Hollywood has long made a habit of exploiting the legendary late actress Marilyn Monroe, and the films that are supposed to honor her do the exact same. Once again, a male director is more interested in exploring and examining Marilyn’s body than delving inside her mind.
It is no secret that Marilyn Monroe lived a hard and tragic life, but anyone who watched Blonde had to experience Marilyn’s personal hell: when she dies and people keep making movies about the worst moments of her life over and over again for decades.
Blonde is based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name which loosely rehashes Marilyn’s most tragic moments. Most aspects of the novel Blonde are fictitious, but the film interprets and communicates these moments as reality. Was Marilyn truly abused, taken advantage of, and struggling with addiction? Absolutely. But to categorize her life as nothing more than a tragedy shoves Marilyn into a box where she can only experience trauma and nothing else.
I honestly think that Blonde‘s director Andrew Dominik forgot that Marilyn is more than a victim. The film shows Marilyn being mistreated, cheated, and abused for almost the entire runtime. Dominik’s version of Marilyn is prey for leering men and something for women to be jealous of… nothing else. I see Ana de Armas’ breasts more than I hear Marilyn talk. De Armas is either crying, naked, or even bloody… and Marilyn’s life was way more than that.
The film told me nothing more about Marilyn that I hadn’t already known. Marilyn’s personal life outside her male relationships, her intelligence, her determination, her philanthropy, and her resentment towards being typecast are completely missing from the film. Marilyn become so renowned not just because she was beautiful and a sex symbol, but her character arc (even if you can even call it one) ignores everything but her trauma. Why does he portray her as a petulant child who can only make doe eyes, speak in a sexy voice, and call everyone daddy? Dominik is only able to view Marilyn through the lens of infantilization, as a woman without agency. His attempt at saying something profound instead underwhelms, as the film is a flashy but surface-level exploration of fame at Marilyn’s expense.
Don’t get me wrong, the film is technically strong; pristine cinematography and superb performances by Adrien Brody and Ana De Armas warranted the film at least one star on my Letterboxd rating. Yet, even though the film was beautiful to look at, I often found myself turning away from the screen.
Through camera work and cinematography, Dominik tries to blur the lines between Marilyn’s films and her personal life. However, this reduces her to the pinup and sexual object that many Hollywood executives, fans, and people today still view her as. Dominik is clearly trying to critique the exploitation that Marilyn experienced during her life, but his withholding agency from the character, sticking the camera up her dress, and including extremely violent sexual assault scenes, just tells me that he is the one exploiting her.
I think it is time we stop letting male filmmakers try and make “groundbreaking” films about women they know nothing about.