I am about 2 weeks late for anyone to care about what I have to say about Blonde. I am about 3 weeks late to saying anything at all here. My brain often works on a delay. For all my procrastination, I’m an obsessive person: thoughts nag at me long after everyone else has moved on, and I don’t express them in time for anyone to listen. I am Captain Ahab, and every fucking thing that happens is my Moby Dick. I don’t know if I’ve ever truly moved on from anything. But I digress. The point is, I’m going to talk about Blonde now. Fair warning, this is going to be long, convoluted, and meandering. If you don’t want to watch Blonde it should give you an approximate vibe.
I went back and forth on the decision to watch the movie. I did feel a certain resentment towards the very existence of Blonde on moral grounds. Most people know the broad strokes of Marilyn’s life—she was born with another name, she was abused in some vague, tragic way, she fucked JFK, she killed herself. Or was killed. The difference is irrelevant to most people outside of the fun of speculation—even the people who believe she intentionally committed suicide seem to view it as another thing that happened to her rather than something she did with intent, the final nail in the coffin of a modern-ish Ophelia.
I hate the trope of the passive helpless victim as is, but it’s frustrating when Marilyn is constantly flattened into two dimensions for the sake of mystique when so much of her life is not a mystery. I’ve read Marilyn’s autobiography. It’s detailed, open, honest, and well-written. She’s funny, she’s tragic, and I wish people learned who she was from her. I got into a Twitter argument with someone who brought up that Blonde was about telling greater truths, that we can’t know the details of her life and therefore speculation is in a way necessary to get at a story worth telling. They brought up Sylvia, which also fictionalizes the life of a famous, tragic woman (in that case Sylvia Plath). I find it interesting that these are both women who actually told us a lot about their lives and feelings. The Bell Jar is in many ways a lot less fictional than Blonde is. Both women wrote poetry, wrote diaries, and told their own stories with the kind of brutal honesty we rarely get because most people are scared to expose themselves that way. We don’t want to hear it. We prefer to create our own narratives of these women, whether to villainize or idolize them. If they tell us too much, become too real, we either need to tear them down or overwrite their story with our own. Enter, Blonde.
Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote the novel, has been on Twitter proclaiming that critics of Blonde are unwilling to face such an unflinching look at the reality of Marilyn’s suffering as a woman. While she’s quick to defend her book as a work of fiction whenever criticized about the graphic depictions of assaults that never happened, she also seems to want credit for depicting a harsh reality.
In perhaps the most bizarre of her egomaniacal musings, she says that she is bravely exposing a rape (which never happened):
The crime she “exposes” involves a stand in for Darryl Zanuck, then president of 20th Century Fox. Marilyn comes in for an audition and is promptly (and brutally) assaulted. She later hears that she’s gotten the part, her breakout role in All About Eve, presumably as a result. When asked by her first husband (also bizarrely turned into a domestic abuser for the story despite no real life record of it) how she got her start, she remembers that fateful “audition”. That’s right, the most captivating and enduring star of our time must, surely, have fucked her way up to the top. If there’s no proof of that, we’ll make something up. Marilyn said throughout her career that she was afraid no one would recognize her talent, that they would only see her for her looks and sex appeal and ignore the tremendous amount of work and talent she poured in. Oates, and Blonde’s director Andrew Dominik make it clear they believe that to be true. Forget that Darryl Zanuck himself said that “Nobody discovered her, she earned her own way to stardom”; that wouldn’t fit in with Blonde’s helpless, doomed protagonist. She can’t earn anything, that would mean taking something for herself. Blonde’s Marilyn can only give—or rather be taken from (the act of giving is still too autonomous for this version of her). She exists to be consumed. As Angelica Jade Bastien says in her brilliant article, “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.”
Marilyn’s real life didn’t live up to the fantasy we’ve created, so we have to curate one on her behalf. The tragedies that befell her were too real, and she survived them too well, then not well enough, or at least not in a way we find becoming. We need her to be a tragic figure, but not in the way that real people deal with tragedy. We don’t want someone irritable, emotional, strong willed but stubborn. We don’t want someone who lashes out, who doesn’t show up to work on time. Someone messy, unglamorous, even, by some reports, downright grubby, who wouldn’t get out of bed. We want someone who sits there crying beautifully while taking punch after punch.
Despite all Dominik and Oates’ (horrible band name for the record) talk about wanting to show us the “real” woman, Norma Jeanne, we never once see Blonde’s protagonist without her hair and makeup done perfectly to match the pictures we know and love. If you’re so concerned with finally giving a voice to Norma Jeanne, then why make no distinction between the two—other than expressing disgust at the concept of Marilyn? “Norma Jeanne” is always in the same perfect styling as Marilyn. She never laughs or cries passionately enough to wrinkle her face. She says she hates Marilyn, that that’s not her, but not for one moment do we get to see anything else. Above all Andrew Dominik is concerned with showing us a picture we recognize and then torturing it’s subject, though never enough to sully her beauty or turn her into something we don’t recognize anymore. There’s not one frame of Marilyn in this film that couldn’t be hung up as a poster in someone’s dorm room. There’s not one scene where we see anything new. We know that Marilyn was tragic, we know that she was beautiful. Blonde is not interested in anything else. We see Marilyn exactly as we always pictured her: winged eyeliner, perfectly coiffed blonde hair, tragedy.
A few weeks ago I wrote about The Total Woman, a pioneering book on how to be a good wife. Marabel Morgan, the cellophaned mastermind behind the book, the original femininity coach, explained Marilyn’s appeal to men: “Sex was, yes, ice cream to her. ‘Take me,’ said her smile, ‘I’m easy. I’m happy. I’m an angel of sex, you bet’”. I think a somewhat similar thought process went through Dominik’s head. His idea of subverting this—what he seems to believe is the only view of Marilyn—is to keep her easy, to let them take what they want from her without a fight, but to strip her of any enjoyment therein. It’s the pornographic and oversimplified bastardization of what Andrea Dworkin wrote in Right Wing Women:
“Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying. She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time. Death, one imagines, numbs pain that barbiturates and alcohol cannot touch”.
This passage conveys in a few sentences what Blonde takes 3 hours to gesture at. I don’t agree with either, but at least when Dworkin reduces her to a symbol, it’s a symbol of something.
The most nuance Dominik can muster is this: “Any person that’s killing themselves is not a figure of female empowerment.” When asked about her life and achievements, he said “That stuff is not really what the film is about. It’s about a person who is going to be killing themself.” Here is where he shows his hand. Tragedy after tragedy befalls this woman. We watch her be beaten down and betrayed by everyone she knows. We see her pour love into people who show only the contempt for her the director has made clear. She is helpless, hopeless, and perpetually victimized. Yet when it comes to the blame, Dominik rests it firmly on her shoulders. She killed her baby, despite the abortions happening against her will in the film (don’t even get me started on the bizarre pro life stance the movie takes in order to be provocative). She killed herself, despite the fact no one can know if her overdose was intentional or accidental. He describes her as self-destructive, says she destroyed her own life, yet her life is completely out of her hands. He wants her to live as a victim but refuses to put the scorn on anyone other than her. He indulges in the pathetic, insulting myth Dworkin parroted, but is unwilling to acknowledge Dworkin’s conclusion:
“Monroe’s premature death raised one haunting question for the men who were, in their own fantasy, her lovers, for the men who had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along—It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions of times? Had those smiles been masks covering despair or rage? [...] In fact, her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death, and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.”
He can’t say what Dworkin says, because that would mean having the self awareness to realize that, while he was too late to fuck Marilyn to death, he’s not above fucking her corpse.
As Manohla Dargis said more eloquently in The New York Times, “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.”
Andrew Dominik has been consistent in this press tour in showing his disdain or at least dismissal of Marilyn’s work. He said confidently that no one watches her films anymore, and when confronted with a someone saying that she and many others enjoyed them, called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a film about “well-dressed whores”. Read the interview, the interviewer is great, and Dominik is hateable. The New York Times article is good, and offers the immaculate phrase “Dominik is so far up Marilyn Monroe’s vagina in “Blonde” that he can’t see the rest of her.” But Angelica Jade Bastien is the gold standard in Marilyn critique, and wrote not one but two articles on the movie. Most importantly, if you can, watch Marilyn’s work. She’s brilliant. You can’t take your eyes off her. There is no spectacle in Blonde that has the same pull as one second of Monroe on screen. Here’s a list of her work curated by Bastien. And I’ll leave you with this (another Bastien quote because she is the be all and end all of this):
“Why isn’t Monroe considered a mad genius given her artistry and mental illness struggles? Is it because the genius side of the phrase also gives her an artistic and intellectual agency?”
Perhaps we never put Marilyn in the same category as mad geniuses like Van Gogh or Kurt Cobain because unlike them we view her craziness not as a side effect of her genius, but as proof she could never have been a genius to begin with. Don’t let men like Andrew Dominik convince you that’s true.