Blonde and Bros
BLONDE. Marilyn Monroe (neé Norma Jean Mortensen) has been dead now 60 years; nearly twice as long as she lived and a dozen times longer than the period of her working life. Her image, more than her acting work, which is truly formidable, sustains her as one of the undeniable icons of 20th century culture. And now a movie ostensibly about her — to me much more focused on the refractory nature of fame, identity under the spotlight, misogyny and the mechanized commodification of personhood — and based on a fictionalized quasi-autobiography published over two decades ago by Joyce Carol Oates (a “humorless broom,” as one of my colleagues would have it). Manohla Dargis, in her New York Times review, of which I have admittedly only read excerpts forwarded by the aforementioned colleague, accuses writer/director Andrew Domink (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007; Killing Them Softly, 2012) of necrophilia and lechery, among other crimes. Planned Parenthood (an organization I will always support) has decried the movie’s depiction of abortion. Blonde has quickly become perhaps the most contentious work of commercial art of the year. One wonders why. Blonde, at least as Dominik has rendered it for the screen (Oates’ ponderous volume looms from my shelf, mocking me, unread) is indeed coarse, invasive and sometimes uncomfortably sexualized. In being so, it plays against the manufactured vision of Monroe (herself a false icon, even in her own time, a point to which the movie frequently returns), which lives on in the popular consciousness as just sexy enough to be non-threatening, a benign bombshell that dehumanizes gender identity. That lasting image, semi-satirized by Warhol mere years after the star’s death, has precious little to do with the life lived behind the bleach and the smile; within that dichotomy, I think, lies the space Dominik and star Ana de Armas (transformed, devastating) explore, with nuance and force of will. Structurally, Blonde hews to something like conventional biopic narrative — we begin at the beginning, with Norma Jean as a child (Lily Fisher), and proceed chronologically through her brief and difficult life — therein may lie the fundamental conflict. Because the movie departs almost immediately from any notion of conventionality and never pretends to tell anything like a straight story. While we become party to some of the star’s thoughts, we experience them as visions, ephemera, echoed and imagined voices…