Blonde

It has been a Year of Marilyn, full of tributes and homages, but "Blonde" explores the darker side of the entertainment icon.

And of course, it comes to the now-familiar conclusion that there was much more to the story than was apparent at the time. But Dominik’s film certainly meets Bolton’s other expectation: “Respect and fidelity to the complexity of the person.” Still, “Blonde” the movie covers many of the major known tragedies and trials of Monroe’s real life, such as her mother’s mental illness as well as her own, her failed marriages, her substance-abuse issues and her unrealized desire to become a parent. (It skips over a few famous beats, too, such as Monroe’s early marriage in her teenage years to a policeman — as well as the fact that she had half-siblings, one of whom she reconnected with later in life. Vogue recently heralded [“Barbiecore”](https://www.vogue.com/article/barbie-fashion-is-everywhere-this-summer) as the hottest trend of summertime, and a TikTok genre known as “BimboTok” was the subject of many a concerned-but-fascinated [trend story](https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/reclaiming-bimbo-bimbotok.html) [in 2022](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/bimbo-reclaim-tiktok-gen-z-1092253/). But the genre does seem to take cues from Monroe’s bubbly public persona — and her apparent enjoyment of being a beautiful, hyperfeminine woman. “Blonde,” however clumsily, attempts to answer that question, as it’s the rare Monroe tribute that looks closely at the mortal person behind the immortal image. Chrissy Chlapecka, 22, is one of the most prominent TikTokers associated with BimboTok, and she names Monroe among her lifelong inspirations. Her image has “come to stand for the very essence of glamour and beauty,” Bolton says, while her life story “stands for the classic hard-luck, rags-to-riches” tale of making it big in Hollywood. “I have noticed once again that clothing is coming around to the ’60s,” says Donelle Dadigan, president and founder of the Hollywood Museum in California (where interest in the Monroe items spikes yearly in June around her birthday). But none of this year’s moments of Marilyn fixation have engaged quite as directly with the latter as “Blonde,” which focuses on Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. A few forces have converged this year to create a period of renewed fascination with Monroe — or perhaps more accurately, with Monroe iconography.

It comes towards the end of Blonde, Andrew Dominik's brutal and explicit fictionalisation of the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Watching it back, three weeks after I first saw it — not least in the wake of a press tour in which Dominik has been One certainly hasn't seen such an unflattering portrayal of Kennedy, already the subject of a cornucopia of fictional portrayals and feature documentaries, across media. — there's a Hitchcockian cutaway to the televised craft pointing to the sky, newly erect. But one scene, coming towards the end of Blonde, is especially ripe for debate. Broader commentary on modern celebrity aside, should such a loosely interpreted version of the life of a quintessential cultural figure be presented as reality, as the [Blonde](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/netflix-blonde-marilyn-monroe) press tour and marketing have seemingly implied? [Blonde](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/blonde-netflix-review-marilyn-monroe) hits laptop screens across the globe with its premiere on Netflix, the ethical discourse around Andrew Dominik's fictionalised, impressionistic Marilyn Monroe not-a-biopic continues apace.

Andrew Dominik's bludgeoning Marilyn Monroe biopic has all the signs of a passion project, but none of the rewards. By Adam Nayman Sep 28, 2022, 8:30am EDT ...

When Monroe tells the great playwright that her insight into Chekhov isn’t second-hand—that she came up with it herself, after reading the play—the mixture of pride and pain in her statement (and her reaction to his reaction) is palpable. After gaining traction as a pin-up model, she transforms into the platinum-blond Marilyn as a way to leave her sadness behind, only to find that it follows her and deepens in the hairline fractures of her new sexpot persona. Subtlety is a virtue only depending on how it’s used, of course, and Dominik—who’s been a maximalist since the first overcranked frames of Chopper—comes by his allergy to understatement honestly. Dominik doubles and then superimposes her prone, unconscious, naked body with another Monroe in a pin-up pose, deliberately evoking the transcendence-in-death catharsis of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, complete with end credits that take us hurtling through deep space. Beyond resembling Monroe physically, which, aided by superlative costume and makeup, she does amazingly well, the actress locates something like a character: She’s an emotional center for this vortex of a movie to swirl malevolently around. Dominik films the glitzy premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in a series of predatory, overhead shots, with the screening itself ramped up to cartoony hyperspeed. The idea that Monroe lived the rest of her life in thrall to this dashing absentee father pervades the film’s ensuing inventory of her personal and romantic relationships. Drawing on and selectively hyperbolizing the historical record—and eliding any moments that might interrupt its highlight-reel-slash-atrocity-exhibition structure—it’s a no-holds-barred exercise in unpleasantness featuring enough graphic scenes of sexualized violence to earn Marilyn is a biography that plays by the rules of fiction, which is to say that it follows no rules at all. Like most of [Roeg’s output,](https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/11/26/18111989/nicolas-roeg-director-dead-obituary-dont-look-now-man-who-fell-to-earth-walkabout) Insignificance is a strange film, but it’s one with a healthy respect for Monroe’s intelligence and resourcefulness: The scene where Russell breathily (and convincingly) [explains the theory of relativity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfxcHsioYfM) to an Einstein stand-in using toy trains, balloons, and a flashlight is affectionate, endearing, and surprising. Mailer ended up admitting he made that stuff up because he needed the money; in a fugue of arrogance and desperation, he used the project to write almost as much about himself as his subject. Similarly flouting the rules of biography and working with an extra 30 years’ worth of hindsight, Oates inflated Monroe into a tragic, emblematic figure of 20th-century femininity: a hapless, helpless victim used and abused by her own illusions, and those of millions of others as well.

Netflix's Blonde is a dreamy, difficult film. It's not for everyone, but Ana de Armas' performance as Marilyn Monroe certainly is.

pricing, plans, channels, and how to get it](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/how-does-hulu-work/) [Ana de Armas shines as Marilyn Monroe in new Blonde trailer](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-blonde-trailer/) It’s a specific kind of heartbreak, realizing only too late that you have yet to find someone willing to put in as much effort for you as you would for them. Instead, it’s the quietest scenes that end up leaving the biggest marks, like one that comes late in the film and follows de Armas as she desperately searches her house for a tip only to find her delivery boy long gone by the time she’s returned to give it to him. It should go without saying which of those aspects of Blonde’s Marilyn prove to be more compelling, but the film’s occasionally uneven handling of her legacy doesn’t stop its ideas about celebrity — both the costs and requirements of it — from ringing loud and clear. Part of that has to do with de Armas’ real-life Cuban accent, which never fades even in the moments when the actress herself is leaning all the way into Monroe’s breathy way of speaking. In order to communicate her inner longing and loneliness, Dominik also has de Armas’ Monroe constantly refer to every man in her life as “daddy,” which is a decision that could have been tolerable had it been used a bit more sparingly. As a matter of fact, Dominik still tells a moving story of loneliness, regret, and emotional yearning with Blonde, a film that feels less like an outlandish Hollywood dream and more like a nightmarish descent into a dark void. The film also features a handful of terribly on-the-nose music cues, including the time when “Bye Bye Baby” begins to play just seconds after de Armas’ Monroe has been coerced into having an abortion that she didn’t want. But there are also moments in which Blonde feels like the most generous fictional depiction of Monroe to date, one that wants almost nothing more than to honor her not just as a movie star for the ages, but as a brave and capable artist. There are moments when Dominik, unfortunately, seems to be further playing into the over-sexualization and infantilization of Monroe that has run rampant for decades, and which attempts to render her as nothing more than a naïve sexpot without any agency of her own. At the center of Blonde’s many surreal images and nightmarish sequences, though, is Ana de Armas, whose performance as Marilyn Monroe feels perfectly calibrated for the film she’s in. In the case of Blonde, we’re shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

The 'Mare of Easttown' Emmy-winner is fierce and terrifying as Marilyn Monroe's mother in the incendiary Netflix film 'Blonde'.

I love being a part of ensembles, but I’m at a place now where I’d like to become more involved.” When she’s working on something, she finds that she learns more and more about her characters as she plays them. She recalls something she told her agent at the start of this year – halfway between a joke and an order. “This sounds funny,” she admits, “but I’d like my characters to be more front and centre in the story moving forward. “When I’m not on a set, I don’t really go out a lot,” she says. [dubbed it “a new low” in Hollywood’s treatment of the star](/arts-entertainment/films/features/blonde-netflix-ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-vagina-b2174440.html). Whenever she gets a rare showcase, like the punch-to-the-gut 2017 indie Who We Are Now – in which she plays a destructive, desperate mother fighting for custody of her young son – critics howl about the “terrific, unsung Julianne Nicholson”, or that she’d win an Oscar “if there’s any justice in this sick, sad world”. One of her big hopes for the film is that it might introduce her to people. In 2000, she was a few years out of drama school when she was handpicked by Steven Spielberg to lead a supernatural drama series he was producing called The Others – Nicholson had worked with Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw on a romcom called The Love Letter a year before. On the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Blonde currently sits at a delicious 52 per cent “fresh” – so close to “rotten” that you can practically smell it about to turn. In just 15 minutes of screentime as Marilyn’s mother Gladys, Nicholson has a nervous breakdown, speeds through the streets of Hollywood as it goes up in flames and tries to drown her daughter in the bath. [Julianne Nicholson](/topic/julianne-nicholson) was a [Marilyn Monroe](/topic/marilyn-monroe) “fangirl”. Meeting Andrew and talking to him about the process and the years he’s put into the project and the story he wanted to tell…