2022 marks 60 years since Marilyn Monroe, the iconic actress, singer and model, tragically passed away. During her life and the six decades since her death, Monroe became a larger-than-life celebrity in the public eye. The dark side of this extreme fame is that she has long since been dehumanized—the sex symbol Marilyn Monroe has stamped out any memory of the woman whose real name was Norma Jeane Baker.
Despite being surrounded by an endless supply of media that have portrayed Monroe as nothing more than a caricature, I had high hopes for the latest reimagining of her life, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde. Cinema has become more accepting of complex female protagonists in recent years (although we still have a long way to go). The world that pigeonholed and abused Monroe during her lifetime is changing, and I anticipated that this film would reflect that growth. Sadly, I could not have been more wrong.
If I only had one word to describe Blonde, it would be “brutal” – brutal in its treatment of Monroe’s legacy, brutal in its representations of her pain, and brutally boring to sit through. With no discernible plot, this film is a sloppy splicing together of traumatizing, and often extremely private, moments in Monroe’s life. Once again, Monroe is not a human, but a beautiful object that is created on our screens with the sole purpose of being abused at every turn, while also remaining easy on the eyes.
The film opens with a young Norma Jeane and her mother, who struggles with a mental illness that is never named. After a few minutes of graphic and disturbing child abuse, the screen immediately cuts to several nude photographs of a smiling Ana de Armas in Monroe’s signature blonde hairstyle. Instead of offering some new perspective on why Monroe was subject to this kind of abuse, or what kind of effect this relationship with her mother might have had on her development, Dominik abandons this vulnerable moment to show us Monroe, as a sex object, yet again.
About thirty minutes in, I resigned myself to the fact that this would be the format for the rest of the film: Monroe is subject to spousal abuse, misogynistic discrimination and violent sexual assaults, only to expose her breasts to the camera moments later. This narrow, male-centric view of Monroe is all we’ve ever seen of her, and it’s getting old. It’s time to stop making movies that romanticize her pain. Actually, maybe it’s time to stop making movies about her, period.
In short, Blonde is not worth your time. This film adds nothing productive to Monroe’s legacy. Instead, once again, she is viciously exploited for the sake of a man’s profit. Hopefully, Blonde will fade away from the collective memory and serve as a lesson that it is finally, finally, time to let Norma Jeane Baker rest in peace.