In a presser with the BFI for the release of Netflix’s Blonde, a loose adaptation of a fictionalised account of the life of Marilyn Monroe, writer-director Andrew Dominik said “She’s somebody who’s become this huge cultural thing in a whole load of movies nobody really watches”. I’ll admit from the outset this did not exactly endear me to the film I was about to endure. I personally have been watching her films since I was a child, many of which are strong and lasting examples of classical Hollywood period filmmaking: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch, How To Marry A Millionaire, Bus Stop, There’s No Business Like Show Business, All About Eve and Niagara among others were all staples of TV in my grandparents house growing up. Some Like It Hot specifically is held up as one of the great comedies of the 1950s and she’s by no means a bit part. People know her and know her filmography. She’s one of the most famous faces of 20th century cinema, not just for her striking good looks but for her presence, charisma and comic talent. But this is where the director is coming from, making a film ostensibly about one of the great icons of the period with no actual knowledge of her career. Not only that but it’s clear he doesn’t care to know about it.
Dominik has also explained that what he was interested in is her suicide in 1962 at age 36, stating he wanted to understand why a woman who was beautiful, successful and by all accounts had it all wanted to end her life. Countless books, articles, papers and internet deep dives have been written about her life and career in the 60 years since her death. She’s one of the most covered Hollywood movie stars ever to grace celluloid. Much of that writing is concerned with the tragedy in her life along with the perceived glamour of it. She was also an avid reader, interested in esotericism, politics (her husband Arthur Miller introduced her to socialist political activism and the struggle in Cuba was of particular interest to her) and the arts. She wanted to start a family but lived with endometriosis which made that a challenge. For all her playing the supposedly dumb blonde on screen, she was anything but. Again, this whole person is not what Dominik nor writer of the original book Blonde Joyce Carol Oates are interested in. Their concern is the inevitable tragedy (albeit highly fictionalised version of that tragedy) that befalls a sexualised woman, that behind a vacuous facade there is only pain.
Blonde as a movie really thinks it has something to say about her and women like her and it doesn’t. Instead, it is an exercise in glossy torture porn, revelling in gory detail in as many moments of Monroe’s suffering as it possibly can, from childhood trauma that’s heavily exaggerated, to graphic rape scenes (which never happened), to an abortion and a talking foetus (which, as if I should need to explain, also never happened). It’s more interested in the events that piled on her and lead to her suicide than it is of the glamorous, bright, witty woman she was. There is something profoundly distasteful in the way Dominik invites his audience to roll about in the highly exacerbated traumatic events in her personal life like an overexcited ringmaster; he wants you to feel her abuse, witness it like kids at school dissecting a frog. To him, abuse, humiliation, degradation are a blood sport, sickening but you can’t look away. No amount of sumptuous production design or admirable performance can distract from what the film ultimately is; an exploitation of a real woman’s suffering for an audience without once attempting to see her as a whole human being, defined entirely by grief, suffering and her untimely end. He wants her to feel punished and ruined by her experiences and the grotesqueness of that is hard to escape.
There is no Marilyn the model, the actress, the comic, the icon, not even the woman in this film, she’s just a cypher for all the ways the world flattens and reduces women to 2 dimensional objects. There is a sense Dominik believes that women cannot overcome their pain and that their pain should define them. It’s disrespectful to her and anyone who has had their own crosses to bear. In his interviews, Dominik repeatedly uses the term “whoredom” to describe Monroe’s roles, dismissing the fantasy she portrays on screen as nothing more than an exercise in consenting to have herself become a fetish object and that consent makes her somehow complicit in what happened to her. Sexualised women are to be made an example of, held up as a cautionary tale, but with not a jot of support or care, only judgement.
For a filmmaker in 2022 to put out a work of this kind, after the supposed enlightenment of the Me Too era and increased awareness of how women should be treated both on and off camera, feels at best tone deaf and at worst like a misogynist incel fantasy. He wants us to watch this extraordinarily famous woman suffer and there is a sense he’s enjoying it like a voyeur behind a curtain.
I’m not sure that the audience or popular culture gains anything from Blonde existing. It’s a cheap shot, makes for grim watching and says more about the values of the authors of the piece than it does of the woman it seeks to depict. More than anything, it feels unfair to make grotesque spectacle of Monroe’s struggles when she isn’t around to defend herself. Does she deserve better? Absolutely. What she deserves more is to be allowed to rest. Instead I would advise using the almost 3 hour runtime to do literally anything else, or watch some of her films which are closer to showing the person she actually was.