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).
