Blonde isn't really a biopic of Marilyn Monroe. It is more about us that it is about her. Based on a work of fiction which is centred around her as a character, created for our consumption, the film follows this idea through to its logical conclusion. What we are watching is how we create and destroy our idols and how they are nothing close to the reality of the human being at the centre of it all. Blonde explores the story of a little girl who grows up to be a legend and how the process of this consumes her.
Director Dominik has shot a dream like film that constantly reminds us that we are the audience, we are the dreamer and Marilyn is the dream. We see snippets of her life but never all of it. Often the parts we want to see, but then juxtaposed with the parts we don't. And Dominik constantly reminds us we are the watcher, utilizing the male gaze as it centres on the pin up girl, the actress, the celebrity, then focusing on how that gaze affects its subject, as a form of violence. Blonde is always reminding us of our role as viewer, we cut away from watching her to watching the cameras, to being blinded by the flashes. We are complicit.
Armas does impersonate Monroe, and does an amazing job of it accent or not, but she also reminds us that there is a human being in there underneath the blonde. She is always layering pain underneath Marilyn's affects and characterizations. Because Marilyn was a role to be played first by Norma Jean. She makes visceral the pain involved in being the famous blonde bombshell, and being her all the time.
Blonde documents the ways the men in her life, from the lovers she chose, to those she didn't, to the bosses and presidents, the the audience itself (to us) always prevented her from being herself, from having the agency she needed. Even when she finds some love and affection, it gets poisoned by the entitlement the men in her life feel. And the film connects this to something bigger. There is a legacy aspect to it. She comes from a history of men abusing women, raised in it. She witnesses the result of her mother's suffering, and how that impacts her going forward. The film sees this as a part of a larger whole, a rot in our culture, that will go on long after her.
I was somewhat surprised by the film's NC-17 rating as most of the sex is kept off screen, and mostly presented as violence, never exciting. There is a scene of sexual assault early on but it is momentary and mostly suggested, we don't watch it, yet it is important for the narrative of what she endures to be successful. There is a scene near the end where she performs oral sex but this too is shot so that you can't see it, just her eyes and she narrates her feelings during it. It's almost as if understanding what a victim feels is too much to be put in a movie and earns a higher warning label than the bloody deaths of thousands we see in TV shows.
And maybe that's what's going on here, a film which wants us to rethink how we see the idols we worship and destroy. Blonde will challenge us because it is about us, the ugly side of us. It is about how we revel in what we enjoy and punish it for our own desires. Blonde choses one of the most famous examples of this idolatry that exists in our social awareness to highlight its point. But underneath all of it Blonde reminds us there was a human being at the centre of it all. And there always is.
Blonde
Starring: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Julianne Nicholson, Casper Phillipson, Chris Lemmon, Scoot McNairy
Writer/Director: Andrew Dominik
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