WEIRDLAND: "Blonde" by Dominik: A Cynical View of the Hollywood Studio System

Saturday, October 01, 2022

"Blonde" by Dominik: A Cynical View of the Hollywood Studio System

Farran Smith Nehme—Some thoughts about Blonde: I relished the aspect-ratio shifts and the switching between black-and-white and color. Our memories of Marilyn have just such shifts, from widescreen Technicolor to intimate black-and-white snapshots, and that’s plenty enough justification. Blonde appears bold and creative after years of mustard-and-beige digital. I do love an iris shot. Other things I liked: Lily Fisher, the exquisite child actress who plays young Norma; a scene between a cop (Michael Drayer) and Julianne Nicholson as Norma’s mentally ill mother; Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, balancing his empathy towards Marilyn and his bewilderment about his wife's mood changes; Toby Huss as Marilyn’s faithful makeup man Whitey, a warm and unaffected take on a relationship that I think could have been better developed. Now for the bad news. Dominik claims his film isn’t anti-abortion. He says Marilyn is “seeing her own fears and desires projected onto the world around her… and I think sort of this desire to look at Blonde through this Roe v. Wade lens is everybody else doing the same thing. They’ve got a certain agenda where they feel like the freedoms of women are being compromised, and they look at Blonde and they see a demon, but it’s not really about that.” 

No, this will not do. I can’t accept that an artist and a person of intelligence, and I presume Dominik is both those things, makes these scenes and believes we see an anti-abortion message because “it’s difficult for people to be able to hold two things in their mind at once.” I don’t know his personal politics, but I do know what this movie is saying, and it says it throughout. Exhibit A is the reproachful talking fetus, which reminded me of the Doonesbury strip where a 12-minute-old embryo’s final words are reported as “Repeal Roe v. Wade.” That cartoon was one of six that Garry Trudeau drew to mock 1984’s propaganda short The Silent Scream. Incredibly, Blonde goes one better than the short by giving its fetus character—both times from a pregnancy so early it hasn’t changed Marilyn’s waistline yet—a newborn’s sweet little face. Pregnant Marilyn tells her mother she’s so grateful she wasn’t aborted: “You did the right thing.” Fictional letters to Marilyn from the “daddy” who abandoned her are read over the action, and we’re probably meant to think they exist only in Marilyn’s head. Maybe that’s why the letters’ narrator has the same exact accent and intonation as Paul Roebling, the voice of Sullivan Ballou from Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War.  

I’d prefer to think that was some kind of grim joke, but Blonde is anti-joke, in the sense of antimatter or an antihistamine. And there’s more, like Disembodied Daddy Sullivan Ballou talking to Marilyn after a miscarriage, offering philosophical thoughts about “the death of an unborn soul” and how its “innocence is unsullied.” What’s most infuriating is that there’s no solid evidence, save hearsay from friends, that Marilyn Monroe even had an abortion. We do know she had three miscarriages, but I guess losing a wanted baby three times—once to a painful ectopic pregnancy that required emergency surgery—isn’t tragic enough. The script also goes out of its freaky way to connect Marilyn’s single on-screen miscarriage to her prior abortion. Her pregnancy loss comes after a chat with the fetus that could have been scripted by Randall Terry: “You won’t hurt me this time, will you? You won’t do what you did last time?” “I didn’t mean to.” “Yes, you meant to. It was your decision.” Do you got that? It was just her personal decision. 

Sure, Mr. Dominik, anything you’re saying here must all be in my head, just like it was in Marilyn’s. How dare anyone make a big deal out of an everyday reincarnated talking fetus with a grudge? This crap alone put me in a “fuck you” frame of mind. Yeah yeah, Blonde isn’t a biopic, it’s based on a fictionalized novel. Yet it’s still reductive as hell. Marilyn’s psychic pain in Blonde is part daddy issues and maternal abandonment, but to a far greater degree, it’s guilt over having an abortion. Really? My response to Dominik’s response is, either he’s lying, or, more possibly, he’s lying. Just my little old opinion. In Blonde many characters are mean to Marilyn. That includes people who were probably kind to her in real life, such as Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr., safely dead at 42 so he can’t see himself jammed into a threesome with Marilyn and Edward G. “Manny” Robinson Jr., who died in 1974 at age 40 due to years of alcoholism. Cass Chaplin Jr and Manny Robinson were deeply troubled guys, but deserving of some sympathy, in my opinion. As conceived by Blonde, both Juniors are affected, sneering gigolos. DiMaggio is shown as a scary abusive husband. How do you explain that Marilyn kept a friendly relationship with DiMaggio throughout her life? It's a mystery for Dominik, I guess.

The actual Cass Chaplin Jr and Edward Manny G Robinson stayed friendly with Marilyn, as did many of her ex-lovers, and they continued to regard her with plenty of affection. But that isn’t a pattern that interests Dominik, any more than he gives a damn about Marilyn’s deep capacity for friendship. It’s a director’s prerogative, even their duty, to jettison or change anything that’s going to qualify what they are trying to say. But this film critic finds it enraging that so many recent sagas of bygone Hollywood turn a decent, even tragic person into a creep because it helps some thesis about how much the studio system sucked. Dominik is far from the only offender; Ryan Murphy, I’m looking at you. I agree with most of reviews that criticize the way the film ignores Monroe’s talent. The only moments when Blonde suggests—quite unintentionally, I believe—that Marilyn Monroe was a unique artist are the Deepfake insertions of Ana de Armas into Marilyn’s movies. Every last one of those scenes proves Monroe had something de Armas can’t actually reproduce. 

De Armas is talented, that’s not the issue. If Monroe’s gifts were easy to replicate, we wouldn’t be obsessed with her sixty years after her death. But Blonde can’t have it both ways, and hammer at how the split between Norma Jeane Baker and Marilyn Monroe is essential to understanding her, then suggest, as it does when Marilyn auditions for Don’t Bother to Knock and performs in Some Like It Hot, that her best work might not have been acting at all. This is a question not of biographical accuracy, but simple consistency. What I haven’t seen discussed as much is the disdain, indeed the contempt that Dominik shows for the entire Hollywood studio system. Nobody’s on the lot to do much of anything except sponge off stars, roughing starlets, and rake in money. Almost nothing they make is worth making for Dominik. Take the scene where Marilyn watches “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” at the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes premiere. In real life, that number was a career peak not only for her, but also for choreographer (and director for the scene) Jack Cole, cinematographer Harry J. Wild, costume designer Travilla, and composer Jule Styne and lyricist Leo Robin. Here, cynically it’s almost blown off as a kitsch joke. 

Or maybe the view of the public is the worst, it’s hard to choose. I became fascinated with the fact that the slavering crowds that surround and oppress Dominik’s Marilyn are all men. By which I mean only men, middle-aged and ugly in their historically correct attire, giving the bizarre impression that 1950s Los Angeles and New York were as gender-segregated as Riyadh. Dominik’s showing what he thinks of the work of Marilyn and the studios—it was pandering to squalid male fantasies. The millions of women who loved Marilyn and sustain her fame to this day, well, for the purposes of Blonde, we don’t exist. Marilyn’s women friends like Shelley Winters, Susan Strasberg and Pat Newcomb, they also don’t exist. Hell, even acting coaches Natasha Lytess and Paula Strasberg don’t exist. Again, this is Dominik’s right as a director, to remove all female support and love from his unidimensional Marilyn character. It’s also a choice that becomes more disturbing the longer the movie goes on. 

I’m a little less enamored of de Armas' performance than some other critics, though. The script pushes de Armas into playing the same notes over and over: wistful sadness, fear, insecurity; insecurity, fear, wistful sadness. She does get about seven minutes of screen time being happy with Arthur Miller, and it’s glorious. Then it’s over, and de Armas will mix in notes of drug-addled stupor, which recur until the end. Her Marilyn is obviously the product of intense study and effort. It’s a shame that work was put into a character that’s as repetitive as a music box. Please, I can’t even with the JFK blowjob. I have my limits. I know Norman Mailer is dead, but he has a lot to answer for, as well as a long list of Kennedys' professional haters. You may also have noticed that I haven’t brought up Blonde, the Joyce Carol Oates novel. That’s because I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. Obviously something disturbing in it spoke to Dominik. I don’t know what that was, and I don't want to guess. As Martin Amis said about Gore Vidal, life is too short. As Vidal said, the saddest words in English are Joyce Carol Oates. On a thematic basis, I don’t get why this film exists. It’s like an artfully shot Billie Holiday movie from someone who’s tone-deaf and believes the Harrison Act was a great idea. Source: selfstyledsiren.substack.com

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