Blonde

2022 - 9 - 28

Post cover — Image courtesy of "The Guardian"

Some like it overheated: how Marilyn Monroe is betrayed by Blonde (The Guardian)

Andrew Dominik's explicit, button-pushing take on the life of the superstar, uses shock tactics to replace insight and depth.

](https://twitter.com/christinalefou/status/1574785874277064706?s=21&t=_uUV2a5I9oTCKHeZGAatPg)It’s a blinkered worldview that infiltrates the film, whose countless attempts to stun and sizzle converge into a paunchily epic fizzle. Her pillow lips and fawn eyes perfectly mirror Monroe’s own (we also see a lot of the actor’s curves, hence the NC-17 rating). Diehard Marilyn fans who want to get a better sense of the woman behind the myth will be equally disappointed. His film, which jerks back and forth between color and black and white, is a litany of degradations and torments, many of which are served up as slow-motion sequences that had such a deadening effect on this home viewer that a two hour and 45 minute film took some 25 hours to finish. Dominik is the New Zealand-born Australian film-maker behind such grizzly works as The Assassination of Jesse James and Chopper, a crime drama based on the life of an Australian serial murderer known for feeding a man into a cement mixer and convincing a fellow inmate to slice his ears off for him. The ever-growing library of biographies includes volumes by avowed fan Gloria Steinem (who said the vulnerable and childlike Monroe represented everything women feared being) and Norman Mailer (his Marilyn was: “blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards”).

America is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. 'Blonde' is about Norma ... (The Washington Post)

It has been a Year of Marilyn, full of tributes and homages, but "Blonde" explores the darker side of the entertainment icon.

And of course, it comes to the now-familiar conclusion that there was much more to the story than was apparent at the time. But Dominik’s film certainly meets Bolton’s other expectation: “Respect and fidelity to the complexity of the person.” Still, “Blonde” the movie covers many of the major known tragedies and trials of Monroe’s real life, such as her mother’s mental illness as well as her own, her failed marriages, her substance-abuse issues and her unrealized desire to become a parent. (It skips over a few famous beats, too, such as Monroe’s early marriage in her teenage years to a policeman — as well as the fact that she had half-siblings, one of whom she reconnected with later in life. Vogue recently heralded [“Barbiecore”](https://www.vogue.com/article/barbie-fashion-is-everywhere-this-summer) as the hottest trend of summertime, and a TikTok genre known as “BimboTok” was the subject of many a concerned-but-fascinated [trend story](https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/reclaiming-bimbo-bimbotok.html) [in 2022](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/bimbo-reclaim-tiktok-gen-z-1092253/). But the genre does seem to take cues from Monroe’s bubbly public persona — and her apparent enjoyment of being a beautiful, hyperfeminine woman. “Blonde,” however clumsily, attempts to answer that question, as it’s the rare Monroe tribute that looks closely at the mortal person behind the immortal image. Chrissy Chlapecka, 22, is one of the most prominent TikTokers associated with BimboTok, and she names Monroe among her lifelong inspirations. Her image has “come to stand for the very essence of glamour and beauty,” Bolton says, while her life story “stands for the classic hard-luck, rags-to-riches” tale of making it big in Hollywood. “I have noticed once again that clothing is coming around to the ’60s,” says Donelle Dadigan, president and founder of the Hollywood Museum in California (where interest in the Monroe items spikes yearly in June around her birthday). But none of this year’s moments of Marilyn fixation have engaged quite as directly with the latter as “Blonde,” which focuses on Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. A few forces have converged this year to create a period of renewed fascination with Monroe — or perhaps more accurately, with Monroe iconography.

Let's talk about that shudder-inducing JFK blowjob scene in Blonde (British GQ)

It comes towards the end of Blonde, Andrew Dominik's brutal and explicit fictionalisation of the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Watching it back, three weeks after I first saw it — not least in the wake of a press tour in which Dominik has been One certainly hasn't seen such an unflattering portrayal of Kennedy, already the subject of a cornucopia of fictional portrayals and feature documentaries, across media. — there's a Hitchcockian cutaway to the televised craft pointing to the sky, newly erect. But one scene, coming towards the end of Blonde, is especially ripe for debate. Broader commentary on modern celebrity aside, should such a loosely interpreted version of the life of a quintessential cultural figure be presented as reality, as the [Blonde](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/netflix-blonde-marilyn-monroe) press tour and marketing have seemingly implied? [Blonde](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/blonde-netflix-review-marilyn-monroe) hits laptop screens across the globe with its premiere on Netflix, the ethical discourse around Andrew Dominik's fictionalised, impressionistic Marilyn Monroe not-a-biopic continues apace.

Blonde review: A nightmarish Marilyn Monroe biopic | Digital Trends (Digital Trends)

Netflix's Blonde is a dreamy, difficult film. It's not for everyone, but Ana de Armas' performance as Marilyn Monroe certainly is.

pricing, plans, channels, and how to get it](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/how-does-hulu-work/) [Ana de Armas shines as Marilyn Monroe in new Blonde trailer](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-blonde-trailer/) It’s a specific kind of heartbreak, realizing only too late that you have yet to find someone willing to put in as much effort for you as you would for them. Instead, it’s the quietest scenes that end up leaving the biggest marks, like one that comes late in the film and follows de Armas as she desperately searches her house for a tip only to find her delivery boy long gone by the time she’s returned to give it to him. It should go without saying which of those aspects of Blonde’s Marilyn prove to be more compelling, but the film’s occasionally uneven handling of her legacy doesn’t stop its ideas about celebrity — both the costs and requirements of it — from ringing loud and clear. Part of that has to do with de Armas’ real-life Cuban accent, which never fades even in the moments when the actress herself is leaning all the way into Monroe’s breathy way of speaking. In order to communicate her inner longing and loneliness, Dominik also has de Armas’ Monroe constantly refer to every man in her life as “daddy,” which is a decision that could have been tolerable had it been used a bit more sparingly. As a matter of fact, Dominik still tells a moving story of loneliness, regret, and emotional yearning with Blonde, a film that feels less like an outlandish Hollywood dream and more like a nightmarish descent into a dark void. The film also features a handful of terribly on-the-nose music cues, including the time when “Bye Bye Baby” begins to play just seconds after de Armas’ Monroe has been coerced into having an abortion that she didn’t want. But there are also moments in which Blonde feels like the most generous fictional depiction of Monroe to date, one that wants almost nothing more than to honor her not just as a movie star for the ages, but as a brave and capable artist. There are moments when Dominik, unfortunately, seems to be further playing into the over-sexualization and infantilization of Monroe that has run rampant for decades, and which attempts to render her as nothing more than a naïve sexpot without any agency of her own. At the center of Blonde’s many surreal images and nightmarish sequences, though, is Ana de Armas, whose performance as Marilyn Monroe feels perfectly calibrated for the film she’s in. In the case of Blonde, we’re shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

The Deadly Glamour of Blonde (The Cut)

Andrew Dominik's 'Blonde' has generated plenty of controversy for its depiction of violence towards Marilyn Monroe. But could the icon's complicated story ...

Near the end of Blonde, a drugged and drunken Marilyn collapses on the floor of a plane flying her to give the President of the United States a blow job, keening and rolling on the ground. But perhaps what we mean by it’s so sad is that we see in women like Blonde’s Marilyn the futility of living so close to life’s marrow, so perpetually in tune with the deep down thrum. And while our feelings about Marilyn Monroe still run hot decades after her death, this fascination may be in part due to our uneasy relationship with the display of female pain among the living. Our enduring fascination with Marilyn points to something darker in the ether; something darker in ourselves. We see this in Blonde when Marilyn, awash in bouquets and fan letters, is being zipped into her undergarments by attendants while confessing that she feels like “a slave to Marilyn Monroe” and is exhausted by life as a caricature. “Every one of us, everybody in the world, would give their right arm to be you.” Only the visible is allowed to be real for a beautiful movie star. This first manifestation of her grief — to make herself beautiful, to make herself sexy — was the most socially acceptable one she could have chosen. The story of beauty is hagiography, while the story of glamour is riveting. When Marilyn slipped into a tight sweater, glued false lashes onto her eyelids, and parlayed the stammer she’d developed after being molested as an 8-year-old into a breathy aural suggestion of sex, she was looking for a daddy, as she would call all of her future lovers: a father figure who would never abandon her as her own father had. She was the aestheticization of female pain embodied, and this is central to [our enduring fascination with her](https://www.thecut.com/2022/09/leave-marilyn-monroe-alone.html) almost 60 years after her death. To use it as fuel to become what the world wanted from a woman — a pliant pinup willing to smile, at least for a little while, in obscenity’s face. Marilyn was about something that had already begun to fall out of favor in the mid-20th century and has continued declining in popularity ever since, which is the idea of a woman needing a man to love her.

'Blonde' Doesn't Celebrate Marilyn Monroe, It Humiliates Her (Collider.com)

As one of Hollywood's sex symbols, it's not difficult to imagine the horrors and trauma that Norma Jeane Mortenson might have faced as an actor finding her way ...

Considering that Marilyn Monroe is one of the most celebrated and beloved actresses of her time, there is never a single moment in this movie (that follows her through the height of her career) when she feels triumphant. As a woman watching this and as a lover of Marilyn Monroe, this felt like torture. None of the people in her life — except for maybe her makeup artist Whitey, aka Allan Snyder (Toby Huss) — is there to comfort her or help her or love her. Men want to possess her or fix her or hurt her, women want to hate her and shame her. De Armas is a duplicate of Monroe in some scenes, with it nearly being impossible to tell the difference between her and the real Monroe. She's crying for the entire movie, and you want to cry with her for the way they're butchering Monroe's legacy. Monroe is perpetually surrounded by men; the only women in her life abandon her or make fun of her. However, it is marketed as a historical film, and it's not really emphasized to its audience that it's based on a fictional story about Monroe by Joyce Carol Oates. The fact that those moments feel so genuine makes it even more painful that the movie doesn't linger in them and instead chooses to shock and sensationalize. Chayze Irvin's camera work is often dreamlike and the constantly shifting perspectives, aspect ratios, and jumping between black and white and color adds to the chaotic nature of the story. If you ever wanted a lesson in what the male gaze looks like, this movie is the prime example. [Blonde](https://collider.com/tag/blonde/) portrays [Marilyn Monroe](https://collider.com/tag/marilyn-monroe/) as a lifelong victim.