You’d be forgiven for mistaking Andrew Dominik’s Blonde for a kind of religious ritual—“the Passion of the Marilyn,” as Leslie Felperin aptly describes it over at The Guardian. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel of the same name, Dominik’s take on Monroe’s life puts its subject’s suffering front and center. An elliptical (and, as director and novelist have long maintained, fictional) chronicle of the actress’s rise to planetary stardom and tragic fall, the film captures Monroe’s life as an endless slideshow of humiliations and traumas. Played by Ana de Armas, Dominik’s Marilyn saunters into Blonde as a sort of martyr, first wrestling with a schizophrenic mother and a miserable childhood, and then with a cannibalistic industry and throngs of brutalizing men who paved the way to her death by overdose at the age of 36.
Rated NC-17 for its graphic scenes of sexualized violence—featuring rapes, forced abortions, and degrading oral sex—the film, David Rooney argues at The Hollywood Reporter, “is a work of such wild excesses and questionable cruelty that it leaves you wondering how many more times and in how many more creative ways are we going to keep torturing, degrading and killing this abused woman.” In Blonde, Justin Chang echoes at the L.A. Times, “Monroe’s pain is never final.”
The insults, the abandonments, the beatings, the rapes, the addictions, the losses of consciousness and selfhood—these aren’t just cruel twists or setbacks; they’re the movie’s organizing principles. With a meticulous command of craft and the kind of high seriousness that only a nearly three-hour running time can signify, Dominik sets out to chronicle the many degradations that were inflicted on Monroe’s body and spirit, plus a few that probably weren’t.
To be sure, the director never openly sides with Monroe’s tormentors. If anything, as Rafa Sales Ross reminds us at BBC, the film is far less concerned with building a faithful portrait of the real-life Marilyn, born Norma Jeane, “than with translating the brutal ruthlessness of celebrity, holding an uncomfortable mirror up to the people who enjoy dabbling in voyeurism neatly packaged as entertainment.” Yet the suspicion remains: does Blonde, a portrait of an exploited woman, wind up being exploitative itself?
The question hints at the “maddening paradox” EbertVoices’s Christy Lemire sees at the film’s heart. Abusing and exploiting Monroe “the way so many men did over the cultural icon’s tragic, too-short life,” Blonde “condemns the cruelty the superstar endured […] while also reveling in it.” It’s not just facts and fiction that Dominik conflates, but empathy and exploitation, too. Time and again, Richard Lawson notes at Vanity Fair, “Blonde seems reduced to a story about a woman fretting about having children and pining over a man, which feels awfully perfunctory as an analysis of Monroe, or really any particular woman.”
It’s there that one might start to question Dominik’s level of awareness, if Blonde really isn’t some daring art project about the wages of celebrity after all. Maybe it’s a lot more shallow than that, and there is no textual purpose of showing, in close-up, Monroe performing oral sex on John F. Kennedy, beyond a leering that the film claims to condemn. In one sequence, as Monroe is walking a red carpet, we see throngs of jeering, demanding men, paparazzi and gawpers, their mouths digitally elongated into demon maws. Does Dominik recognize that he is, in some sense, also one of those men? Or that intended audiences may be as well? That is the great, vexing question of Blonde: whether it’s a keen and exhausting work of commentary, or if it’s just a demanding fan, asking for ever more from the object of its insatiable fascination until there’s nothing left.
Then again, nasty as they are, Blonde’s most gruesome segments only sponge up the bilious anger radiating from the source text. “There should be room for white-hot fury and brutality in depictions of misogyny,” Philippa Snow contends at Artforum, “and in their most scrambled and nightmarish moments, both [Oates’s] novel and the movie achieve the effect that J. G. Ballard once suggested he desired when writing Crash—that of rubbing humanity’s face in its own vomit.” To boot, as Dana Stevens remarks over at Slate, for all the topless shots of de Armas’s Marilyn and the many others where she’s slavered over by all sorts of predators, Dominik’s intent may just be “to show us such moments of objectification from Marilyn’s point of view.” The problem, in this light, isn’t so much that Blonde traffics in the same exploitation it seeks to decry, but that the film “doesn’t exploit Monroe’s life story enough.”
Dominik’s use of visual and auditory trickery—distorted images, disorienting temporal shifts, unexplained switches from color to black-and-white, a couple of ill-advised conversations with about-to-be-miscarried fetuses—certainly produces a subjective effect of being inside the consciousness of a drugged-out, dissociated woman moving through a world she experiences as a hostile blur. But though these techniques make us identify and sympathize with de Armas’ fragile Marilyn, they seldom help us to understand or admire her, as a resilient person who, despite a lifetime of systematic maltreatment, managed to grow into an artist with a deep desire to create meaningful work. Blonde tries to honor the legacy of Marilyn Monroe by serving up a heaping helping of what she already got too much of in life—voyeurism, sexual abuse, audiences who longed to step through the screen and rescue her—while robbing her of the best gifts she gave us: her humor, her vitality, her inextinguishable inner light.
Any consideration regarding her craft is pushed to the margins; it’s not Monroe’s talent Blonde is interested in so much as her utter, chronic pain. “The movie does insist,” Richard Brody observes at The New Yorker, “that the character of Marilyn is an intelligent and insightful actor, yet Blonde reduces to an indicative, forensic minimum the scenes in which she expresses sharp ideas and discerning thoughts.” The film, Angelica Jade Bastién echoes at Vulture, “ultimately moves through her life narratively like the Monroe biopics that have come before, wedded to her trauma while forsaking the complex artistry and politics that glittered through her life.”
Whether she’s playing an earthen working-class dame in Clash by Night or joyfully subverting the dumb blonde in How to Marry a Millionaire and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she approached comedy with a graceful touch and impeccable timing, but also a hard-won refusal to be disconnected from her audience and made into a punchline. The trouble with being a woman and making your art look so natural is that the world believes you unaware of your own magic; you’re less skilled artist than unaware naif merely happening upon great talent.
In an illuminating and confrontative chat with Christina Newland in Sight and Sound, Dominik has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t have much affection or respect for Monroe’s films, which he regards as “cultural artifacts.” Which might account for Blonde’s almost complete exclusion of her on-screen work. The few shots we get of Monroe’s turns in All About Eve and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes see the real-life Marilyn replaced by deepfake insertions of de Armas. A creepy move, per Jessica Kiang at Film Comment:
How can a movie purportedly honoring Monroe justify literally erasing and overwriting her actual performances? But even more ghoulish is the use to which all this gimmicky mimicry is put: to decorate and remythologize a narrative of unalloyed victimization, exploitation, and ceaseless, ceaseless tears, in which even Marilyn’s sunniest moments seem to anticipate her foregone tragic fate.
More broadly, Sophie Monks Kaufman contends over at IndieWire, Dominik “defines [Monroe] strictly through what she does not have—direction, love, a dad—resulting in a gaping lack to De Armas’ [sic] earnestly committed performance; she is playing a character with no autonomy,” a performer “for whom acting was an innate untutored gift,” a “savant, a babe in the woods, a Balthazar the donkey with ass to spare.” Sure, Norma Jeane may not have enjoyed full control over her glittering alter ego, “but to suggest that she had no hand in the creation of Marilyn Monroe,” Justin Chang puts forward at the L.A. Times, “is to deny her a very specific form of agency.” And since Dominik “can’t conceive of Monroe as anything but a victim, he can’t even grant her the respect of seeing her as, at the very least, a participant in her success and her undoing.” What’s missing, Manohla Dargis writes in her New York Times review, “is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius.”
It’s easy to dismiss the movie as arty trash; undoubtedly it’s a missed opportunity. Monroe’s life was tough, but there was more to it than Dominik grasps, the proof of which is in the films she left behind—“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Misfits —the whole damn filmography. To judge from “Blonde,” her performances were shaped by her agonies and somehow happened by chance, by fate, or because she’s a mystical, magical sex bomb. That’s grotesque, and it’s wrong. But if Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.
The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about topics in the wider film conversation.