Warning: This review contains content about sexual violence.
Blonde is a Netflix film directed by Andrew Dominik that is based on the novel of the same title by Joyce Carol Oates. The source novel is a fictionalized version of the life of Norma Jeane Mortenson, otherwise known as Marilyn Monroe. This movie is presented as a biopic, which is simply untrue and important to keep in mind when choosing to consume this depiction. Ana de Armas stars as Monroe and other high-profile actors are featured, such as Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller and Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio.
Getting right into it, I thought this movie was deeply offensive and completely disregarded who Monroe truly was as a person and how she wanted herself shown. Marilyn Monroe was a renowned actress and sex symbol of the 1950s. During the prime of her career, the media didn’t present her as a human being, they portrayed her as an object, and that is exactly what Blonde did. Within the first twenty minutes of the movie, before we have seen anything that shows who she is as a person, there is an explicit depiction of her being sexually assaulted by a casting director, with no inkling of an up-front trigger warning from Netflix aside from the NC-17 rating for “some sexual content” ( a gross understatement.) The bulk of the movie is dedicated to her sexuality and relationships, some of which never actually occurred. The portrayal of Monroe was incredibly hyper-sexual despite that in an excerpt from her unfinished autobiography, she stated, “Why I was a siren, I hadn’t the faintest idea. There were no thoughts of sex in my head. I didn’t want to be kissed, and I didn’t dream of being seduced by a duke or a movie star. The truth was that with all my lipstick and mascara and precocious curves, I was as unsensual as a fossil. But I seemed to affect people quite otherwise.” Her alleged affair with President Kennedy was framed as fact and painted her as a promiscuous ‘other woman’ who allows herself to be taken advantage of.
It is such a shame that (male) stars like Elvis, for example, are getting marvelous blockbuster biopics that manage to cast them in a godly light despite their many flaws. While Marilyn Monroe, one of the most famous women of all time, gets a fictionalized version of her life that shows her being a pathological, helpless, and stereotypical dumb blonde. Exactly the way the media manipulated her image in the ‘50s. Having a male director really spoke to the amount of nudity, explicit sex scenes, and mildly inaccurate imagery surrounding pregnancy in this film. Women are habitually excluded from the film industry, and I think having a cisgender man trying to tell the story of a constantly misunderstood woman is so disappointing. The director of this film has gone as far as to come out and say, “She’s somebody who’s become this huge cultural thing in a whole load of movies that nobody watches, right? Does anyone watch Marilyn Monroe movies?” He then went on to say that the popular Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a film about “well dressed whores.”
She didn’t want to look like a joke, to be reduced to something to laugh at, something she made clear in her final interview with Life magazine. This film was nearly three hours of trauma exploitation in the form of glorified fan-fiction, a true disgrace to Marilyn’s legacy. It is disheartening that Netflix was willing to produce a film that perpetuates these sexist stereotypes.