Having stepped away for a decade, Andrew Dominik returns to directing with his passion project, Blonde. Starring Ana De Armas as Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe, Dominik’s psycho-fiction tragedy plunged social media into an endless cycle of sight unseen discourse leading up to release. With relatively mixed reviews spawning out of the festival circuits earlier this month, Blonde’s tenacious pull picked up steam. Labeled frequently as “misery porn”, “soulless”, and “emotionally and characteristically misguided”, the movie going public seemed to groan at the thought of having to endure another film bludgeoned with discourse. In the wake of Olivia Wilde’s flash in the pan, Don’t Worry Darling, no less. Film Twitter never catches a break, but a lot of it is our own doing. We’ve become so invested in the cycle of who is saying what at what time about whatever film, and we let it pick away at us before we even have the chance to give it its day in court. How is this beneficial to how we engage with movies? It isn’t. It’s harmful.
With a movie like Blonde in particular, the material is overwhelming to a point that watching it feels criminal. It’s intrusive, constantly, and you quickly understand why Blonde has left so many viewers in discomfort. In a nearly three hour film, the attempts to engage with sequences of images is exhausting as we try and muster up the energy to endure what Dominik is attempting to create. Especially when it pertains to an icon as emblematic, significant, and unforgettable as Marilyn Monroe. The connection to our past, in an era that is insistent on glorifying perceived comfort, is the foundation Dominik builds on to interrogate that identity. The identity of Monroe, the identity of Norma, the identity of Old Hollywood and the patriarchal dominance of the male gaze. This reality-bending adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ (cited as “a work of fiction” by the author herself) novel of the same name swings between images in stark black and white, glaring color, aspect ratios forged as windows, profiles and portraits into transparent evils at our displeasure. It is agonizing, and solely at the cost of the viewer’s patience by forcing us to endure alongside her. Blonde has achieved this much exposure because of the material, the subject, the bone-headed interviews by Dominik himself, and our collective inability to grapple with the complicated politics within the movies we watch at a mature enough level.
A young Norma Jeane, played by Lily Fisher, innocently hugs her favorite teddy bear. Her emotionally spiraling mother plucks a photo off the wall and shoves it in her face. “This is your father,” she says. “He’ll come back to you someday. I know it.” Young Norma Jeane is confused, antagonized by the seed her mother has planted. This will weed through Norma Jeane’s youth, and into her life as Marilyn Monroe (now played by Ana De Armas). Every beat, experience, and dream is emotionally tied to the hope of her father resurfacing. Whomever he may be. This is the catalyst of the film’s stylistic developments, and how they will represent the story. That search for her father never ends. She isn’t subjected to finding that in any man she meets, but it is rather Dominik using the male dominated status of the world to infiltrate that hollow. The male gaze is so abrasive and harmful to Ana De Armas’ otherworldly performance that it engulfs every fiber of her existence. In every image she feels small. Dwarfed by the dominance of men, the sights and expectations they place on her. They neglect her wit. Downplay her sensibilities. Peek under her skirt. Their eyes swallow her whole, their words spit off the tips of their tongues, and their actions lash her open.
Marilyn Monroe, 29, starring in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, draped in a white dress that flares around her legs, steps on a sidewalk grate. “Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?” she joyously exclaims as the wind pushes the air up and around her. Her dress opens up and her legs ignite the set. Her undergarments peek around her attempts to obscure it, and history is made. Dominik portrays this sequence as horror. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score torments the viewer to the sound of flashing bulbs, mouth agape men, and the tragedy of abusing this sight for their personal pleasure. Dominik elevates the camera and unveils a sea of people. Hundreds, maybe thousands, clapping, cheering, whistling at the sight that’ll embody the legacy of Marilyn Monroe more than anything else. It’s a sight typically associated with delight that incites the next wave of men devaluing her to the barest bones of a marketable sex icon. It’s troubling, just as much as her meeting with the President, the self-inflicted claw marks, or the conversations with her unborn child. She’s been stripped of her intimacy and spontaneity in a single moment that’ll be the glimmering mirage of the many tragedies that follow.
Andrew Dominik is a filmmaker that doesn’t shy away from understanding the inherent politics of filmmaking. He isn’t afraid to imbue his films with that either. 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and 2012’s Killing Them Softly mine through the catacombs of their respective political eras. The waning West, once remarked as plains of promise, hope and change, ends in tragedy. The contemporary politics of “hope” in a political paradigm shift in the late 2000s betrays the financial infrastructure of, “the free world”. That false promise is also imbued with tremendous amounts of tragedy. Blonde is no different. Less a biopic, and more an exercise in how men root the market of the country in sex appeal, before they actively deface it. A horrifyingly tragic set of parameters. Blonde is a visceral study in how men politic women. How Marilyn Monroe, and all of her sensibilities, skills, charm, and wit were belittled to a yapping puppy dog who loved saying, “daddy”. Or how they harvest women’s wombs, making choices for them, so they can continue to market their sex appeal. All of this (in typical Dominik fashion) is politically grueling because we know this isn’t exclusive to Marilyn Monroe, but the many women that have developed the traumas that Blonde’s Marilyn has. It’s interesting, thought provoking, and mildly frustrating that only a man could have made it like this, but its service to the exterior of the film is a complicated relationship. The lack of agency in her own story isn’t a product of Andrew Dominik’s negligence, it’s a product of associating the camera with a specific perspective. The perspective of the predators around her that always looked for a way to take that from her, and give it to themselves. It’s that sense of hypocrisy that Dominik has ingrained into the nasty politics of his filmography that makes him one of the most provocative filmmakers working today.
It’s fascinating that a story which has the opportunity to reconstruct the image of Marilyn Monroe through the objective lens of the male gaze, tinkers with this glamorous of a subjective subject. It creates a truly unsettling motion picture that wobbles between the checkpoints of history as the endurance it asks of us becomes a full fledged triathlon we never trained for. It isn’t wish-fulfillment for Andrew Dominik either. That feels ridiculously disingenuous for a collective audience that was okay with Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… giving the memory of Sharon Tate a chance to breathe again. Is that not wish-fulfillment? How do we pick and choose what is right in the memory of someone if the intent is to broaden the thematic scope of a story?
Blonde is a film that is difficult to “like” in the proper sense, because none of the material is worth liking on a moral level. It’s like watching a David Lynch movie without all of the figurative representations of ideas and emotions taking center stage. The masquerading evils are just plain evil here. The degradation of a sex icon in three hours should leave a pit in anyone’s stomach because it is applying a literal perspective to a fictitious retelling of a broader, applicable text. If Marilyn Monroe was an icon of sex, she could probably fit as an icon of abuse as well, or a myriad of other issues women have faced before and since her time. It all started with the conjecture by her mother in that room with the picture of her husband on the wall. The belief that there was a man out there who would come back into their lives and make it better. Make it right.
In the world of Blonde, however, no such man exists.