"Blonde": a dismal and dreary viewing experience

Writing for TIME, Stephanie Zacharek criticises the one-dimensional ‘victimhood’ of Marilyn Monroe (as seen lately in Blonde), and with reference Don’t Bother to Knock, How to Marry a Millionaire, Bus Stop, and Some Like It Hot, argues that Marilyn was a ‘brilliant actor’ who made even her most stereotypical roles believable and sympathetic; and whose life was defined by hard-won agency, although overshadowed by her tragic death. “Even though we’ve had 60 years to figure out how we feel about Marilyn Monroe, no one really knows what to do with her. We know all about the sadness of her life, to the extent that her name has become a synonym for emotional fragility, a vessel we can fill with our own fears about loneliness and self-doubt. We love Marilyn so much—as a symbol, as a bottomless well that will take as much pity as we can pour into it—that collectively we seem to have lost sight of one of the central truths of her being: she was a phenomenally intelligent and gifted actor, a woman whose natural charm and devotion to her craft resulted in work so delightful, and sometimes so emotionally raw, that it’s worthy of any modern actor’s envy… Actors are always more than the sum of their parts, and Marilyn Monroe especially, as both a performer and a persona, is too complex to be reduced to some parts in the first place. 

Her performances are a major component of her story, and the one that’s most often neglected. In the 1950s, once Hollywood had figured out the secret to her bankability, she played so many sex-symbol roles that it’s tempting to lump them together, but even if Marilyn herself longed to play roles that would challenge her in different ways, she made each of these performances distinctive; there’s nothing rote or perfunctory about any of them, largely thanks to the pin-dot precision of her comic timing. Marilyn knew her power over men, over her audience, and she worked it on-screen, though never in a way that was cheap or calculating. Perhaps that’s why women love her as much as men do—she glowed with a spectacular and special feminine magic that has always felt generous rather than competitive. Everyone who has tried to learn about Marilyn—to understand her painful and lonely childhood, to come to terms with the depression and anxiety that dogged her, to reckon with the fiery intelligence that so many people around her, particularly men, preferred not to recognise—comes away with a sense of her deep fragility. But is it possible that, without ever acknowledging as much, we stress Marilyn’s fragility almost as a way of making her sexuality, and her own sexual appetites, more manageable? As if to assuage some shame we might feel about her sexuality and desirability? Marilyn fought her own shame all her life, but one fact that Blonde fails to stress—it would muddy the film’s victimisation narrative too much—is that Marilyn, though tragically insecure, she knew how to avoid being used, and railed against it. Those of us who love Marilyn yearn to protect her, even beyond the grave.” 

Writing for BBC Culture, Anna Bogutskaya asks: why do biopics always get Marilyn so wrong? “‘Please don’t make me into a joke,’ Marilyn said, to interviewer Richard Meryman near the end of her life. But Hollywood’s cruel joke has been to turn her into a trainwreck, reducing her legacy to a series of messy love affairs, daddy issues and addictions. Documentaries and TV biopics have tried to explain her many times over, but they always come back to the same narrative – that of a victim, a tragic beauty. Is there really nothing else worth saying about Marilyn and her cinematic legacy? Marilyn Monroe’s mystery is not that of her ascent, but of the extreme contradictions of her life. She was a generational talent, a movie star with undeniable charisma, charm, fantastic comedic timing and an aggressive earnestness about her that was as disarming as it was captivating. Watching her on screen, even today, is to fall under the spell of cinema. Meanwhile, the contrast between her carefree on-screen persona and her supposedly tortured off-screen existence has become the alluring core of her narrative: the woman-girl, the success-tragedy, the self-loathing-beauty. Her untimely death remains a favourite for conspiracy theories that most often include the Kennedys and the mob, and which Blonde, both book and film, indulge in. ‘People find it hard to reconcile that someone can be so exceptional and meet such a banal end,’ said Dr Lucy Bolton, a reader in film studies at Queen Mary University of London.

But why the endless drive to tear her down, to reduce her to a sad cautionary tale? ‘There is something in the most puritanical part of our nature that says, these Hollywood people, they have so much and they deserve it so little,’ the writer and film critic Farran Smith Nehme tells BBC Culture – and so because Marilyn was the biggest star of them all, it’s as if she deserves these, in Nehme’s words, ‘relentlessly downbeat interpretations of her life.’ In the wave of TV Marilyn biopics of the 1990s, Marilyn is presented at best as a hot mess and, at worst, as a wanton floozy. Every single biopic made of her life zeroes in on the tension between Norma Jean Baker and Marilyn Monroe, the woman and the movie star. It’s an incredible challenge for any actress, no matter how talented, to play Marilyn Monroe, because they’re not only playing the person, but an idea of a person that’s been manipulated and perverted over the years. ‘The biopics and impersonations of her have done more damage to her than the tragedy itself,’ Bolton says. The challenge for any biopic, Bolton continues, is ‘to convince us Marilyn is a real person, because she’s so reduced to a caricature so very often’. Most of the actresses who have portrayed her, from Poppy Montgomery to Ana de Armas, have focused on the little-girl-lost narrative. Nehme says she would love to see an actress get past ‘the clichés and the mannerisms, the tricksy things that so many people imitating her go for. There’s no way in hell Marilyn Monroe was like that when she was enjoying her life.’

Very few of the films that purport to tell us ‘what really happened’ actually focus on the fact that made Marilyn so successful: her dedication to her craft. ‘If you are born with what the world calls sex-appeal, you can either let it wreck you or use it to advantage in the tough show business struggle. It isn’t always easy to pick the right route,’ Marilyn said to the Chicago Tribune in 1952. The same year, one of her most enduring performances, that of endearing gold-digger Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would cement her in the dumb blonde persona that Marilyn found so frustrating and limiting. “She’s conflated with Lorelei Lee,’ thinks Bolton. "The biopics choose to disempower her further by forgetting about the middle part of the story, the part where she became an extremely successful, highly-paid actress, who challenged Fox for underpaying her, and founded her own production company with Milton Greene." ‘I’m not sure if people perceive her as an actress at all’, says Nehme, while pointing out that if you look at the actual work, ‘you start to see how unique and how intelligent her choices are, to make it as funny as possible.’

The only exception, perhaps, is My Week With Marilyn (2011), a light-touch take on the troubled making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), told from the perspective of real-life, love-struck set assistant Colin Clark, on whose memoirs the film is based. With Marilyn played by Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, the film is very much a part of the ‘Marilyn and me’ sub-genre of books and films… However, this is the only example that even tries to recreate Marilyn’s charm, not just her fickle and unreliable on-set antics. Williams captures Marilyn’s sensuality without leaning into the sex-pot persona. There are hints at her duality, but it focuses on the work and the drive, as well as the crippling insecurity that somehow Marilyn found a way to transform into moments of pure comedic gold. There is hope, though. Nehme believes there’s a generational shift that is inspiring a reappraisal of Marilyn Monroe: ‘As film critics have been getting younger, they’ve been going back to the work. They’re very interested in the role she played in creating her own persona.’ Her image may be universally familiar now, but discovering Marilyn’s performances is always a revelation for many. Her feline femininity in Niagara, her coy clumsiness in The Prince and the Showgirl, and her adroit delivery of all-timer quips in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Marilyn’s awareness of how she was perceived imbues every performance and informs every choice. While it might not capture Marilyn’s star power, the best thing that Blonde can do for her is inspire more people to watch her actual work.” Source: themarilynreport.com

Blonde consists mainly of ugly, abusive scenes one after another, so I had to keep reminding myself, “This is fiction, and most of these terrible things really didn’t really happen to Marilyn Monroe. They are figments of Oates and Dominik's disturbed imagination.” It left me to wonder, “why would anyone make up and spread these types of violent, warped, heinous details?” I hoped the movie version couldn’t possibly sink to such depths, especially with the radiant Ana De Armas in the title role. But about ten minutes in, I found I was being painfully delusional. We see Marilyn as no more than a tragic victim, with not even a hint of  strength, intelligence, or joy. In the beginning we see her mother trying to drown her in a bathtub, before she’s unceremoniously dropped off at an orphanage. Then it’s a fast forward to pin-up girl, followed by her grueling climb to super stardom, via exploitation, abuse, drug addiction, and an abortion, the latter  shown via an awkward womb camera angle. Maybe it’s a wise choice to present it as an artistic vision of a fever dream, perhaps a nightmare. This way, hopefully viewers will realize it’s an interpretation, a prevarication, rather than a factual biopic. In the end, I find it both disturbing and unfair that both author Joyce Carol Oates and director Andrew Dominik chose to reduce Marilyn Monroe to little more than a tragic victim. I bet nobody wants to be defined by the fabricated worst parts of her life, and less than most Marilyn. 

And after watching the loopy “Blonde,” some viewers might argue that this movie takes the streamer to a new low. Sadly, Dominik’s adaptation isn’t as cagey as Oates's novel. Where Oates channels the actress and iconic sex-symbol climbing inside her mind in a sometimes-unmoored stream of consciousness, Dominik uses his camera to leer at the Monroe body—the result is cinematic masturbation of the highest order. It’s hard on the eyes. And the sound design is assaultive. And while de Armas fits the role's physicality, her lightly detectible accent strikes an odd tone for the Marilyn we know. Dominik’s adaptation is an indulgent meander. He approaches Monroe as a platform for nausea, wallowing in everything sad and depressing about her life without giving viewers any of the magic, love or happiness that Oates was able to subtly weave into her itchy fiction. The craving for a child was a theme that Oates explored but not to the exclusion of other parts of Norma Jeane’s life. Oates was more sensitive to the exploitation that marked the time and the Monroe alter ego. Dominik’s film is so morbidly focused on her abortion that it makes the story unnecessarily unpleasant. All this wastes de Armas, who could have brought more dimension to the character if given the opportunity. Instead of giving us enough of the authentic Norma Jeane side of the protagonist, Dominik leaves his talented actress in Monroe mode almost exclusively. We get it, Monroe was a tragic icon, but Norma Jeane was more than just a sad sack. Even Oates knew that all too well; But Dominik didn’t. Blonde is a dismal and dreary viewing experience. It seems filmed through the same kind of hallucinatory nightmare lens as Requiem for a Dream. Source: times-herald.com

In the fall of 1953, just before one of his performances, during his second week as Hal in Picnic, Paul Newman was alerted by Joshua Logan that both Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe were in the audience. "I wasn't so afraid of Marilyn, but of Sinatra. For some reason, I thought he'd make fun of me. I knew he hated Method actors like Brando." Sinatra congratulated Paul on his performance. "You're great, kid," Sinatra told him. "Originally Logan wanted Brando for the part. That jerk would have fucked it up big time." Paul accepted their invitation for an apres-theater dinner. Every head in the restaurant turned to watch Marilyn slither across the restaurant floor while Newman and Sinatra were virtually ignored. Newman deciphered the real purpose of the visit. Marilyn was lobbying for the role of Madge in the movie version of Picnic. "Janice Rule would be okay," Marilyn said, "but she's got no sex appeal." Newman said that being in the presence of two fabled stars was going to his head even more than the wine. 

Paul Newman was crushed when he learned Logan had cast Don Murray for the role of Bo in Bus Stop, but he tried to be gracious about his loss. Newman admitted to Kim Stanley: "I'm horribly disappointed. But Marilyn is such big box office, and she is right for the role. You and I have seen her act at the studio. We know how good she is. None of us believe that she's the lightweight her fans think of her." Much in the same way the arrival of a train-hopping drifter shook up the small-town residents in William Inge’s Picnic, the emotional (and sexual) disruption instigated by the intrusion of Lila Green—a peroxided, emotionally-wounded, aging starlet with a squalid past and a childlike disposition—into the Baird household is the source of The Stripper’s central conflict. The film was provisionally called Celebration, and then originally titled Woman of Summer, was released in the US on 19 June 1963 as The Stripper. It was released as Woman of Summer in the UK. 

Marilyn Monroe was set to play Lila Green but she died during production and was replaced by Joanne Woodward. The original New York production of William Inge's play A Loss of Roses had opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theater on 28 November 1959. 20th Century Fox directive, Buddy Adler, purchased the rights to A Loss of Roses for a whopping $400,000 before it even opened on Broadway. As Adler told columnist Louella Parsons: “Yes, we paid a big price, but Inge writes only hits. He wrote 'Bus Stop,' 'Picnic,' and 'Dark at the Top of the Stairs.'” The Stripper's sole Oscar nomination was for the costume designs of William Travilla (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Valley of the Dolls). In school it was revealed that Joanne Woodward had a high I.Q. of 135, and she excelled in her grades. Life seemed so happy in the Woodward household that Joanne was devastated when her parents got divorced. Returning to Greenville, South Carolina, she appeared in a local production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie-ironically, the same play in which Paul Newman had appeared during his own school years in Ohio. In 1987, Joanne would star in a film version of that same play, directed by none other than Paul himself. —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Lawrence J. Quirk