A short note: Blonde is the best movie I saw last year. But given its graphic content and controversial reception, it felt important to me to expand on my perspective of the film. Thanks for reading. 🙂
In 2016, Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs was released in theaters to general acclaim. The film, an unconventional biopic structured more like a three-act play, was lauded by critics for its direction, acting, and sharp writing, garnering many wins and nominations during the film world’s awards cycle. But one of the biggest questions on anyone’s mind was a tricky one: how much of the film was real? Of course, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin had adapted the film directly from Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, but as with all biopics, the accuracy of certain events and the portrayals of its characters were challenged. Boyle defended the film’s creative liberties, saying, “I mean, you hope that our intentions are honorable. That they’re in pursuit of the truth about him [Jobs]. That’s for other people to judge. That’s not, we had a lot of people around who did know him. And who advised us and guided us. And not everyone will ever agree about some of the things about him, of course. But I do think that something I always used to say it was kind of Shakespearean, really. It was what Shakespeare used to do. He would take some of the facts about a man of power and he would guess at a lot of the rest, and just gotten away at actually getting at the human in it.” Steve Wozniak, Jobs’ real-life creative partner and Apple co-founder, was certainly impressed. “I saw a rough cut and I felt like I was actually watching Steve Jobs and the others, not actors playing them,” Wozniak stated, “I give full credit to Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin for getting it so right.” But most important was the reaction from former Apple software engineer Andy Hertzfeld, portrayed in the film by Michael Stuhlbarg: “It deviates from reality everywhere – almost nothing in it is like it really happened – but ultimately that doesn’t matter that much. It is cavalier about the facts but aspires to explore and expose the deeper truths…”
All of this, then, brings us to Blonde.
Blonde, the latest from Australian director Andrew Dominik – and the year’s most controversial film. Blonde has drawn wildly polarizing reactions, with audiences and critics alike reacting in shock and anger to the unrelenting cruelty inflicted upon its depiction of Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most beloved actress of all time. Admittedly, its director hasn’t exactly made things easier on himself. Comments from Dominik from interviews surrounding the film have drawn vitriol, comments ranging from spectacular arrogance, stating that “Blonde will be one of the ten best movies ever made,” to outright insensitivity, calling the actresses in Monroe movies (specifically Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), “well-dressed whores.” These comments only served as fuel to the fire for criticizing Blonde, further exacerbated by the film’s graphic portrayals of sexual content and rape. Yet despite all of this, I don’t believe Andrew Dominik and his film are truly sexist, at least not the way you would assume by taking those quotes at face value. He is clearly a man who needs to learn to read the room; that much goes without saying. But watching Blonde, it slowly becomes clear that it is not that Dominik wishes to deliberately disrespect his subject – only that he does not feel the need to go out of his way not to do so.
That sounds like absurdity in and of itself. In what universe should a film about one of the most admired actresses in pop culture not endeavor to present itself as tasteful? Perhaps the only way to properly decipher the film is to take it all the way back to the source; to understand why author Joyce Carol Oates would choose Marilyn Monroe in the first place as the subject of her fictional novel from which Blonde was adapted. That’s a question I asked myself many times, since on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much justification in puppeteering a real person to fit a fictional narrative. To do the same thing with any other actor, alive or not, would truthfully seem blasphemous. So why should Blonde get a pass? Here’s one possible answer: Marilyn Monroe was not just an actress, model, or any other label we would like to give her. She was a symbol. She was the ultimate, all-encompassing vision of sex, glamour, and stardom. She was the American dream personified, in the eyes of the world.
And she was dead in her home at the age of 36.
Of course, we know that Marilyn was not just Marilyn. She was also Norma Jean Baker, a woman from a troubled childhood who would be on a quest to find herself for her whole life. But onscreen, as Marilyn Monroe, she became profoundly, hideously wanted. Indeed, in the film, everyone in the film who surrounds her needs to control her, to possess her. Her husbands and partners can’t stand her displaying her body to anyone else, studio executives and fellow actors mock her acting ability behind her back, and journalists light up her life with camera flashbulbs during her most vulnerable moments. They leer at her, demean her, and objectify her. By these actions, the very idea of “Marilyn Monroe” became a curse that swallowed Norma Jean whole. Ana de Armas, who portrays Marilyn in the film, was determined to understand this: “It was important to find the emotional truth in this character. One of the biggest themes in this movie is the private and public self. Norma Jeane was completely unseen. I wanted to capture the essence of that woman, to find the human underneath. It was a long process studying her and her films, to understand what she was feeling at all times, always thinking that Norma for the most part never thought she could live up to Marilyn. What people thought of her was not at all what she felt like.”
The most common reaction to Blonde has been, “let her rest, let her rest in peace.” Is she not? Marilyn, the symbol, is immortal; the assertion that a single film could change that in any way is absurd. Films can’t rewrite history. But we need, more than ever, to actually understand the truth of Marilyn’s reality. Blonde is not exploitation, it is awareness; it is not meant to pervert our understanding of its subject, but to illuminate the unspoken horrors that drove her to an early grave. It is not a celebration of the male gaze, but a condemnation of it. A paradoxical work in which its true sympathy lies in the lack thereof. The film’s whole thesis doesn’t work if it gives in to the conventional tropes of a standard biopic: to praise its subject, lift them on a pedestal, and entertain us as an audience. One of the film’s more disturbing moments has the camera drifting past a horde of rabid fans, clawing at Marilyn through the barricades of a film premiere. Their eyes and mouths are horrifically distorted as they shout and leer at her, as we slowly pan up to reveal the crowd impossibly stretching all the way to the horizon, an endless sea of demons. But this version of Marilyn doesn’t even seem to notice. She only beams her megawatt smile and blows kisses, all the while happily proclaiming, “I love you, I love you, I love, love, love you all!” There’s no Norma Jean here, she’s gone. We’re with the crowd now, oblivious to the horror, only transfixed by the gleaming smile of a beautiful woman. This is the ultimate representation of Marilyn as concept, the very definition of a parasocial construct.
It’s profoundly disturbing – and it should be. During the film’s most shocking moment, in which Marilyn is dragged into a hotel room and forced to sexually pleasure President Kennedy, Dominik radically depicts her during the act as envisioning herself projected on a sprawling theater screen, playing in front of countless viewers, internally musing through voiceover narration about what stories are being created about her. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter anymore whether or not that moment, or any of the others that have come before in the film, actually happened in real life. What matters is that so many believed things like it did happen. For Marilyn, then, the “truth” was a pipe dream, one that went out the window in an instant. The point is this: as viewers, as an audience, we are obsessed with the need to control the narratives we see. These days, we want women to be protected (and rightfully so, I should add) from the abuse they have been forced to endure as they have suffered through male-dominated industries for so many years. But in Marilyn’s time, we ogled her, gossiped about her, and fantasized about her, until it drove her to an early grave.
Many have cried, “she was more than that – where’s the compassion?” But where was the compassion for Marilyn when she still walked in this world? We don’t gain anything from sugarcoating tragedy. Fiction or not, what Blonde depicts is real and necessary. The way in which we, as an audience, still persist to this day in trying to rewrite Marilyn’s narrative to put ourselves on the right side of history, only reinforces what Blonde is saying. It shouldn’t be scandalous to consider the tragedies she endured in the same breath as praising her accomplishments. That’s what it means to have a true understanding of the complexity of life, and this is exactly what Andrew Dominik wants us to consider: “If you look at the Instagram version of her life, she’s got it all. And she killed herself. Now, to me, that’s the most important thing. It’s not the rest. It’s not the moments of strength.” To some, that may seem callous, but to me, it’s only another indication that Dominik simply doesn’t feel the need to follow the conventional constraints of storytelling. His disdain is not for Marilyn, but rather for celebrity as a thing to be admired. What does it mean for a powerful woman to be loved by the whole world and still lose everything? That’s a genuinely meaningful question, and there’s no way to truly answer it without a full-on plunge into the darkness of Marilyn’s psyche.
It’s a difficult film to stomach, but that doesn’t implicitly make it wrong, any more than a film about the horrors of war is wrong for portraying strong violence. Of course, it is still incredibly challenging to ask any audience to intentionally sit for nearly three hours and watch any woman endure what is depicted in Blonde, let alone an icon like Marilyn Monroe. We would rather sit through films like Elvis, films that, no matter how entertaining or creatively filmed, nevertheless function as little more artistically than the cinematic equivalent of a Wikipedia page. Elvis was fun, bright, colorful, and extravagant. It also omitted an overwhelming amount of drug abuse in Elvis’ later years and glossed over him meeting his future wife Priscilla when she was 14 and he was 24 – pretty questionable, to put it mildly. But that wouldn’t make for good entertainment. Said Dominik of the film’s harsh backlash, “Now, we’re living in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered woman. That’s what they want to see, and if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them.”
The truth is, he’s right, as difficult as it may be to accept. We don’t really want to see our heroes depicted like this, do we? We want the Hollywood we know and love. The glamour, sparkle, charisma, and swagger. We want to think of our heroes as gods and goddesses, immortal woven images in a grand cinematic tapestry. But they were human, like us, and like us, they were also deeply flawed. Some abused, others were abused. We need to understand and feel that if there’s any hope of film, as art, ever getting to the bottom of this messy thing we call the human experience. Blonde is unquestionably a challenging film. There is no doubt that it will continue to spark vicious debates for years to come. But for my money, it is bigger even than Marilyn herself. It is true. It is a haunting masterpiece that stretches far beyond the confines of Norma Jean’s actual life, a damning indictment of the myth of celebrity, and an achingly sad portrait of a woman whose very life was stolen from her as we watched. It is a film of necessary evils, one that is nearly impossible to experience fresh anymore without preconceived bias from what you’ve already heard. But if the greatest purpose of art is to move us, and to illuminate the truth, well, here it is: Blonde deeply moved me. I cannot give it higher praise than that. I’m willing to criticize Andrew Dominik for the unpleasantness of his comments, but he doesn’t hate Marilyn Monroe, and neither does his film. He only hates what happened to her – and we should too.
Many Worn Words 