TIRED OF THE DISCOURSE: ON BLONDE ON

FIRST HALF: ON BLONDE

For anyone who wants to avoid Andrew Dominik's Blonde, may I recommend the South Park episode about Britney Spears. It's been a while since I've seen it, but it points out how America elevates a pretty woman into superstardom and is just as quick and likely to absolutely destroy them. To sacrifice them. The episode is about 21 minutes and gets much of the same point across (so does David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). But - since before Monroe, and definitely after - we've seen the world destroy some of its most beautiful creatures, and if it doesn't destroy them it often makes them insane. America and the world is horribly misogynistic, and there is a base connection between arousal, self-hatred, and the desire to hate what makes you aroused (because of often religious - AKA bullshit - guilt) that often leads to tragedy. 

This is such a known thing that we've come to accept it. You Must Remember This can have a series on Dead Blondes. The jokes about the downfall happened before Tara Reid (or whomever you want to fit under this guise) burned out. Some of the attitude about this changed with the Me Too movement - it's impossible to look at the stumbling out of control-ness of Paz de la Huerta and now think "oh she's a hot mess" when the truth is she is an assault survivor. There are no set pattern to the ends of Monroe, Sharon Tate, Dorothy Stratten, Dominique Dunne, Brittney Murphy, and on and on, but it seemingly always happens. We've known about the producer's couch since long before I was born, but it has only been moderately curtailed as of the last - what? - six years? The system makes it hard not to go crazy if you want to be a successful working actress, and the audience is ready to hate you for being beautiful. Showbiz: So glamourous. 

As someone who was born in 1976, I first became aware of Marilyn before I was sexual. And like a lot of sex symbols thrust upon me at a young age, I wasn't moved. Not because I don't find Monroe attractive, it's that my sexual tastes didn't really exist yet beyond preferring girls in a general sense, so when you're told before you can control your erections what the hottest person who ever lived was, it doesn't make you go "oh, you're right." I don't know, maybe some people fell for her right away. Maybe because I could "discover her" or maybe because she didn't play dizzy dames, or maybe because she had huge boobs, I was always more a Jane Russell kind of guy.    

But I do know this: The Seven Year Itch is really gross. And so by the time I became a cinephile I never warmed much to Monroe's star filmography outside of the ones she did for Howard Hawks. Not because she was bad, but because the movies tended to be - at best - pretty good, and she didn't do it for me enough to want to watch her work for Fox hacks. As such, I never invested much in her, and I guess like the Manson murders, it just never felt worth investigating for me. It was just... sad. 

But even as someone who never got excited about Marilyn Monroe, or felt the need to defend her as an artist (she was), her legacy has been well known for almost my whole life. The lobby in one of the theaters I spent my youth going to had a French three sheet for The Seven Year Itch up until it closed. We know she died young and not sober. We know she sang for the president, we know the key images, from Playboy to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which served as inspiration for Madonna, if not intentionally lyrically than at least visually. Not everyone knows she appears in The Asphalt Jungle or watched There's No Business Like Show Business, but most everyone - even people who may not know they're doing it - can do a Monroe version of "Happy Birthday."

A lot of people who don't like Blonde hate how it treats Monroe. I don't think the film is interested in her at all. I think it's interested in the legend of Monroe. As such, it doesn't even mention plastic surgery, or show her making more than a handful of her films. It doesn't waste time with pointless "and here's Jon Hamm as Clarke Gable" or whatever you normally expect from showbiz biopics. I think because it's not about trying to understand or make sense of Monroe's life. It's trying to unpack her image. And in doing so it's kind of an unpleasant ride. Granted, as someone who loved semiotics and dissolves, I was probably always going to appreciate a movie where Marilyn achieves orgasm as her bed dissolves into Niagara Falls, but the reason why I think this is a good movie is because I find its intentions interesting.

What is the myth of Marilyn? For everyone that's probably a little different, but of a certain age, Itch, Gentlemen, Some Like it Hot, JFK, Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, ODing, being a hot mess are part of the popular consciousness. And almost every single one of them is gross. Gross to her. Gross in general. As funny as Gentlemen is, and I'm an avowed fan, removed from the joke of it all, the most famous images are Monroe in an opulence bukake as men proffer her money for her attention as she sings "I'm going to get old, and people won't pay me any more, so I take the money (I am a whore)." Itch gets into the whole weird sexual energy of the time, where leering at Monroe's panties (because they hide her vagina) is what the film was sold on. 

The film was sold on leering at her privates. 

The film itself has Monroe playing someone completely (seemingly) unaware of the effect she has on men so she tells her neighbor she puts her underwear in the fridge. Hawks gives her power, but the conceit of Blondes is that Monroe believes it's okay that sex is transactional because she is a venture capitalist. But even though it empowers her, it's still saying she's kinda a prostitute. Some Like it Hot has her complaining about getting a raw deal and dating musicians, and it ends with her with a musician with no prospects. It's not a mistake that Monroe is tied to the birth of Playboy, which introduced the idea of getting nudie mags into peoples homes under the auspices of being a gentleman's journal. The explosion of porn becoming commonplace is tied directly to her.

There's a lot to unpack about American sexuality in that era, and put in this form it showcases that every single thing that marks Monroe's fame and notoriety is tinged in terribleness. Arthur Miller didn't get her or take her seriously, she was never respected as an actress, she got hate mail from women, etc. etc. And what would happen if you're having an affair with the POTUS? When you game it out, it sounds terrible, being a - at best - kept woman? Though it's fascinating in an historical sense, the reality of it would be sport fucking, and dudes who can't keep it in their pants aren't known for respecting women. I get why people don't like Blonde. but I also think it's possible they're not appreciating what the film is trying to do. I get not liking or enjoying the film, but also, this is not meant to be definitive, or even close to comprehensive. 

But then also, this is based on a book, and so I get how this may be tired discourse - there are some people who are probably sick of pointing out the bad and would rather focus on her strengths and the positive side of her. But for me, as likely the target audience, the way Dominik shot the subway grate sequence, it made me sad, angry and a little disgusted, to which the film twists the knife: her husband is offended, but mostly because he sees her crotch as his property. If Monroe is treated only as a great icon that doesn't acknowledge that her story should also be warning that Hollywood and America  will destroy beautiful women because men want to pretend that they're animals.

END HALF: Blonde On

Blonde premiered about - what - two weeks ago at this point, and has been out for less than a week. It kinda feels like it's already done. 

Recently when I've gotten together with my film loving friends, we find that a common thread is "Avoiding a movie that became a talking point." Waiting to watch films like Licorice Pizza, or The Last Duel, or JoJo Rabbit, or West Side Story, or whatever because you are tired of the discourse. Nowadays, films aren't just graded by stars, they're also graded by morality. And if you like them, do you really want to defend a film that people feels seems to be okay with pedophilia? Or racism? Or features someone accused of a sex crime where there's no law involved so it's like "is it real or is it internet"? Or whatever? Why would you want to have a public opinion on anything like that? The problem is this discourse often happens around films about adult subjects that expect the audience to meet them halfway. 

Part of the problem is the dying of criticism. Timed tweets. Insta Reactions. No one has time to digest art any more. How many people are composing their reviews and tweets while the film hasn't even finished? News Stories about "That infamous scene" for a movie that comes out in two weeks. No one gets to sit in art, and any film that deals with troubling things leads the most basic of us to question "this shows a bad thing, is this a bad thing?"

The thing that makes this most troubling is that when films are about problematic things without addressing them, no one says shit. Elvis Presley met Priscilla when she was how old? And kept her? And Married her when? And cheated on her throughout? Dude's a literal groomer. Doesn't everyone think that's bad now? If the film Elvis doesn't put it front and center does that make it okay, does it make Elvis okay? Top Gun got hundreds of people to join the Navy, are we not going to talk about how its sequel is also propaganda? Are we going to address the role of the military in American cinema ever? How they give money and tools to Hollywood because they're peddling Viagra warrior fantasies?

 We don't sit with art any more, we consume it. We move on to the next. And a lot of art that asks people to look at the worst of us is treated like it's bad art. Granted, right now, we've been going through some shit, and the last three years have been a hellscape. But I wonder, as we see fifty year old men think nothing of buying Star Wars clothes for themselves, and have very serious opinions about the MCU and Star Wars, and Halloween basically starts in September now, the fact that adult art is dying is likely because a lot of adults have little interest in being adults any more. (That though, is way too big a topic, so SIGNING OFF).

The Fetishistic Nothingness of THE BATMAN

Fun fact: I didn't grow up reading comic books. I was born in 1976, and other than feeling fucking old of late, one of the big things about my generation is that we didn't have Disney films growing up like other generations. Those of us born in that era were in that sweet spot where home video was growing but not ubiquitous, while Disney animation itself was on a slow decline for over twenty years before they figured out how to make animated films again, and I was way more likely in 1988 to watch BIG BUSINESS or OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE (Disney/Touchstone films) than, say, OLIVER AND COMPANY . The first animated film that brought them back came out when I was thirteen. And though I may still have been watching DUCK TALES, I wasn't exactly going to go to the theater or rent a video for THE LITTLE MERMAID. Subsequently, I didn't see much of the Disney relaunch at the time. Teen boys weren't running to see THE LION KING or MULAN in the nineties. I saw reissues like BAMBI and new stuff like THE BLACK CAULDRON, but was driven more towards stuff like E.T. and GREMLINS as a pre-teen and was on to ALIENS and ROBOCOP by the time I was hitting double digits. But basically, I don't like being resold my youth. I hate it. I want to be an adult. 

Maybe because I was also front and center for the world of Grunge. And though there is a lot of pick through with that whole movement, the idea that corporate art sucks is something that has always been with me. Not that a corporation can't make great art, but it is never in their interest; they would rather be able to sell something marketable, and marketable and good are not always the same. But we are now at a point where most of the major art that can be made in a studio setting isn't new. It has to be IP, and it suggests that film - as it currently exists - will be dead in the next ten, at best twenty years? Like, who do you get to direct the next Marvel movie if indie directors are coming from under million dollar budgets and isn't that basically TV people, so the big difference between theatrical and home viewing will become how much it cost to make, but only event films will then be theatrical? Disney are such fucking assholes for not making non-Disney movies when they own Fox at this point. They have no interest in the future of cinema, and will likely destroy it as it currently exists. 

The problem is that movie fandom has been taken over, upended as it were, by comic book movies. They do not function like normal films, and going by Marvel and DC's more recent output, they sometimes barely function as films.  They are often very successful, sometimes insanely so. But we are getting to a point where it must be said, whatever the appeal of these movies taps into isn't about cinema. That's not to say comic book movie fans don't love movies, but there's an entire audience of movie goers that either doesn't understand or care about craft. But then also, that gets weird too. Respected critics gave Zack Snyder's JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE ASSEMBLY CUT glowing marks and it's hard to tell if they liked it, or are afraid of the violence prone dweebs who like to threaten critics for not genuflecting to lord Marvel and God Snyder, which is a legitimate reason to hand wave it off. That said, I think people may legitimately love ZSJL, but it isn't a movie. Whatever it is isn't as intended even as it tells you it is as intended which is the lie that you have to swallow. And a lot of modern fandom requires swallowing things. As there have been so many sea change moments, none sticks with me more than knowing people hated the Ewoks because of how crass and commercial they seemed. Forty years later and Baby Yoda is fucking everywhere. SELL OUT/THEY LIVE/CONSUME it says. The audience seems to say "yes, yes, take my money." We are culturally at a point where adults know what being pandered to is, and want it more than going to movies that don't. "Please, don't challenge me in any way!" 

One of the things that's been happening is that as the Comic Book Movie Universe grows, we've seen that structure and cohesion no longer matter, and that narratives have no economy. It's all about the saturated fats, it's all about bloated runtimes to make you feel satisfied that you got a full meal, even if there's no great story or action, why complain if you get so much of it? Third acts that basically have no stakes because they have no alternate conclusions. A lot of this started with the prequels, which famously had a sword fight take twenty minutes that could have been over in thirty seconds. That there is a rabid fanbase for the prequels who think everyone was wrong asks the question about some childhood favorite and if they have ruined people's tastes. 

I saw THE BATMAN. There's a point maybe when you're with a friend and they are being hit on by someone else and you tell your friend "that person is trying to take pictures of you having sex while you're dressed as a clown and if you don't walk away they probably will." And you know it's bad news, and you know your friend may be plied with flattery and substances that might take a hard no to a soft yes, but you know it's not your place to parent your friend, so you're also left asking yourself "should I have done more, did they want it, or did they get talked into it?" as they try on clown shoes "as a goof." 

I guess from my perspective, making a grounded three hour movie about Batman chasing down The Riddler is where you end up, and maybe it seems like a good idea at the time, but from where I'm sitting, GROSS. I don't think it's where anyone started their night, and I think if you don't think about the start, you don't maybe think about how each iteration keeps getting more and more boxed in to one version of the character. And it's not that the film is bad, far from it, it's totally watchable, exciting in parts, but it only exists because fandom craves seeing Batman, but Batman in a very fetish-specific way. And I've got nothing against fetishes, it's just so much effort for so little, and this seems like the moment where the world is pot committed to this nonsense in ways that mean movies will be even less artistic.

Batman is the story of a rich orphan who beats up criminals. Now, say, eighty years ago when people like Al Capone and the like were part of the fabric of pop culture, the idea of super villains made a lot more sense. But here we are. This is more disconcerting with the DC movies because they want to traffic in the real (Marvel movies are lame at times, but they don't try to suggest anything is practical or realistic any more, so you don't really have to think about the real world), and so the question becomes, why are people jerking off to a rich guy beating the crap out of criminals that don't exist? Look, as often as these characters can bring in some "of the moment" devices, The Riddler is modeled on The Zodiac. Who killed people fifty plus years ago. 

So again, is this what you really wanted? You want a realistic portrait of a crime fighter, but then also he goes up against criminal masterminds that are more cinematic invention than reality, while Batman also spends some time around The Penguin and lets him get away with criminal acts. Literally does crime in front of Batman. The important part is that Batman punches good? I don't get it.

For the record: I think the Adam West film is great, and the TV show is a blast because it isn't serious. It's kids stuff. I think Burton found the camp he wanted, and with the German expressionist visuals, he created something that exists clearly as fetishistic and weird and cartoony, mixing film noir with pop art. I find both his movies uneven, very horny and fascinating, though I don't think most of the characters are in the same movie. Schumacher saw the whole thing as camp, and that gave the game away somewhat. Homophobes don't like being told their homoerotic art is gay, it seems. That said, Schumacher seems vaguely indifferent as a filmmaker, so I can't hold his two in high regard, even if that reveals how much he feels like the whole thing is beneath him, which it might be. Nolan going more realistic was refreshing at the time, it worked and was its own thing (It also happened 15 years ago, before a lot of the Marvel/Wall Street crash/housing bubble/Trump, etc). If the wheels came off that run by the final movie, a lot of that has to do with Heath Ledger dying. But also Nolan had his own vision of the character that was nothing like what was done previous. The Snyder Batman is interesting, because Affleck is inspired and he does good work in dogshit movies, though I don't really think of those as Batman movies, or really movies. Van Art? But also, that's not a practical Batman, because he's dealing with space aliens and Amazons. Snyder would have been the absolute worst choice to do a solo Batman movie (especially after Rorschach-ing WATCHMEN, a film I like), but he doesn't desecrate the character too much (other than that futureworld sequence where Affleck basically threatens to kill Leto's Joker using an F word that feels like the actor smiling while he says it) like he does Superman, so there’s that  

Robert Pattinson is great as Batman. It's just, he's playing a variant of Bale's version. I mean, I'm sure people will make a case that it's totally different, except there's nothing really to latch on to with any iteration of Batman. He's not an interesting character as a superhero or human being, and basically all Batman cinematic narratives come to that conclusion. The main reason he had love interests in the Burton run is because that's what you did then (and also to de-gay all the leather, because, honey). There's some stuff about his parents maybe being POSs that's interesting, but it's 2022. Rich people fucking suck. We know this. What is Batman a fantasy of and who's it for? Why are we now accepting three hour runtimes from popcorn movies that should be 105 minutes? I guess I can understand if it becomes a hyper-stylized essay on good and evil or a fun phantasmagoria type situation. And I totally get having a take on these movies. I don't think JOKER is a great movie, but it is a movie and it does have ideas. This feels like a variant on everything that's been done before, just enough different that it isn't 100% Nolan-y, but just Nolan enough to make those fans happy. Im trying to think of a singular insight the film has in to human behavior, crime, violence, etc  I don’t think it has one.  So why is there a new Batman? Because the market is there, and the audience is rabid  

The film uses Kurt Cobain - who famously wore a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" shirt to a Rolling Stone photo shoot - and the song "Something in the Way" to be a Batman theme. The lyrics go like this: 

"Underneath the bridge
Tarp has sprung a leak
And the animals I've trapped
Have all become my pets
And I'm living off of grass
And the drippings from my ceiling
It's okay to eat fish
Cause they don't have any feelings"

Sounds like a portrait of a homeless man losing his mind. The antithesis of a rich kid who beats up bad guys and fights crime for catharsis. My guess is Batman and the filmmakers, like the audience Cobain decried, knows not what it means. Knows not what it means, and I say yeah.