A woman fabricated in fiction:
On Andrew Dominik’s Blonde
by Basje Boer | translated by Roxy Merrell | originally published in De Groene Amsterdammer in Dutch
In May 1957, Marilyn Monroe was photographed by Richard Avedon. The actress spent four hours dancing around his New York studio, singing songs and flirting with the camera. Later, Avedon would recall it as: ‘She did Marilyn Monroe.’ But after the evening had passed, and the wine was all gone, that very same Monroe was sitting in the corner of the room — staring blankly, void of emotion, ‘like a child.’ Avedon snuck up on her with his camera in hand and captured the shot. It was that photograph, the portrait of a lost child, that would become world famous. That portrait revealed what would later, after her death in 1962, become abundantly clear: that there was a tension between the laughter and the pain, between the persona and the woman behind it.
Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik and produced by Netflix, is not a true-to-fact biopic about Monroe’s life, but a film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalized biography from 2000, also titled Blonde. In interview after interview, Dominik is asked what attracted him to Monroe, and he always offers the same reply: he was not attracted by Monroe, but by that book. Oates’ Blonde is vastly ambitious, rife with experiment and thick enough to weigh a ton. The book is full of bravado; just as Dominik’s film is too. The story told by Oates in Blonde is about a woman who existed only in the gaze of another — a woman who was fabricated in fiction, and was doomed to succumb to fiction. It is this very woman who Andrew Dominik created an almost three-hour-long horror fairytale about. This is not the woman we know from the glamorous photographs, who seduces, flirts, plays and laughs, but the woman whose life was like a downward spiral, which started with neglect and ended with suicide, which revolved around men, daddy issues and an unfulfilled desire to become a mother. Blonde is about that lost child, staring blankly, in the corner of the room.
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde begins in Hollywood in the ’20s and ’30s, where Marilyn Monroe grew up as Norma Jeane Mortenson. Raging wildfires form the backdrop for a hellish childhood, tormented by a cruel, psychologically unstable mother. Her father is long-gone, only present in her mother’s frustrated desire, and her accusations that his departure was Norma Jeane’s fault. Blonde works towards a gruesome climax. Norma Jeane is taken away from her mother, and taken in by the neighbors, only to end up in an orphanage soon after. Here her devastating backstory is born: the child no one wanted, who would spend a lifetime craving to be seen. Fast forward almost twenty years to the early 1950s, Norma Jeane has a new haircut, a new face and a new name: Marilyn Monroe. The child has transformed into a persona. As she tries to give shape to her career, we see her searching for an identity. Everyone turns around when Marilyn Monroe walks by, but no one understands who she is. Nobody really cares to know.
In Blonde, the American Dream is a nightmare, and that’s exactly how Andrew Dominik portrays his story: like a Lynchian fever dream. Here, the emotional traumas are so great, that they barely fit on your TV screen. Here, good and bad are pitched against each other, like black versus white. Here, we witness how Monroe is betrayed and belittled, how success is always closely followed by disappointment. How she first marries a jealous and violent man, and then a contemptuous intellectual. Trauma piles on trauma, addiction piles on addiction. The problematic extends into the pathological. Andrew Dominik flexes his muscles. He seeks the extreme in everything: in the technical ingenuity, the machismo, the brazen urge to experiment. He distills from Monroe’s life a world like a haunted house, a dark universe that does not allow even a single sliver of light to perforate its realms. Here, he lets his protagonist wander — blind, helpless, lost.
The film’s extremes are mirrored in the reactions it provokes. Blonde is criticized and praised in reviews and on social media in equal measure, inciting in turn both the slander and celebration of Andrew Dominik. In her review of Blonde in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, film critic Pauline Kleijer describes how Andrew Dominik is accused of exploiting Monroe ‘by showing her vulnerability.’ Instead of a victim, Kleijer writes, Dominik’s critics would rather watch a ‘feministic heroine who radiates power, for example, or just something more cheerful.’ And journalist Coen van Zwol writes, in the Dutch newspaper NRC, that female characters must be ‘strong, active and formidable’ nowadays — ‘Marilyn Monroe as interpreted by Madonna.’
This is not the Monroe that Andrew Dominik portrays. Dominik’s Monroe is not strong or active, but weak and passive. Dominik’s Monroe is no feminist heroine. But she’s also not the woman Norman Mailer once deemed an ‘angel of sex’: the cheerful sex bomb in the white dress fluttering in the wind. ‘I believe,’ Dominik told de Volkskrant, ‘that most of us (…) don’t relate to everyday reality, but to stories. We make a story about ourselves: that’s what we experience.’ This is the Monroe that Dominik wants to show us: the story that she fashioned of herself, a story that was larger than life. But to tell that story, he must show us something that was hidden in the shadows. He must walk the line between the allegorical and the factual, between fiction and reality. So, he meticulously copies the photos of Monroe that we know so well and brings them to life, as if to say: this is the reality of these photographs. But at the same time, he abstracts reality by magnifying it and smoothing it out. Characters are not only reduced to their profession (Monroe’s exes are called the ‘Ex-Athlete’, the ‘Playwright’ or the ‘President’), but also reduced to their betrayal, their violence, their abuse. They are one-dimensional bogeymen, Big Bad Wolves next to Monroe’s Little Red Riding Hood.
Is it true, what Pauline Kleijer contends? That we would rather see Marilyn Monroe portrayed as a ‘feminist heroine’? In recent years, Monroe’s life and career have been viewed through all kinds of new lenses. Suddenly we saw Marilyn-Monroe-the-proto-feminist and Marilyn-Monroe-the-girlboss. Suddenly we saw, in photos of her reading Ulysses with a frown, Marilyn-Monroe-the-intellectual. Is that feminism — or is that marketing? In de Volkskrant, theater critic and editor Herien Wensink describes the Monroe portrayed in Blonde as ‘revolutionary.’ This ‘fragile’ Monroe, she writes, is ‘a Marilyn for the MeToo era.’ But weren’t feminist heroines supposed to embody strength? And is it really Monroe’s vulnerability that Andrew Dominik shows us in Blonde — or is it something else?
In Blonde, the bigger picture of Monroe’s life is true-to-fact, but the tangents are fictional. To arrive at a clear story, Joyce Carol Oates writes in the introduction of her book, she had to simplify and adapt some events. But the worst things that happen to Monroe in Blonde — rape, conspiracies, abortions, and attempted murder — simply never took place. Dominik himself calls his film a ‘rescue fantasy’, but the fetishism that emerges from Blonde is not about rescuing — it’s about suffering. Dominik revels in that suffering, stretching it as far as possible. He fantasizes about it and adores it. He lifts Monroe’s mask, only to find another mask behind it. He exchanges one abstraction for another, the sex symbol for the martyr.
As simple as feminism appeared to be in the time of MeToo, so complex that it revealed itself to be in the period that followed. You can read it in the articles de Volkskrant published on Blonde, which first crown the strong and then later the vulnerable woman with the title ‘feminist icon’. Is it true that we only want to see ‘strong’ female characters in the post-MeToo era? Or are we mimicking the film studios and streaming services that elevated ‘strong female character’ into a film category? The question we ask ourselves after MeToo is: if a woman identifies as a victim, does that make her strong or vulnerable?
Marilyn Monroe was not a feminist heroine. She was neither an intellectual nor an activist businesswoman. But she was outspoken. She was witty, funny and a little strange. In Blonde, we jump from the 1930s to the 1950s, from Monroe’s childhood to her Hollywood breakthrough. It is precisely in that time gap that we could have found the answer to the question: what made her choose acting in the first place? It is precisely in that gap that her willpower and passion are hidden. The Monroe that Andrew Dominik shows us in Blonde was a woman that life happened to, but the real Monroe made choices, had opinions, spoke her mind. The real Monroe was ambitious and eager to learn and poured her whole heart into her craft. The real Monroe was indeed a victim, but victimhood, as we now know better than ever, is complicated. It doesn’t lend itself to be captured in a story that seeks out extremes. The Monroe that Dominik portrays is a lost soul wandering with her shirt off, a victim perceived through the male gaze. This Monroe had to suffer, so that she could be rescued by Andrew Dominik. The real Monroe was smart and dumb, lively and lost. She was both a victim and a heroine. The real Monroe was paradoxical, complicated, interesting. The real Monroe was human.
For four hours, Richard Avedon took photographs of Marilyn Monroe. Photos in which she’s captured joking and laughing, where she strikes different poses and pulls different faces, like the professional she was. Of all those photographs, we only picked one. Only one became world famous: the photograph where she looks lost. This Monroe, we conclude, is the real Monroe. Is that her own story? Or is this the story we turned her into?
