Making the rounds in the last few days has been a curious interview by Christina Newland with Blonde director Andrew Dominik, shedding light on Dominik’s ideas of his movie and its’ subject, always a contentious one, Marilyn Monroe, against probing, critical questions from Newland, who hated the movie in question. It’s an interesting, revealing piece, one that might endanger subjectivity in an approach to the movie, a movie that has been swimming in controversy pretty much since it was announced. This interview seemed to confirm Dominik’s unflattering image of the iconic Marilyn, an image that centres trauma and self-destruction as her epitomizing attributes. Certainly it did nothing to temper the high polarization around this movie -whatever their particular conception is, people have very strong feelings about the life, early death, and persona of Marilyn Monroe.
Blonde as a work is entirely fictional. Though based around real biographical details, it is a musing on her life, filling in blanks and ascribing personality traits based off speculation and in service of a particular narrative for her life story. Dominik can’t take credit for this, it was Joyce Carol Oates who wrote the book and created this version of Marilyn (one of countless across media in the past sixty years that bear little resemblance to the actual person). But he does carry a lot of the responsibility in how this version of Marilyn is interpreted, how she communicates the humanity of the real person, and the ways in which our culture has martyred and deified her. And in that respect, he doesn’t do a very considerate job.
This is a really difficult movie, one that is more or less defined by its’ heavy contrasts. Psychological artistic choices that are riveting brush up against characterization that is offensively hollow and perhaps outright hostile. A stylized visual language that is nothing but compelling is met with a script that is unpolished and thoroughly incurious. Dominik generally paints a portrait of a Marilyn whose life is dominated by her miseries and trauma, by sexuality and sexual exploitation -whose faint reprieves from these things are brief and whose greater aspirations are doomed to failure. Based on the fictitious nature of the story, it is hard to determine whether the point-of-view is meant to be reflective of a popular conception that tends to envision Marilyn in these broad strokes or if it is indeed aiming to be sincere and objective. The dreamlike atmosphere of so much of the movie might suggest the former, but Dominik’s recurring frankness in talking about the movie would point to the latter. Regardless though Blonde is still using the image of Marilyn to make judgments, the aesthetics of her life story to drive an idea that would seem forceful even to one not familiar with her biography.
Following a glimpse of her childhood under the auspices of a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson), the film plays through her adulthood as a series of vignettes, from her earliest movie roles and increasing sensationalism around her, to her celebrity marriages, first to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), then Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody); the toll her fame takes on her is illustrated, her desires for motherhood, and how misfortunes from this result in a drug dependency -all of which would of course lead to her suicide. Interspersed in there are speculations about her personal life: that rumoured affair with John F. Kennedy and most notably a posited polyamorous relationship with Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel) and Edward Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams). Marilyn of course is played by Ana de Armas, a casting choice I was skeptical about, but she does indeed commit emphatically to the part in a way that is impossible not to be impressed by -I’ve never seen her hide her Cuban accent so well. In fact the performance is so much better than the material itself that it becomes kind of sad to watch -those dimensions of Marilyn’s person that the movie conveniently ignores could be done real justice in de Armas’ hands.
Instead this film has her deal almost exclusively with unresolved daddy issues as the source of much of her psychological distress. And I’m not being glib, the phrase “daddy” comes up so often, both in reference to her absent father -alleged to have worked in Hollywood in the 1920s- and towards each of her love interests, in a bizarre Freudian insinuation that seems a gross oversimplification. It’s honestly embarrassing the way all roads lead back to her need for a powerful male figure in her life, and as it factors into the ending it is especially contrived and lazy. Dominik’s vision of Marilyn Monroe is someone defined by her suicide and he by his own admission endeavoured to find the reason for it with this movie. It being fiction provided him licence, but that doesn’t make his choices any less unattractive. If Marilyn had had her daddy, everything would be alright -hell, if she had a family it would be alright, as the side effect of this seems to be an apparent instinctual urge for motherhood. She has an abortion she immediately regrets, and a later miscarriage is depicted as what drives her completely over the edge. It’s insidious the way real harsh biographical details are twisted around Oates’ narrative to lend it support, extending alike to Marilyn’s infamous difficulties on Some Like it Hot or her abuse at the hands of her mother and DiMaggio.
And yet amid all this, the movie is enrapturing through Dominik’s stylized, abstract, occasionally Lynchian way of telling it. Various scenes, usually involving her direct relationship with the film industry, are shot in black and white, and a very few scenes are set outdoors or in tangible locations. It is a veritable and elegant dreamscape at times, every transition or imagery choice being interesting or unique. High-contrast, slow motion frames stand out, where the camera will stay poised on a particular moment or feeling -and this is best used when illustrating the public objectification of Marilyn, such as in the shooting of the famous up-skirt scene of The Seven Year Itch. Of course there is a very fine line between characterizing objectification and objectification itself that I’m not confident Dominik balances very well, but it is in any case effective in showing how dehumanized Marilyn was among both fans and peers -her husband is seen in that crowd looking on. The best, most haunting example is a nightmarish premiere sequence where she navigates a labyrinth of fans and onlookers taking photos and shouting at her, whose faces are distorted to their freakish obsession -and it feels like it goes on forever. A few of the wilder metaphorical choices don’t have the same effect -there is a talking fetus at one point that feels ripped from Christian anti-choice propaganda (the way that whole aspect of Marilyn’s life is played has heavy conservative overtones), and still other brief images lack coherency.
Much was made of this movies’ rare NC-17 rating due to sexual content, that given the role of sexual assault in Marilyn’s story, for good reason had a lot of people wary. It’s a relief then that the movie doesn’t go there, dealing relatively sensitively with that subject, and the sexual material itself is hardly more explicit than any R-rated movie or T.V. show (Dominik himself made the comparison to Euphoria and that seems about right). It’s to the point I wonder if the fight for the NC-17 rating was mere publicity, Dominik certainly would need to change very little to make that difference -unless the R-rating itself has been tempered in recent years the way PG-13 has.
But NC-17 or R or PG-13 wouldn’t change the fundamental tenets of Blonde, which are fairly toxic when you get right down to it. It’s impression of Marilyn, fictitious though it may be, is often damaging and unfair, much as de Armas’ performance succeeds at drawing sympathy. It purposely overlooks the nuances of her life and career to focus only on the troubles, and uses them alone to craft an uncomfortably moralistic impression of a woman beholden to her death, chasing after daddy or babies all her life. In spite of what he set out to do, Dominik reveals much more about himself than he does Marilyn. Blonde is a tantalizing, evocative movie in its’ craft and artistic imagination, too beautiful for the miserable things its’ saying. A Pyrrhic beauty, void and vapid, just as it sees Marilyn Monroe.
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