Andrew Dominik adapts Joyce Carol Oates’ novel,Blonde, for the big screen, telling a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe’s life, from her troubled childhood as Norma Jeane Mortensen, a fatherless girl at the mercy of a mentally ill mother, to Marilyn’s entrance into Hollywood via the casting couch, and then onto great fame and a string of abusive, exploitative relationships. 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 merely asks us to consider her abuse in a near three-hour slog that amounts to fancy torture porn.
Dominik, an Australian, has made two of the best contemporary films about American myths inThe Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert FordandKilling Them Softly.Blonde, then, seems like a natural fit, another American myth for Dominik to deconstruct. ButBlondesuffers terribly from the inescapable feeling thatDominik simply isn’t interested in Marilyn Monroe—let alone Norma Jeane—as a person.Blondeis a hollow egg, a pretty shell with nothing at its core, just a mélange of scenes that trace Norma’s rise and Marilyn’s downfall and offers little beyond the shallow observation that the Hollywood machine is cruel, the audience exploitative, and Marilyn Monroe their victim.
Blondelooks great (with cinematography from Chayse Irvin), and throughout the film Dominik plays with aspect ratios and flips between color and black and white photography that is both disorienting and impressionistic. The specific passage of time matters little, the order in which certain events take place isn’t the most important thing, and Dominik’s tricksy visuals underscore different happenings in Norma Jeane’s life as if we’re experiencing her memory—imperfect, and colored by emotion, not logic. As the film goes on (and on), the visuals grow increasingly distorted, such as a nightmare sequence shot to mimic night vision which depicts Marilyn naked, with unnaturally darkened eyes and exposed veins, a vulnerable creature fleeing men who have invaded her home. That style choice emphasizes the nightmarish quality and unreality of the scene, and the overall effect suggests Marilyn’s deteriorating mental health.
WhereBlondefails both its subject, and its audience, is in its total lack of interiority. Oates at least tries to restore Norma’s voice, Dominik doesn’t seem interested inherat all, only the effect of Marilyn’s fame, and her monstrous exploitation at the hands of the men in her life. 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. It’s not a problem that Dominik doesn’t seem interested in recreating Marilyn’s performances—though he slavishly recreates many famous photographs and off-screen film moments—it IS a problem that he doesn’t seem interested in her art, at all. For a film that purports to be about the result of that art, the art itself is elided from the storytelling.
As Norma Jeane-Marilyn, Ana de Armas gives an exceptional performance—she, at least, is trying to reach the heart of the person behind the famous persona. But she is laboring in the service of nothing more than yet more objectification, as Marilyn is abused over and over, exploited and degraded in myriad ways, with nothing to leaven that darkness. The warmth, the wit, the generosity and underappreciated intelligence that marked Marilyn Monroe on and off screen is nowhere to be found. There is only a fatherless girl calling all her husbands “Daddy” and stumbling from one degradation to the next as her mental state declines. But Marilyn was notjusther suffering, she was a whole person, complicated, yes, but also a survivor. Yet Dominik has no interest in the other faces of Marilyn, he is only fascinated by the wide eyes and trembling lower lip of the plaything, the “meat” delivered to various men to be consumed.
Dominik is clearly reaching for something through the smoke and mirrors of the decades of rumors and conspiracies and commercialization that have swallowed Marilyn Monroe whole. And in part, his thesis about the exploitation of fame and sexualization of women, specifically their bodies, works. ButBlondeis unrelenting, Dominik makes his point about thirty minutes in and keeps going for another two-plus hours. And again, with nothing to balance that darkness,Blondebecomes lopsided, until it eventually falls over. The scaffolding of these terrible things should be a sense of the human being at the center of them, but Dominik’s Marilyn remains a cipher, despite de Armas’s best efforts to anchor the misery with humanity and not just suffering.
In attempting to tell a story about exploitation and objectification, Dominik further exploits and objectifies Marilyn Monroe. Marilyncould是一个很好的主题这种案例研究,但是Dominik’s approach only compounds the exploitation, in denying Marilyn substance, he deprives her of humanity. His cinematic rendering, intentionally impressionistic as it is, is just another form of abuse. Marilyn, by proxy, is degraded all over again, and de Armas’s attempts to infuse life and dignity into this person are denied by Dominik’s insistence that there is nothing more to the myth of Marilyn Monroe than her image, her body that was to be used by men and her face that was to be sold to the masses. The myth of Marilyn Monroe is thus perpetuated, an unending cycle of exploitation and consumption that continues to deny the complicated woman being objectified. Without any sense of a person at the heart of the story—not eventheperson, justaperson—Blondeis nothing more than empty spectacle, another magnet for the fridge.
Blondeis now streaming on Netflix.
