"Blonde" by Dominik, "Blonde" by Oates

Andrew Dominik: I wasn’t that interested in Oates's Blonde when I first read it. But there was a story I was interested in telling, which is about how childhood drama shapes an adult’s perception of the world, and I could sort of see that within Blonde. My original idea was to do that for a serial killer, but when I read Blonde I thought, well, I could do this with an actress and it should be slightly more sympathetic. There’s over a thousand books written about Marilyn, and I haven’t read a thousand, but I’ve read all of the big hits. I’ve read all the biographies of all the other people that were in her life too so I’m aware of what they think happened in most of the situations in her life. 

And I’m aware of how that’s different to the book Blonde. I did all that research and I used very little of it in the movie. Blonde the book was pretty much the bible for the film. I know the ways in which this film is different from what people agree it happened. Not that everyone’s sure. So it’s all fiction anyway, in my opinion. Zanuck [studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck] never liked her, never knew what to do with her, so she very much did self-actualize, which we don’t show in the film. OK, she wrested control away from the men at the studio, because, you know, women are just as powerful as men. But that’s really looking at it through a lens that’s not so interesting to me. I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in the images. I’m more interested in what her emotional life was like. Marilyn represents a kind of rescue fantasy. And the film is no different. The film is a rescue fantasy. We feel we have a special intimacy with her. That’s the attraction to Marilyn, that feeling that we’re the only ones who understand her. That we could have saved her somehow. And maybe the flipside of that is a punishment fantasy, or a sexual fantasy. But it’s just a movie about Marilyn Monroe. And there are going to be more movies about Marilyn Monroe. Source: deadline.com

There is zero historical evidence of any of these vicious misdeeds we see in Blonde (specially those related to Zanuck's sexual assault, DiMaggio's abuse, or JFK taking sexual advantage of Marilyn Monroe) actually happening, which makes the non-stop grief seem needlessly punishing, both for her and us. Not to mention uncomfortably exploitative. There’s so much anguish, we eventually become numb to it over the nearly three-hour film. We come to know her only as a victim, not a fleshed-out person. Is that take enlightening? Not at all. Entertaining? Not really. Where Dominik struggles with Blonde is the specific dissection of the female mind. While perhaps not purposefully misogynistic, the Freudian nature of Norma Jeane’s desires feels ripped from a film student’s essay. A narrow script and chaotic filmmaking reduce an American Icon to an empty image of darkened glamour. Dominik simply doubles down on his myopic vision of a woman who, perhaps more than we’ll ever know, contained multitudes. Heed the Motion Picture Association’s advice. Most audiences (if they know something about the real Marilyn Monroe) will not enjoy this film, if they make it to the end. Source: www.austinchronicle.com 

"A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. Happiness so acute it was like broken glass in Norma Jeane's mouth. Her waxy-pale skin gave off waves of heat like pavement in summer sun and her eyes!-flirty, slip-sliding and dilated." 

"Norma Jeane stared memorizing what she saw; she was a camera taking snapshots; one day she might be lost and have to find her way back to this place she'd never seen before until this moment, but with Gladys such moments were urgent, highly charged and mysterious, to make your pulse beat hard as with a drug. Familiar, too, was the airless heat of the apartment, for Gladys didn't believe in leaving windows open even a crack while she was away, the pungent odor of coffee grounds, cigarette ashes, scotch, perfume, and that mysterious acrid chemical odor Gladys emitted. Yet these smells were comforting to Norma Jeane for they meant home. There were fields of fire, canyons of fire, fireballs like comets within a few miles of Santa Monica. Sparks, borne by the wind like malicious seeds, erupted into flame in the residential communities of Thousand Oaks, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Topanga. Gladys snorted: "Sometimes, Norma Jeane, you sound like such a fool. Like the rest of them." Gladys was committed to the California State Psychiatric Hospital, where her official diagnosis was: "Acute chronic paranoid schizophrenia with alcoholic and drug-induced neurological impairment." 

"Norma Jeane's rage stoked a madness of ambition to revenge herself upon the world by conquering it-however any "world" is "conquered" by an individual who was female, parentless, isolated, and seemingly a solitary insect amid a teeming mass of insects. 'Yet I will make you all love me,' was then Norma Jeane's threat. Norma Jean was recognized now in Hollywood as Marilyn Monroe, she was altogether a new bleached-blonde woman, a successful icon of the American dream." 

"But Marilyn would let pasta boil to a mush if you didn't watch her and she was always dropping things in the kitchen. She couldn't do a risotto, her mind was always drifting off. She tasted something, she didn't know what she was tasting. 'Is it too salty? Does it need salt?' She thought onions and garlic were the same thing! She thought olive oil was the same as melted margarine! She leaved tissues caked with makeup in the bathroom, there were ugly splotches of makeup in the sink, blond hairs in combs and hairbrushes; and scum in the bathtub. God damn. Sometimes she even forgot to flush the toilet. Almost, it seemed it was ordinary life baffled her. And, that wistful little-girl look in her face, "Daddy, how hard it is to figure what people mean when probably they don't mean anything?" Joe would shake his head, not knowing what the hell to say. He'd dated actresses, models and party girls, and he'd have sworn he knew that personality type, but Marilyn was something else. And sometimes she scared Joe to death. Like if an actual doll opened its blue glass eyes and you're expecting baby talk but she says something so weird, and possibly so deep, you can't grasp it."  —"Blonde" (2000) by Joyce Carol Oates.