Netflix-style political porn disrespects Monroe and distorts pop history.
Marilyn Monroe, the pop icon born Norma Jeane Mortensen, gets so little respect from Netflix and director-writer Andrew Dominik that they didn’t even bother naming the movie Blonde after her. That title, from a 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, sums up their derision. The film’s sleazy speculations about Monroe’s life and mental capacity are at the Maggie Haberman level of fake news. Oates and Dominik indulge every dumb-blonde stereotype, then heighten them into a judgmental horror show. Shots of predatory paparazzi and leering fan-demonium, out-weird Wee Gee; Dominik equates them to the many in-utero fetuses tormenting Monroe’s imagination.
Monroe and her movies are probably unfamiliar to most contemporary film watchers. What’s notable about Blonde is that a distinct Netflix style emerges: slick, cynical nonsense, usually interposing black-and-white artifice for effect (as in Roma, Mank, The Irishman, Power of the Dog, etc.). This fanciful treatment comes together, after an introductory crazy-mother childhood-trauma sequence, when Monroe submits to sodomy by Fox studio president Darryl F. Zanuck to get her first feature-film role.
Her tryout, playing a psychotic babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock, presages doom. Monroe (played by Ana de Armas) lacks MM’s space-cadet trick but comes off pretentiously literary (although she’s never seen cracking a book). This ominous audition does not connect the actress to her culture as did the Gone with the Wind audition of the tragic girl in Brian De Palma’s revelatory Black Dahlia.
Turning Monroe into everybody’s victim exemplifies feminist victimhood gone awry. She has no “agency,” just a “secret self” conveyed through voice-over narration of imaginary letters from an unknown father. “Where does dreaming end and madness begin? Isn’t all love delusion?” pouts the Dostoevsky reader who calls each husband “Daddy.” Was the Oates novel this trite?
Dominik, who made the strained, artsy Western biopic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, overinflates his subject as if he never met an actual person. Ignoring how Monroe calculated her career and contrived the unique acting style that mesmerized the world, he resorts to the visual equivalent of psychobabble: Deranged, expressionist distortions, lacking Baz Luhrmann’s silliness or Ken Russell’s ingenuity, resemble strained pop-music videos. De Armas, a funny presence in the horror comedy Knock, Knock, has mercurial flashes. But without Monroe’s ebullience, she winds up doing a superior version of Madonna’s Marilyn impersonation. Deconstructing Monroe’s legend has turned into degradation. Recently, The Shed at Hudson Yards in New York City presented Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, by Anne Carson, featuring a drag-queen heroine — an idea that, like Blonde, is no longer worthy of calling avant-garde.
Here’s the problem: Dominik can’t define stardom when celebrityhood itself is in trouble. Maybe because there are no actors to respect these days. (Blonde was produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B.) We don’t see ambitious Monroe’s work ethic or her joy. No clue why she was cast by the sexual sophisticate Howard Hawks, scholarly John Huston, cynical Billy Wilder — the only filmmakers she worked with twice — or artful Preminger or empathetic Cukor. Even Monroe’s most accomplished acting in Joshua Logan’s 1956 film of Willliam Inge’s Bus Stop and her star-to-star competition with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl are omitted.
Instead, Dominik repeatedly blows up her famous Seven Year Itch dress stunt. Nine times by my count — echoing the film’s sadistic redundancy. That also defines Monroe’s private life — a depraved ménage à trois with Hollywood scions and hopeless marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller (respectively played by Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody, both too old to show the spark of mutual celebrity attraction).
By the time Monroe is shuttled through the White House for furtive assignations with John F. Kennedy (naked except for a back brace), she’s denied the whorish effrontery of the “Happy Birthday” public sing-along that eventually inspired Kim Kardashian.
When the CIA secretly aborts Monroe’s JFK zygote, Blonde climaxes as political porn. Conservatives needn’t get excited that Marilyn is sacrificed on the abortion table (Dominik innovates a from-the-inside view of a vaginal curette), because the film’s process is inherently dehumanizing.
We shouldn’t have to be thinking about Netflix gaslighting Marilyn Monroe while our government and media are gaslighting us, but Blonde is another example of Millennial distraction by way of decadence.
