"Blonde" is not Marilyn Monroe (reviews)

"Biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe should be sought not in Blonde, which is not intended as a historical document, but in biographies of the subject." -Joyce Carol Oates (in the preface of Blonde, published in 2000 by Fourth State Publishers)

Donald R. McGovern: During the ten years that I have researched Marilyn’s life, reading books, watching documentaries, I have read and watched enough fiction and biographical distortion of that remarkable woman to last me a life-time. One of the publications that I read―or I should more accurately admit, attempted to read―was Blonde, the novel. Admittedly, after reading and grimacing through approximately sixty-five percent of that grating and grotesque book, I stopped. I considered putting a match to it, but, despite my revulsion, I put it in a more than appropriate place: a garbage can. I have not uncovered any reason at all for me to expose myself to Blonde, to force myself to endure what one reviewer called a ”fundamental failure” and what a majority of the movie’s assessments dismissed as a jumble, a shamble of exploitive, misogynist garbage, a movie that “should never have been made.” So, I have not watched Blonde: I never will. Why was such a movie produced? Who is to blame for such a uniformly disliked and criticized movie about a beloved actress who died sixty years ago? 

Why would sentient human beings involve themselves in such hubris, arrogance and hatefulness? Were they so blinded by what they could fictionalize and film about Marilyn Monroe that they failed to ask themselves if they should? And, too, why would they produce such a rank dishonest movie and then assert, as if gripped by delusion, that what they had produced was actually meant to be a love letter to Marilyn Monroe, meant to be a panegyric? Who is to blame for creating a movie that one reviewer called “a morbid, leering and tasteless abasement”? I expect that Ana de Armas more than likely rendered a fair approximation of the planet’s most famous blonde, or any other actress for that matter, would ever be able to render, not only due to the impossibility of duplicating that which cannot be duplicated, but primarily because Ana was not provided with a character, a person to render who even remotely resembles the real Marilyn Monroe. I don’t blame Ana de Armas. I blame Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote the diabolically ridiculous novel, and Andrew Dominik, who wrote and directed this diabolically ridiculous movie, who has now directed a total of four whole movies, a man who has dismissed Marilyn’s cinematic career, and by extension, the work of the men and women who produced her movies. Dominik has reduced Marilyn’s films to being “cultural artifacts” meaning that her films and her performances are merely examples of the era during which they were produced and are devoid of any meaning otherwise. 

According to one reviewer, Dominik must believe that Marilyn’s “performances were shaped by her agonies and somehow happened by chance, by fate, or because she’s a mystical, magical sex bomb. That’s grotesque, and it’s wrong.” The artisans involved in producing Marilyn’s movies just happened to be some of the best that worked in Hollywood during its Golden Age. Additionally, many of her films were guided by the artistic visions of directors now considered to be all time greats: John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle and The Misfits), Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot), Howard Hawks (Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Henry Hathaway (Niagara), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve), Joshua Logan (Bus Stop), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night) and Sir Lawrence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl). The first three men combined directed 105 feature films, were nominated for 148 awards, including Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Billy Wilder is considered by some cinema experts the greatest screenwriter of all time, with 25 screenplays on a lengthy resume, including Some Like It Hot, a movie that many cinephiles and cinema experts consider to be the greatest comedy ever made. 

For those authors to be reduced to producers and creators of mere “cultural artifacts,” it indicates and exemplifies the unfounded arrogance of Andrew Dominik, not to mention his narcissism. One reviewer noted that Dominik “is a scumbag”; but then the reviewer added: “He’s also a blowhard.” Another reviewer humorously suggested that Dominik should “jump up and down” and “let us hear ‘em clank together,” Dominik’s brass testicles I have concluded. I have not uncovered any reason at all for me to expose myself to Blonde, to force myself to endure what one reviewer called a ”fundamental failure,” and what a majority of the movie’s assessments dismissed as a jumble, a shamble of exploitive, misogynist garbage, indeed a movie that “should never have been made.” Unholywood and its resident practitioners have frequently engaged in biographical revisionism while retreating behind a shroud of artistic or poetic license, a cloaking device they employ like the curtain concealing Oz; but Blonde just might be the most egregious example of playing fast and loose with the facts and therefore fast and loose with the truth appertaining to a person’s life, in this case, the life of Marilyn Monroe. Virtually nothing in the Blonde novel and therefore nothing in the Blonde movie is factual or truthful.

Blonde is a fictional, ghastly, grotesque and self-indulgent semi-pornographic excursion into exploitation by both the novelist Oates and the film’s director Dominik. Evidently Dominik additionally adapted and transmogrified an already hideous version and vision of Marilyn Monroe into an even more hideous version that more appropriately reflected his own myopic and puny, narrow-eyed vision of who and what Marilyn was and also what her life meant. Both the novelist and the director obviously―proven by the many salvos fired during their pathetic campaign―loathe Marilyn Monroe and each took deadly aim at her heart. What is the movie Blonde actually about? What is its purpose? Unquestionably it is simpler to stipulate what the movie is not about: it is not about Marilyn Monroe, it is not about her life. As Ann Hornaday, in her review for the Washington Post asserted: “Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel is a morbid, leering and tasteless abasement. Reductive, ghoulish and surpassingly boring, Blonde might have invented a new cinematic genre: necro-fiction.” In an interview with Christina Newland, Dominik briefly discussed Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in reductive and chauvinistic terms. I hasten to report that New German Cinema auteur, Rainer Fassbinder considered Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to be one of the top ten movies ever made, not just among musicals but movies ever made. High praise, indeed. On Fassbinder’s top ten movie list, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Howard Hawks resides in the sixth slot. Dominik's clueless comments explain every choice he made regarding his depiction of a woman that he obviously does not understand and for whom he feels no affinity, sympathy or empathy.

Quite frankly, the movie’s purpose is simply this: distastefulness. “I’m not concerned with being tasteful,” Dominik admitted. That is certainly self-evident. And he was not concerned at all about the facts or the truth about Marilyn. Certainly, that is also self-evident. “It’s all fiction anyway, in my opinion,” he announced, meaning that everything about the blonde movie star and the events appertaining to what Dominik called her mysterious life, are actually fictional, made-up, created by Hollywood’s fame machine. Blonde is an accurate and truthful depiction of fictional events that actually never happened, a fictional life never lived by his real woman subject. Is that an oxymoron or a paradox or an oxymoronic paradox or simply just meaningless Orwellian doublespeak? During an interview, Dominik admitted: “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.” What Dominik found interesting was a view from Marilyn’s cervix as a speculum entered her vagina and a view from inside the toilet bowl while she vomited. 

In favor of the preceding disgusting and disrespectful scenes, Dominik egregiously ignored Marilyn’s cinematic career and what one reviewer noted was her “transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace.” Blonde intentionally ignores Marilyn’s rare gifts, her dedication to the craft of acting and her constant reach for improvement, not only in her craft but her everyday life as well. But more importantly, perhaps, Blonde ignores Marilyn’s fundamental humanity and her shrewdness in order to create a perpetual victim, which she most certainly was not. Marilyn Monroe was kind and generous and according to everyone who actually knew her, she had a wonderful and devilish sense of humor. According to Robert Mitchum, Marilyn was generous to a fault and a witty, naturally funny girl; but evidently, Blonde does not contain a single shred of humor. As Farrah Nehme Smith wrote: “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.” So true, and I think that is downright pathetic. 

Perhaps there is not a just punishment for writer and director, except maybe being condemned to spend eternity planted upside down in a bucket filled with the fecal equivalent of their cinematic concoction: donkey dung. But then, unlike Dominik’s stupid movie, I don't want to sound ridiculously hyperbolic. Still, I know that Marilyn’s singular quiddity will survive this most recent cinematic debasement, just as it has survived all the senseless debasements heaped upon her during the past six decades. Long after Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Dominik have shuffled off this mortal coil, long after Blonde and its creators have been forgotten, the woman they have treated with utter disregard will remain the planet’s most famous woman, loved and revered by billions. As Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis proclaimed after Marilyn’s death: “she will go on eternally.” Source: marilynfromthe22nrow.com

Armond White: Ignoring how Marilyn Monroe calculated her career and contrived the unique acting style that mesmerized the world, Andrew Dominik resorts to the visual equivalent of psychobabble: Deranged, expressionist distortions, lacking Baz Luhrmann’s silliness or Ken Russell’s ingenuity, that resemble strained pop-music videos. Ana de Armas, a funny presence in the mystery comedy Knives Out and horror comedy Knock, Knock, has certain mercurial flashes. But without Monroe’s ebullience, she winds up doing a superior version of Madonna’s Marilyn impersonation. Here’s the problem: Dominik can’t define stardom when celebrityhood itself is in trouble. Maybe because there are no actors to respect these days. Blonde has been produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B. The main caveat is we never see ambitious Monroe’s work ethic or her joy. We don't have any clue why Monroe was cast by the sexual sophisticate Howard Hawks, the gritty John Huston, the cynical/romantic Billy Wilder, the artful Otto Preminger or the empathetic aesthete George Cukor. 

Even Monroe’s most accomplished acting in Joshua Logan’s 1956 film of Willliam Inge’s Bus Stop and her star-to-star competition with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl are omitted. When the CIA secretly aborts Monroe’s JFK zygote, Blonde climaxes as political porn. Dominik innovates a from-the-inside view of a vaginal curette, because the film’s process is inherently dehumanizing. We shouldn’t have to be thinking about Netflix gaslighting Marilyn Monroe while our government and media are gaslighting us, but Blonde is another example of Millennial distraction by way of decadence. “There is one thing wrong about this film,” Paul Schrader posted on Facebook. “I was thunderstruck by Andrew Dominik’s kaleidoscopic approach, juxtaposing colors, screen formats, camera styles, music, sound effects, and image manipulation. But it’s not Marilyn Monroe. This would have been far better if it was freed from Monroe's history. The criticism applies to the novel as well. Why the gleeful need to jump on Monroe’s cadaver for a romp? Can’t these fabulators trust their own creativeness? Was their need to exploit irresistible? Dominik made an innovative film, but it wasn’t about Marilyn Monroe. His film is now a curiosity. Some critics say Dominik did Marilyn no favors. I think it’s the other way around. Marilyn Monroe did him no favors.” Source: www.nationalreview.com

The US federal government released the FBI papers related to Marilyn Monroe in 2012, in response to a FOIA request by the Associated Press. Timestamps on the documents start around 1955, the year she began dating suspected communist playwright Arthur Miller. By the early 1960s, the FBI made it clear that Marilyn Monroe had no ties with the Communist Party USA. “Subject’s views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Community Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles,” one agent said in a letter to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. But that didn’t stop the FBI from continuing to investigate Monroe. The most recent documents in the trove are dated 1973, more than a decade after her death from a barbiturate overdose on August 4, 1962. The FBI’s fascination with Monroe, her whereabouts, her relationships, and her political affiliation was nowhere to be seen in Blonde (2022), though documents show the government spared no resources in tracking the icon around North America. “They start following her right after she gets involved with Arthur Miller,” retired UCLA history professor Lois Banner, author of Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox, told The Daily Beast. “She’s married to this person they think is proto-communist.”

Much of the trove of documents focuses on Monroe’s trips to Mexico, where she allegedly mingled with members of the American Communist Group in Mexico (ACGM). There, she reportedly spent a lot of time with Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a descendant of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, known for his radical leftist politics. According to the FBI, she arrived in Mexico on February 19, 1962. No longer with Miller, her entry into the country was reportedly arranged by Frank Sinatra. One source “advised that during the course of the visit a mutual infatuation arose between Monroe and Frederick Vanderbilt Field. This situation caused considerable dismay among Miss Monroe’s entourage and also among the ACGM,” the report states. The FBI names Eunice Murray, Monroe’s housekeeper, as a source of this story, though Lois Banner disputes this. “The FBI is not completely trustworthy. They sometimes make things up.” Source: themarilynreport.com

Julie Forrest: There is something so ugly and disturbing about Joyce Carol Oates’s interpretation of Marilyn’s life that if one were to take away the author’s name, one would suspect it was written by a loathsome mysogynist, hell-bent on destroying every last vestige of humanity in Marilyn Monroe, movie-queen, and Norma Jeane Baker, innocent dreamer. Oates’s fangs come out. She reveals to us her secret loathing for Marilyn, sub-consciously played out. Knowing how much Norma Jeane abhorred being written about in her Marilyn persona, Oates revels in ignoring her plea. “I’m always running into people’s unconscious.” Those words, prophetically spoken by Marilyn Monroe, shine quite a light on this fictional pseudo-biography. Oates seems to have run smack into the middle of her own “unconscious” while trying to explore Marilyn’s, and the result is quite ugly. It simply seems to derive from a sense of frustration, typical of a snobbish bookworm, an ugly duckling like Oates envying a powerful sex-symbol (Marilyn) who attracted (besides a loyal public), the likes of Sinatra, DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, or JFK. Oates's take on Marilyn's life lacks cohesion and substance. Oates writes at the beginning that those looking for a true biography should look elsewhere. Fair, but in constructing her alternate reality, Oates should have at least given it a veneer of truth to ground the points she was trying to make. Source: goodreads.com

Arthur Miller in his memoir Timebends: A Life (1987): "To have survived, Marilyn would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes. She was a whirling light to me, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a poetic sensitivity that few retain past adolescence; meanwhile her adult self stood aside observing the game. And ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization. To be with her was like moving out into a kind of sanctifying light from a life where suspicions was common sense. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she was fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted was not to be judged but to win recognition from those blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty."

Attorney Corey Santos, an expert in Entertainment Law residing in Reno (Nevada)—whose legal career was highlighted by the significant precedent setting case Flamingo Hilton v. Gilbert—has advised entertainers, producers, directors and politicians. Santos assures: "I will not watch that fake film [Blonde]. It seems many have sadly tried to darken the legacy of Marilyn and JFK by focusing on this innuendo as opposed to their achievements. Marilyn Monroe certainly deserves better remembrance. She was an outstanding actor and entertainer. Interestingly, my office in Reno is across the street from the Virginia Street Bridge where Monroe threw her wedding ring into the river in “The Misfits”. While filming here, she stayed at The Mapes hotel which also used to be directly across the street from my office. As to what happened to her there are so many theories. Perhaps when her psychiatrists records are released in the next decade we will get answers. May she rest in peace and her real legacy be remembered."

James DiEugenio: "This story got completely out of control. Blonde is based on a novel! Let me repeat that: A novel! And then the director added even more fiction to the Joyce Carol Oates' novel for one reason: to sensationalize it even more. Sensationalism sells. There are only a few responsible writers in this field: Donald McGovern, Gary Vitacco Robles, Donald Spoto, Nina Boski... I might be missing others, because April McVea wrote a kind of week by week with Marilyn book. That is really valuable for responsible writers. There was never any kind of  "affair" between JFK and Marilyn or RFK and Marilyn. In fact, there is no evidence at all about Bobby and Marilyn. The people that writers like Norman Mailer, Donald Wolfe or Anthony Summers have used to create this mythology are not credible. And this has been demonstrated at length. As John Gilmore said, Norman Mailer started an industry which Gilmore called, "Trash Marilyn for a buck." This is a continuance of that industry. But it also has an appendage; trash the Kennedys for millions. I’d like to suggest that we attempt to separate the JFK conspiracy from the Marilyn Monroe conspiracy. The first is a legitimate attempt to right an historical wrong. The second is meant to sully the Kennedy brothers." Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com

Lainey Gossip review of "Blonde": "The film inherits all of the book’s faults, and Dominik only exacerbates and enhances those faults, and adds to them, as cinema allows for visceral storytelling in a way novels can never match. Where the novel at least asks us to consider Norma Jeane’s voice, the film ignores it. Dominik simply isn’t interested in Marilyn Monroe—let alone Norma Jeane—as a person. Blonde is a hollow egg with nothing at its core, just a mélange of scenes that trace Norma’s rise and Marilyn’s downfall. His style emphasizes the nightmarish quality and unreality of the scenes, and the overall effect suggests Marilyn’s deteriorating mental health. Where Blonde fails both its subject, and its audience, is in its total lack of interiority. Oates at least tried to restore Norma’s voice, Dominik doesn’t seem interested in her at all. This is a film that tells us Arthur Miller fell in love with Marilyn after seeing her read a monologue from one of his plays but doesn’t show us that monologue. Marilyn was not just her suffering, she was a whole person, complicated, yes, but also a survivor. With nothing to balance that darkness, Blonde becomes lopsided, until it eventually falls over. Dominik’s Marilyn remains a cipher, despite de Armas’s best efforts to anchor the misery with humanity and not just suffering." Source: laineygossip.com