Blonde Does Not Have Fun with Marilyn Monroe

D espite my opinion that Howard Hawks is one of the top five directors of all time, I didn’t get around to seeing 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes until I could watch it with my teenage daughters. That film features one of the great Marilyn Monroe moments: her breathy/breathless rendition of the cheerfully cynical song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” (Apparently, credit for that scene belongs more to dance innovator and film choreographer Jack Cole than Hawks; co-star Jane Russell once said that Hawks “was not even there” for the musical numbers.)  It features Marilyn in one of the greatest dresses ever put on screen, drenched in color and swarmed by tuxedoed suitors, begging King of Diamonds Harry Winston to tell her all about it. It also features chandeliers made of women.

I mention all this because my experience watching that scene provides a spoiler-free encapsulation of my experience watching Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde, currently playing on Netflix after an extremely limited theatrical release. (Don’t call it a biopic; despite its real-life elements, it’s based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel about the actress.) They have chandeliers made of women. That’s amazing. They have chandeliers made of women. That’s terrifying. Just look at them, cantilevered beneath the candelabras, cuffed and strapped into place, white skin against black bikini against red background. Spectacular. Awful.

Spectacular-awful seems to be Dominik’s whole point here. Think of a famous Marilyn moment. Maybe it’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Perhaps it’s the scene in The Seven Year Itch in which her white dress gets blown up by the wind through the subway grate. Or when she’s wrapped in a diaphanous, diamond-dripping gown and singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You” in the classic comedy Some Like It Hot. Or maybe it’s her brief but radiant early-career appearance as an aspiring actress in All About Eve, taking direction from Addison Dewitt about how to make it in show business. They’re all here, and they’re all spectacular. And every time, Dominik is there to hammer home just how awful things were for Marilyn as she gave the world those moments. The movie starts with little Norma Jeane Baker’s suffering as the daughter of a shattered single mother and a mysterious absent father, and does not let up on the pain for the next two hours and 46 minutes, unless it’s to allow our heroine enough hope and happiness to make her eventual disappointment and despair that much more crushing.

No, wait — “despair” isn’t the right word. Because the amazing thing is that Monroe, played here with a heroic blend of control and abandon by Ana de Armas, does not despair, not even when she’s being humiliated by the president of the United States. You see, her mother tells her at the outset that her father is coming back someday, and the guy keeps writing her letters throughout the course of the film, always promising an eventual reunion. And it’s enough. It’s enough to keep her soldiering on through the horror, and even to chase the dream of love and family, again and again. The only thing it’s weirdly not enough to do is get her to quit show business, despite her stated desire to do so. There’s just something about the stars, shining so bright but always alone. (That last image is from the script; throughout, Dominik is not afraid to use blunt force to make his point — switching from silvery black and white to color, giving life to the reflection in a mirror, even allowing an on-screen fetus to make anxious accusations.)

Blonde is long, and Blonde is brutal. You may find yourself wondering why you are putting yourself through it, despite its visual and performative virtues. You may even find yourself wondering why Dominik made it. If he loved her, why drag her through hell this way? Why not let her rest in peace? Did he maybe hate her? I don’t read other people’s reviews before writing my own, but I did see a notification on Twitter from the L.A. Times to the effect of, “Blonde isn’t interested in Marilyn Monroe. It’s interested in her suffering.” But I don’t think Monroe’s suffering is Dominik’s endgame. I think he’s after the audience’s suffering. He’s using her to get at us. To me, Blonde felt like an extended assault on our tendency to get stars in our eyes, to worship the image on-screen and happily ignore what went into its creation. Dominik keeps up the violent destruction of those Marilyn moments precisely because we persist in maintaining their glamour. I can imagine him snarling, “You think Blonde is exploitative? Not a bit. ‘Candle in the Wind’ — now that’s exploitative.”

Still, he is using her. And she was a real person. And here, she’s being transmogrified into art while her name is retained and she remains recognizable, rather like poor Salieri in Amadeus. (At least Orson Welles renamed William Randolph Hearst as Charles Foster Kane.) Dominik maybe could have gone whole hog and created a genuinely fictional character, even one clearly based on Marilyn Monroe. But if he’s after the audience, he needs those real Marilyn moments — the ones we actually cherish, despite what we may know about her painful life and early death — to deconstruct and destroy. Spectacular-awful, spectacular-awful. His decision helps to keep Blonde from being successful as a movie, even if it is a tour de force.