The passion of Marilyn Monroe
“Blonde” makes the deeply subversive argument that nothing is ever our fault.
It was a strange coincidence that I saw Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s new biopic of Marilyn Monroe, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc within a day of each other.
The latter, mainly through unbearably powerful closeups of actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s face, portrays the trial and execution of the French heroine and eventual saint in excruciating detail. A stunning portrait of human and especially female suffering, it is utterly without mercy for the audience, clearly seeking to be as emotionally devastating as humanly possible. In this, it unquestionably succeeds.
Blonde’s kinship with Dreyer’s masterpiece is striking though likely unintentional. In its own way, it deals with a similarly revered and, among some, sacred figure, though of an entirely different type. In equally excruciating detail, it portrays the prolonged crucifixion of a helpless child-woman as Monroe ricochets between a deranged mother, an unknown father, multiple rapes and miscarriages, betrayal by every single man she loves, and finally total existential despair and suicide. She is a kind of glamor-puss Joan of Arc, down to the long and devastating closeups of silent tears perpetually running down actress Ana de Armas’ face as she confronts yet another horrendous act of emotional or physical abuse. One has the sense throughout that Dominik believes Monroe is the only saint our celebrity-obsessed age deserves.
While hardly the equal of Dreyer’s film, Blonde has some striking virtues. It is beautifully photographed, visually and editorially ambitious, and—unlike so many films today—was clearly made without compromise to either audience or financier.
Indeed, whatever its problems, which have been attacked by a legion of detractors, Blonde resembles nothing so much as a female version of Raging Bull, with its slow-motion flashbulbs going off like gunshots, the stark black and white in which most of the film is shot, and its relentless—though largely bloodless—violence. As someone once said of Raging Bull’s real-life protagonist, “Jake fought like he didn’t deserve to live.” One has the strong sense that Dominik’s Monroe does largely the same thing, though her fights are emotional rather than physical.
Equally striking is Blonde’s kinship to the films of Malick and Tarkovsky, with its existential but vaguely spiritual themes, stately pacing, poetically elliptical narrative, sense of the silence of God, and a final sequence strikingly reminiscent of the hallucinatory fever dream that serves as the emotional climax of Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
In this kind of pure and total artistic intent, Blonde is further proof that, in agreeing to finance it, Netflix has made yet another major contribution to cinema. Blonde is not quite the equal of Netflix’s previous accomplishments, such as Martin Scorsese’s magnificent The Irishman and the reconstruction of Orson Welles’ long-lost final triumph The Other Side of the Wind. Nonetheless, it does underline the perhaps sad fact that, in recent years, the streaming giant has done more for the art of film than any of the major Hollywood studios, which remain obsessed with churning out cookie-cutter Marvel movies and imitations of Marvel movies. Netflix may have been, in fact, the only forum in which a film as relentless and expensive as Blonde could have been made without compromise.
But do Blonde’s virtues, in the end, add up to anything substantial? Joan of Arc, whatever else she may have been, was something like the savior of France and one of the more extraordinary historical figures who ever lived, with her mad visions and total derangement of the role assigned to women in the Middle Ages. Was Monroe really a suffering saint on this level? Is Blonde’s obsessive attention to her passion justified?
I ask this, perhaps, because I have never fully understood the appeal of Marilyn Monroe. It may be due to a generational divide, but her status as an icon of femininity has always struck me as shallow and sometimes painfully ironic. Indeed, in many of her films and photographs, Monroe is so heavily coiffed and made up that she looks more like a drag queen than a real woman. There is a certain transsexuality to her image that I doubt worshippers like Hugh Hefner ever contemplated, but were certainly moved by. If Monroe’s story is tragic, it may be because she was forced to transform herself not into a heterosexual male fantasy, but an effeminate man’s satire of femininity itself.
At least Blonde understands that suffering may have been the secret of Monroe’s appeal. This is perhaps most palpable in her one great film, John Huston’s The Misfits, in which one can tell throughout that, despite her beauty, she is dying inside. Monroe’s image served the savior fantasy that afflicts many men. When they watched her, they believed that they alone could rescue her from her silent interior despair. This is a powerful force, and should not be taken lightly.
But was Monroe really like that? Was she prey for the jackals of Hollywood, or could she have been a jackal herself when she chose to be? Many believe or want to believe the latter. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, in a viciously negative review of Blonde, strongly asserted that Monroe was something like a transcendent genius. Monroe, Dargis claimed, possessed brilliant comic timing and, among other things, ran her own production company and exercised considerable control over her career in an era when female stars were still tightly controlled by agents and studios.
I strongly doubt that Monroe was a transcendent genius. The claim otherwise smacks of both feminist wishful thinking and America’s constant and desperate need to see success as an indication of moral virtue. In many ways, the Marilyn image is the kind of mass suggestion that, in America, with its intense puritanism, only the spectacle of sex can provide, as shown by the absurd attempts to justify the horrors of celebrities like the Kardashians. There is no doubt that, today, Monroe would have a reality show.
Nonetheless, Dargis’ take on Monroe may be more accurate, in some ways, than Dominik’s. It is possible that, in the beginning, Monroe was a naïve victim. She herself admitted that she was forced to trade sex for photographs in her early pinup days, and Hollywood is, to a great extent, a business of exploitation—especially of beauty. Still, Dargis is right that, in the later years of her stardom, Monroe was a resourceful and powerful woman. It could not have been otherwise. She might have been naïve at first, but she could not possibly have remained naïve forever. She was in the business a long time and understood how it worked. At some point, she must have known what she was doing.
At the same time, however, we are faced with the indisputable fact that Monroe died by suicide. Underneath it all, it is clear that she was a profoundly troubled and unhappy woman. The accumulated traumas of her life did eventually overwhelm her. She may have been resourceful and powerful, but at some point, she was unquestionably dying inside.
In many ways, these two images of Monroe—Blonde’s suffering celebrity saint and Dargis’ feminist heroine—complement each other. And they raise a fascinating moral question: Was it all her fault? Was Monroe brutalized and exploited until she had no choice but to die? Or was she a sex-positive and empowered proto-feminist? In other words, did she have agency and thus responsibility?
Americans, by and large, constantly preach the gospel of agency. From idiot talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey to numerous self-help con artists like Tony Robbins, the prevailing ideology that everything is your fault pervades the general culture. This extends to absurd fantasies like The Secret, which hold that reality itself is our fault.
Ironically, it is Dargis’ feminist argument that largely conforms to this catechism. She holds that Monroe was, above all, in control. She was a woman who ruled over her own destiny and was not laid low by exploitation or male violence. Instead, she empowered herself and, Dargis implies, women the world over.
By contrast, Blonde makes a deeply subversive argument: Nothing was Monroe’s fault. Everything in her life, every wound and scar, was inflicted on her by others, until the only way she could achieve agency was to take her own life.
In this, Blonde is, in many ways, a brave film. It asserts that it is possible that nothing is ever anybody’s fault. We are wholly determined by the actions of others, and no one is ever responsible for anything. This is disturbing because it may be true. Certainly, it is not impossible. The truth that no one wants to admit, especially in America, is that we don’t know. Until we do, morality and culpability are, to some degree, suspect. This is an uncomfortable thought, and thus the likes of Winfrey and Robbins make millions convincing people otherwise.
Blonde is a flawed picture, but its moral courage is undeniable, much like Dreyer’s masterpiece. His Joan is not at fault for what happens to her. Dominik’s Marilyn is not at fault for what happens to her. It is for this reason, perhaps, that viewers and reviewers have been so distressed and at times outraged by Blonde. They do not want to believe that they do not deserve what they get, and this is, perhaps, even more tragic than anything Marilyn or Joan endured.