Marilyn Monroe, for better and worse, has transcended what it means to be an actress. She has become a timeless symbol of old Hollywood and her legacy has lived on much longer than her tragic and unfortunately short life.
Blonde is not the first piece of media to take a look at Monroe’s life. Blonde is based on a book of the same name written by Joyce Carol Oates. The book is a fictional account of Monroe’s life, making the source material, and therefore the movie, problematic from the beginning. It’s dicey to write a fictional book based on someone who actually existed in real life, and it feels inherently exploitative, especially when it comes to Monroe.
Monroe had to deal with the industry not treating her as a human being. No one took her seriously and they constantly undermined her intelligence and the hard work that got her to where she was. In an industry that was already harsh towards women, Monroe had to deal with much more than her fair share of oversexualization and harassment when it came to Hollywood. She was treated as a piece of meat to be consumed by men rather than the talented and hard-working actress that she was.
Things didn’t get much better for Monroe after her devastating death. She continues to be treated as a symbol rather than a human. This is made evident by the countless books, movies, and other forms of media that attempt to portray her life. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making media based on real people’s lives, that has been going on for a long time and isn’t exclusive to Monroe, but it’s the way that the media portrays her that’s the real, larger issue.
This brings us back to Blonde, the most recent attempt to capture Monroe’s life. Instead of treating Monroe as a fully fleshed person, the movie treats her solely as a victim. Yes, she was abused throughout her life and had to deal with trauma, but that doesn’t define her, not in the slightest. The movie has been accused of fetishizing female pain, which I don’t disagree with. This movie is obsessed with the pain that Monroe had to deal with, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing to explore. I think that exploring someone’s pain and trauma could be interesting and thought-provoking if done respectfully, which of course, this movie doesn’t do. Rather, Blonde romanticizes and fetishizes the pain that Monroe had to endure with cinematic, almost angelic shots that are clearly meant to serve the male gaze.
Speaking of how this movie is shot, most of the scenes of trauma and abuse are played for shock value and only serve to romanticize her pain. There are ways to show that someone went through something traumatic without explicitly showing that. There is also no shortage of scenes that blatantly oversexualize Monroe and the actress playing her, Ana de Armas. People have said that the movie isn’t shot as a movie, but rather as a high-budget cologne commercial. This kind of cinematography only makes it seem like the director, a man by the name of Andrew Dominik, was more interested in the question “how do we romanticize and show off her pain” rather than “how do we respectfully show what she went through and how it impacted her”.
Rather than bringing light to the exploitation that Monroe faced and doing a deep dive into the various ways that it had affected her, Blonde only furthers this exploitation. The movie props her up as a piece of meat and says “look at her! Look at her pain!”. Almost like she is a zoo animal, and her life is nothing more than a spectacle for audiences to watch and be entertained as.
Blonde is a portrayal of Monroe’s life that is at best, disrespectful, and at worst, disgusting and exploitative. To make matters even worse than its Rotten Tomatoes audience score (32%), the movie doesn’t tell the audience that it’s based on a fictional book. So, if someone watches it and doesn’t know the source material, they will be under the impression that this is an accurate portrayal of Monroe’s life, which just simply isn’t true.
Society has a long and troubling history of romanticizing, fetishizing, and even sexualizing female pain, and Marilyn Monroe is a great example of that. Throughout her life, she had to endure so much in her professional and her personal life. But even in death, she continues to be treated horribly, her image being abused for entertainment value. Even in death, she cannot rest.