of Monroe
vomiting down on us repeatedly.

And throughout, we’re asked to accept the idea that Marilyn Monroe,
even a semifictionalized one, could somehow be the biggest star in the
world for ten solid years while hating every minute of it, wanting no
part of it, never working to get established in the movie business,
and resisting at every turn the maintenance of her stardom once she
has it. When legendary retired baseball player Joe DiMaggio (Bobby
Canavale), Monroe’s second husband, who’s presented as a
blockheaded brute, asks her how she became a star, Monroe can think of
nothing but her brutal rape in a studio executive’s office, which
somehow rocketed her to the top in one act of ugly violence. She says
tremulously, “I guess I was… discovered?”

Tremulousness is the keynote of Armas’s performance, and she does
wonders finding variations in the one note she’s asked to strike ten
thousand times over. Her only happy moments — tremulously happy
moments! — occur when she’s pregnant or first married to Arthur
Miller (Adrien Brody), who’s presented as weak and clueless about
the woman he married.

It seems that this version of Monroe only ever wanted to be plain
Norma Jean Baker, the unglamorous name she was born with. She longed
only to be the mother of a child of her own, and the beloved daughter
of an unknown father who apparently writes to her year after year,
promising throughout the film to make an appearance in her life, but
never showing up.

Alas, all her dreams were denied her!

That’s a ludicrous story to spin out of the remarkably focused and
determined struggle for stardom of a young woman who rose out of a
grim Depression-era childhood. It took her years of constant striving
to become, first, a popular model appearing on countless magazine
covers, then a bit player in movies, then a starlet playing small but
increasingly showy roles, and finally a star.

On her way up, her bitter experiences of poverty and powerlessness
gave her leftist, class-conscious politics
[[link removed]] that
nobody in Hollywood took seriously. She was mocked by the press for
being observed reading the autobiography of socialist investigative
journalist Lincoln Steffens, and cautioned by the studio not to be
seen carrying radical books around. She was a supporter of civil
rights and Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba, and “she became a
founding member of the Hollywood branch of the Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy.”

She married playwright Arthur Miller right after he was called to
testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in
1956, testimony demanded in part because his play about the Salem
witch trials, _The Crucible_, was so clearly an allegory for the
anti-communist witch-hunt in America. Monroe’s immense stardom and
expert handling of the press probably helped shield him from the harsh
consequences of refusing to name names as demanded by HUAC,
consequences that befell other writers such as, for example, Dashiell
Hammett, who served five months in prison and was financially ruined.

But Monroe was vulnerable to the sexist expectations of her day, and
the biggest tale female stars of 1950s Hollywood used to tell the
press was that they didn’t want to be stars at all — that they
only wanted to be contented wives and mothers leading fulfilling
domestic lives, subservient to breadwinning husbands. Some probably
believed it, for the anti-feminist ideology of that era had intense
brainwashing strength. Doris Day, for one, seemed to have honestly
convinced herself that she was a huge movie and recording star for
fifteen years through no desire of her own. But at least some of them
must have known it was simply good 1950s PR.

Monroe expressed similar wife-mother longings, while simultaneously
evincing the most titanic career ambitions since Joan Crawford. The
less well-known but much more impressive story of Monroe’s life is
not her miserable, squalid childhood in foster homes after her
mentally ill mother was institutionalized — not the cruel way she
was sexually exploited by men in the film industry, about which she
was startlingly frank in her own lifetime — not her marriages and
relationships with famous, powerful men which started hopefully and
ended disastrously. It’s the story of Monroe’s astonishing drive
to achieve amazing things in her life, and become a person of
distinction.

“I don’t care about the money,” she said. “I just want to be
wonderful.”

It’s the ambitious Monroe that doesn’t get nearly enough
attention, while an unwholesome delight in the abject Monroe generates
endless biographies in all media. That Monroe who was a tragic mess in
her last few years, who went so deep into depressions she didn’t
bathe for many days at a time, wandering around in a dirty bathrobe in
her lonely house, living on a diet of champagne and barbituates,
unable to sleep nights and placing desperate, suicidal calls in the
wee hours to less and less patient friends.

_Blonde,_ of course, dwells a lot on that Monroe at the end of the
film. But even the way Monroe is portrayed in her earlier years —
when in reality she was athletic, humorous, hardworking and, though
she could be shy at times, quite social — reflects the late-Monroe
state of neurasthenic angst. Armas does impressive work realizing this
morbid version of Monroe, though it involves repeating similar
scenarios over and over to the point of monotony. It’s telling, for
example, that Monroe is shown in this film version to be involved in a
fictional “throuple
[[link removed]]”
with two troubled sons of movie stars who eventually betray her,
Charles “Cass” Chaplin Jr and Edward Robinson Jr to the exclusion,
it seems, of any other relationship in life.

At around that time, she was briefly dating just Cass, and also
rooming with her jovial, high-living, strongly left-wing friend who
was equally bent on becoming a movie star, Shelley Winters. As Winters
tells it in her autobiography _Shelley Also Known as Shirley,_ they
had hilarious times together, partying, dating lots of men, and
pooling resources so they could take turns wearing fancier outfits
that neither could have afforded on her own.

Dominik’s Monroe has no women friends, because that would complicate
the film’s narrative of endless victimization at the hands of men.
When asked why there’s no Jane Russell or any other woman friend
represented in the film who was actually supportive of Monroe at
various points in her life, Dominik says
[[link removed]],

Well, that’s the way the book is, and I think it’s the way it was.
I think Marilyn was a guy’s girl. I don’t think she was a woman
who had a lot of female friends. But then I think she was a woman who
didn’t have a lot of friends. There is a sense that we want to
reinvent her according to today’s political concerns. But she was a
person who was extraordinarily self-destructive.

She was also a person who was exuberantly self-creative, and for all
her suffering, achieved nearly everything she set out to do in life.
You have to wonder what’s at stake for Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew
Dominik in seeing Monroe as a pathetic victim who never had a friend
or a career triumph. It’s notable that scenes from the films Monroe
was probably most proud of are not recreated in _Blonde. _Her zany
and delightful screwball comedy performances in _How to Marry a
Millionaire_ (1953) and _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_ are not shown
— only the famous scene of her singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s
Best Friend” in _Gentlemen,_ while Monroe watches herself in the
audience, cringing at her own her sexy gold-digger number and
thinking, “I’m not that _thing._”

Also left out is_ Bus Stop_ (1956), which was based on a prestigious
play by William Inge. The film represents Monroe at her zenith,
demonstrating everything she’d learned while studying at the Actors
Studio, for which she’d been cynically mocked. Her astute,
emotionally rich performance earned her excellent and amazed reviews
from some of her harshest critics. And though _The Prince and the
Showgirl_ (1957) was an unhappy experience to work on, it was a
hugely prestigious project and made by her own company, Marilyn Monroe
Productions. It involved her professionally with Laurence Olivier, the
most admired actor in British theater, as director and costar. And in
the end he stuck to his broad, stagy performance while she acted him
right off the screen.

It’s a gloomy and mortifying experience, witnessing Oates and
Dominik drag down Marilyn Monroe yet again in _Blonde_. And they do
it with such a sick relish that it really makes you wonder about them.

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
[[link removed]].

* SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]]
* DONATE [[link removed]]

The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
[[link removed]] and get a yearlong
print and digital subscription.

* Blonde
[[link removed]]
* marilyn Monroe
[[link removed]]
* Hollywood
[[link removed]]
* misogyny
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]