The Gospel of Marilyn, According to Blonde
Andrew Dominik misunderstands why Marilyn Monroe is important in this hot mess, and the lessons to be learned from films who've done it better.
Content warning for discussion of sexual assault and self harm.
“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
I once worked with a woman who had this entire quote tattooed on her forearm. When she read it to me it was the first time I’d heard the whole thing. The quote is attributed to Marilyn Monroe, although there is no firm evidence she originated it. The latter half has been “girlbossified,” plastered all over shirts and mugs and posters. The quote loses meaning when removed from its full context. Such is the problem with Andrew Dominik’s 2022 film, Blonde.
Now, I am not a Marilyn Monroe expert by any means. I wouldn’t even consider myself a fan. Of the major Tragic 20th Century White Women people get obsessed with, mine was Princess Diana1. But since I have a soft spot for wronged women, I consider Marilyn Monroe under my purview.
I usually enjoy a movie about a woman losing her mind. When I learned there was going to be an NC-17 film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, I said sign me the fuck up. I gave Blonde a chance. I wanted it to be good. The visuals are beautiful and Ana de Armas’ performance is the only reason why anyone should sit through this endurance test.
Blonde was adapted from a 2000 book of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates. I have read most of it. Like the movie, it’s a slog, and I have other things to do. Most importantly, I read the ending, which differs from Blonde. I’ll give Dominik credit for creating a new one instead of regurgitating the the book’s Mid-Century Misogynist Norman Mailer2 nonsense.
A review likened Blonde to the Passion of the Christ. Considering both movies take icons important to millions and puts them through the wringer, the comparison is apt. Blonde is essentially the Stations of the Cross for Marilyn Monroe3. The film drops the audience into certain points of her life, following well known biographical “facts” step by step. Marilyn performs in Niagara. Marilyn marries Joe DiMaggio. Marilyn stands on the subway grate. Marilyn divorces Joe DiMaggio. Jesus falls for the third time.
Both Dominik and Oates say their Marilyns are not supposed to be biographical and are meant to be regarded as fictional. Which is a fine thing for any writer to say in regards to their work. However, the film wants to have its cake and eat it too. Blonde is not the story of the “real” Marilyn Monroe, but it requires the audience to know her life to understand the film. The story moves fast, going from incident to incident. You better have read her Wikipedia page if you want the full experience. Blonde covers Marilyn’s whole life yet nothing gets explored in proper form. Perhaps that’s the point, but I think it’s part of why people don’t like this movie.
Blonde is only interested in Marilyn Monroe’s suffering. Yes, her life was tragic and ended in probable suicide, but we have to assume there was joy. The film does not care (or care enough) about her politics, intelligence, hard work, fertility troubles, her humor, or her conversion to Judaism. Traumas are invented when there were real ones worth exploring. This fascinating woman is reduced to a “fuck me, Daddy” Barbie doll and treated with the same care as a child throwing a toy down the stairs.
The film has been called exploitative due to it’s, often very distressing, content. I agree, but not for that reason. Oates and Dominik could’ve created a fictional actress for both versions of Blonde. Instead they made her Marilyn Monroe. Without her name attached to the projects, the interest would have been much less. That’s what’s exploitative to me. To rely upon a dead woman’s fame to sell your story and deny it’s value in the next breath.
This is not some tenderqueer crybaby “the movie made me upset, so it’s bad” temper tantrum. Art is meant to inspire feelings, positive and negative. Give me messy and painful stories. But is it so hard to ask that it be well written?
Dominik forgot people love Marilyn Monroe. Remember the backlash when Kim Kardashian wore her dress? She has a piercing named after her for fuck’s sake! Think of Marilyn’s broad appeal. My coworker with the tattoo was two of the following (for anonymity’s sake), not cisgender, not white, not straight. The director dismisses this anger by saying viewers want to save her.
I don’t think it’s a savior complex, fans of Marilyn want to give her what she was denied in life, love and protection. Call it a parasocial relationship, whatever. Still, the feelings were real and they came for this movie. They came for it with sledgehammer and scalpel.
But can a modern filmmaker create a movie about the life of an iconic 20th century woman, warts and all, and do it well? Or tell a story about the brutal consumption of women and girls in the entertainment industry? And can they all do it better than Blonde?
Absolutely.
Enter Pablo Larraín, the Chilean director has succeeded twice were Dominik failed. Of the above stated Tragic Women, he has made both Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), films that are thematically similar to Blonde. In the case of Jackie, they even share an actor (more on that later). They follow Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) and Diana, Princess of Wales (Kirsten Stewart) during particularly fraught periods of their lives. Jackie, in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination and funeral, and Diana spends a miserable Christmas with her royal in-laws as her marriage continues to break down.
Jackie and Spencer work were Blonde doesn’t because they narrow their focus. Spencer is Diana’s crappy vacation. While Jackie does move around more, JFK’s assassination and the question of what his presidency will mean to history tie everything together. They don’t try to cram in Jackie and Diana’s whole lives, and it allows the film to build its situations instead of speeding forth onto the next misery.
Like Blonde, Jackie and Spencer make you uncomfortable. Our protagonists struggle with mental health issues. Jackie drinks and takes barbiturates, and Diana binges and starves herself. Both women express suicidal ideation. Diana almost throws herself down a flight of stairs, and Jackie tells a priest (John Hurt in his last role) she walked behind her husband’s casket in the hope someone would shoot her too.
There is pain and sorrow, but there is happiness to compare it to. The films make an effort to develop Jackie and Diana’s relationships. They have their children. Diana finds comfort and understanding with her dresser, Maggie (Sally Hawkins) and Royal Chef Darren McGrady (Sean Harris). Jackie has her loyal secretary Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig), and processes her loss with brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard).
There really isn’t that in Blonde. Marilyn is mostly alone. She does have her kindhearted makeup artist Whitey (Toby Huss), but his presence is more of an afterthought. There are her husbands, but they aren’t around for long. And Eddy (Evan Williams) and Cass (Xavier Samuel) are just some of the many creeps in her life. Marilyn’s loneliness adds to her despair, the main thesis of the film, but there aren’t enough developed relationships for her to play off of. It’s unfortunate because de Armas is a great Marilyn.
Most importantly in this comparison, is how Larraín understands the power of restraint, that less is very often more. And when the horror does come, it’s shocking. Diana imagines eating the pearl necklace Charles gave her, it’s duplicate also the Christmas present for his mistress. The sounds of the crunching and swallowing in this rebellion of consumption is what make the moment so memorable. Not to mention Diana snipping her arm with wire cutters4.
Jackie admits to the priest she’s been lying about not remembering her husband’s death, and JFK’s fatal headshot is recreated with a vividness Abraham Zapruder could only dream of. Most film adaptions of the Kennedys politely look away and don’t show the assassination. But Jackie knows the audience must understand its protagonist’s pain on a visceral level. You need to see. She watched and so will you.
Scenes similar to these in Blonde are the ones I thought were great. The elongated mouths of the hungry men outside the premier of Some Like it Hot. Norma Jeane’s childhood with her unstable mother. The beginning of Marilyn’s drugged out transportation to the president. But these are far and few between, and Blonde is tragically a very shallow movie.
Dominik has confused brutality for depth, and too many motifs are stupidly on the nose. Marilyn wants a father, “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da Daddy” starts playing. Marilyn has a coercive abortion, “Bye Bye Baby” is the song of choice. The power of the harrowing JFK sequence is immediately undercut by the most puerile visual metaphor.
Dominik is determined to give his audiences a straight answer about Marilyn’s death. This spoon-feeding is what ultimately makes Blonde bad, and a lack of emotional variety rubs the viewer raw. When everything is shocking nothing is. Despite saying otherwise, I don’t think Dominik thinks much of his subject. I genuinely laughed approximately once, when Whitey comments that Joe DiMaggio has a “(baseball) bat for a cock.”
The narrative pays lip service to examining the studio system that contributed to Marilyn’s abuse. There are rapist producers, demeaning directors, and leering fans. But they are merely set dressing for the film’s singular focus of Marilyn’s suffering, her need for a father. In fact, the ending makes this explicit.
Both Jackie and Spencer end on bittersweet notes, as the women move on to the next part of their lives. The audience knows there are further tragedies waiting around the corner. Bobby Kennedy will be shot in the Ambassador Hotel and die 26 hours later, and Jackie marries Aristotle Onassis. Diana will be hounded by the paparazzi and not survive the car crash in the Pont de l'Alma5 tunnel.
Sadly, Blonde does not have this subtilty.
Now for the elephant in the room. The scene where Marilyn is sexually assaulted by JFK. Contrary to what you might expect from me, I thought this part of the movie was better than what came before. At least until it veers off into Austin Powers’ level stupidity.
Marilyn’s drug use has worsened. She’s barely coherent as she’s brought by the secret service to a hotel to see the president. While traveling in the car, she says her relationship with JFK is “not sexual.” We don’t know how much of this is a true, since their prior encounters (if there were any) are not elaborated on.
She enters the president’s hotel room and finds JFK (Caspar Phillipson) in bed wearing nothing but a back brace and a cigarette. JFK is on on the phone discussing a possible sex scandal. He wastes no time getting Marilyn to give him a handjob, and when that’s not enough, he forces her to perform oral sex on him. Marilyn talks herself through this in voiceover and imagines herself on screen in front of an audience, that this is just one of her many roles. After he finishes, JFK rapes her off camera. This is largely unchanged from the book.
But this disturbing scene is ruined with a tacky visual metaphor. A science-fiction movie plays on the TV in JFK’s hotel room. A rocket ship means his erect penis, and when a flying saucer explodes into the Washington Monument it signals ejaculation. Everybody got that?
Did this happen to Marilyn Monroe? Most likely not. But could it have happened to another woman (or women)? Absolutely. JFK, Ted, and even my admitted favorite, RFK all get a big ol’ F when it comes to their treatment of women. (I am excluding Joe jr. here because he died young and unmarried.) JFK did so much fucking around I’m impressed by his time management skills. As I said last time, his womanizing was a security risk for the secret service. Ted is the only one who is certainly responsible for a woman’s death.
RFK often gets the “not as big of a jerk as you could’ve been award” since his mistresses had nice things to say about him after his death. But this does not excuse him cheating on poor perpetually pregnant Ethel, who by all accounts adored him6.
Blonde made me think of Mimi Alford, a White House intern who had a “relationship” with JFK when she was nineteen, including losing her virginity on Jackie’s bed. Ms. Alford is still alive, so I will let her speak for herself.
As for Caspar Phillipson, the Danish actor has become famous for impersonating John F. Kennedy due to his strong resemblance. He played the president in Jackie, flitting in the background of her memories, already a ghost. Before JFK, Phillipson was known for being the voice of Danish Big Bird.
He has the range, darling! 7
Blonde may have it’s surface similarities to Spencer and Jackie, but the film it has the most in common with is it’s elder and prettier sister, Perfect Blue (1997) by the late great Satoshi Kon. Everything Blonde tries to do, Perfect Blue does better, with more thought, style, and substance. Especially in its excoriation of the entertainment industry.
The film follows Mima Kirigoe, an idol singer in Japan who is trying to make the challenging transition from idol to serious actress. Mima works with her manager Rumi and agent Tadokoro to further her burgeoning career. However, she ends up working on a trashy TV rip off of Silence of the Lambs called Double Bind. The writer on the show decides to give Mima a bigger part, but this comes with complications.
As with Blonde, Perfect Blue’s heroine struggles with her sense of self and has a double. Marilyn is split between the private Norma Jeane and her iconic public persona. One scene has a teary Marilyn begging Whitey to make her other self appear. Marilyn the actress appears in the mirror, gleaming. But in Perfect Blue the double is more than just Mima the idol singer vs Mima the actress. The conflict between who she wants to be and who other people expect her to be is the central point of the film, not “Daddy Issues.” Mima’s insecurities torment her as reflections, hallucinations, and finally the doppelganger is given physical form by the villain. This is better than repetitive scenes of Marilyn’s dissatisfaction with her movie star status. Blonde never made me believe she liked acting. Yes, this is not biographical, but Marilyn’s goal of being a serious actress is a well known part of her life.
Perfect Blue has the systems of the industry be the backbone of the story, both the true villain and the saving grace. Rumi and Tadokoro argue over what each think is best for Mima. The director of Double Bind and the writer confer over ways to get more people to watch the show. They choose to exploit Mima’s vulnerability, although the idea is presented to her as away to escape her idol image.
Like Blonde, Perfect Blue condemns fans who treat the object of their admiration as a consumable product, one they expect to be in control of. However, we get to see their discussions throughout the movie and this issue is manifested in the character of Me-Mania.
I don’t wish to spoil Perfect Blue for those who haven’t seen it, but it has layers. The audience is never a hundred percent sure of what is real. Are you seeing an episode of the in-universe show Double Bind? Is what we’re watching through the eyes of the real Mima or one of the doppelgangers? Or have we been shown a situation that never happened at all? Answers are not presented straightforwardly. Viewers get to figure it out.
Above all, Perfect Blue has the intelligence to know the villain is also a victim of the entertainment industry. A woman who has been used up and worse, got older, and no longer has a body deemed worthy of desire.
I saw much of Perfect Blue in Blonde. Doppelgangers, traumatic experiences survived via imagining an audience watching, surreal imagery, and the exploitation of women and girl’s bodies. But the former has politics, Mima’s experiences are not just hers, they speak to larger societal problems. Blonde’s conclusion is that’s Marilyn’s wish for a father’s love is the ultimate reason for her death. Everything else is secondary.
Blonde ends with a snapshot of Marilyn’s last days at her Helena Drive house. She gets a phone call from creep/old lover Eddy that their mutual creep/lover Cass has died from alcoholism. Eddy tells Marilyn Cass had a package specifically for her. Throughout the movie, Marilyn has been receiving letters from her “father,” who claims his poor health prevents them from meeting in person.
The letters both praise Marilyn and slut shame her. (Mima receives similar messages, but the origin is far more interesting.) Marilyn opens the package Cass meant for her and finds a stuffed tiger and a card revealing he had been the one writing the paternal letters.
This causes Marilyn’s final spiral. She intentionally overdoses and dies in her bed, imagining her father welcoming her to the afterlife. The end.
Okay.
A part of the backlash to Blonde has been incredibly moralizing. I’ve read numerous comments complaining about the movie on an ethical level, that it is immoral. I think it’s poor criticism to see a movie this way. Save your outrage for things made by your Woody Allens and Roman Polanskis. You can hate Blonde because it is a bad movie!
For all of the discussed reasons above. The writing is patronizing to Marilyn and mean spirited at worst. There is so much cringe besides the in your face song choices and dick rockets. Cass and Eddy are bizarre incestuous not-twins. Marilyn’s constant address of her husbands as “Daddy.” I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine Arthur Miller letting his wife call him that. And don’t get me started on the talking CGI baby!
The movie lacks the element of fun to make it camp. Blonde is not as complex or as political as it think’s it is, and does not have the intelligence to reach it’s lofty goals.
Back to Passion of the Christ. Another movie I think is not very good, but the part I still think about is not Jesus being flogged. It is Claudia, Pontius Pilate’s wife, bringing cloths afterwards to Mary and Mary Magdalene so they can scrub Jesus’ blood off the stones. The dialogue-less interaction of these women crossing political, cultural, and colonial boundaries for a bit of humanity is far more powerful and thought provoking than any gore.
The best scene in Blonde is not any of the atrocities it depicts. I greatly enjoyed the conversation between Marilyn and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody in an understated performance) after she reads for Magda. There is a authenticity to the scene you never get anywhere else, and the sense of character for each of them is strong.
While Blonde does have its fans, (there are a few critics who’s opinions I respect that enjoyed it) the movie has been largely panned. The Razzies8 for 2022 gave it eight nominations, including Andrew Dominik & His Issues with Women for Worst Screen Couple. In Dominik’s defense, any of the weird things about women in Blonde already existed in the book.
You can boil the story down to this, Marilyn’s life sucked, she needed a daddy, and now she’s dead. If she had a daddy, maybe she would be alive. It’s a reductive view, I know. But Blonde is already reductive to Marilyn Monroe. The worst part is that the movie could have been good. If Dominik had focused on some instead of all. A movie just about her childhood or marriage to Arthur Miller (the best parts to me) would have been much stronger.
All critics have their biases, perhaps I would have liked Blonde if I had never seen Perfect Blue, Jackie, or Spencer. Even without that prior viewing, the problems with Blonde would still be there. We need more emotionally complicated and difficult movies, but this is not how to do it.
Marilyn Monroe deserved better.
Housekeeping in Camelot
I’m happy to share that Trapped in Camelot is being shared by Magen Cubed on her substack, Notes on Monstrosity. I’ve been a fan of Magen’s writing for years. Check her out below!
The four usual choices are Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, Sylvia Plath, and of course, Marilyn Monroe.
Oates herself became the main character of Twitter for a day when she charitably discussed Mailer’s history of domestic violence.
Not to get all Catholicism on you, I know Marilyn was Jewish.
Everyone in my theater yelped when this happened, my friend and I included.
I saw the Pont de l'Alma tunnel during my visit to Paris in 2014. It was a surreal experience.
In Ethel’s titular documentary, daughter Rory points out to her mother that she was pregnant for ninety-nine months of her life. Ethel merely shrugs and laughs.
Although actor James F. Kelly has him beat for playing RFK 6 times and JFK once in the 80s and 90s.
The Razzies are silly nonsense anyway, whatever credibility they had was lost when they nominated a LITERAL child for Worst Actress. Gimme a break.