‘Blonde’ is Incredibly Problematic
Marilyn deserves better.
After watching Elvis only a few days prior (my thoughts about Elvis here), the thought of watching yet another biopic was far from appealing. Let alone a 2-hour and 46-minute affair. I was not excited to watch Blonde, but little did I know how deeply problematic this film would be.
Blonde is a fictionalized chronicle of the life of iconic American actress, Marilyn Monroe, written and directed by Andrew Dominik. The film is based on the 2000 novel of the same name, written by Joyce Carol Oates. The film explores the contrasts between the private life of Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas), whose real name is Norma Jeane, and the sparkly public persona of Marilyn Monroe.
The concept of fictionalizing the life of a real-life figure in history is a fascinating one. The film Spencer also explores this concept, creating a “fictionalized” depiction of a few days at Christmastime for Princess Diana. Spencer does a masterful job using the fictionalized aspects of the storytelling to highlight and emphasize the feelings and experiences of Diana’s frustrations, hopes, and contradictions.
However, unlike Spencer, the film Blonde does not seem to have a meaningful theme or thesis it hopes to communicate to the audience about Marilyn’s competing personas. The film is sprawling, covering major events that happen over the course of Marilyn’s life. Each new event or sequence in the film does not seem interested in exploring the nuances of Marilyn’s competing personas, her loneliness, or the complications of the relentless male gaze. The film repeatedly depicts the concept of her two personas, but it seems to have nothing more to say about this other than, “Look! Here are the two sides of her!”
This film seems entirely uninterested in intimately understanding and conveying the full humanity of this person, whether it be Marilyn or Norma Jeane. Perhaps this is the source of the two major issues I had with this film and why I believe this film is highly problematic. Let’s unpack them further.
Note: spoilers for Blonde ahead.
Her Utter Lack of Agency
I was floored at how little agency Marilyn’s character has in this film. In nearly every scene, she is reacting to the things happening to her and her choices, as depicted in this film, have little to no impact on how the plot unfolds.
What makes this particularly problematic is that in this movie, the things that are happening to her are often abuses perpetrated by the men around her. The majority of the scenes in Blonde depict the trauma and abuses that Marilyn endured. To depict these scenes while being entirely uninterested in giving her character agency and humanity simply feels exploitative. And yet, even in the scenes where Marilyn speaks her mind, rebels, or fights back against her perpetrators, it is positioned in the film as simply a result of the effect of her addictions that are causing her to act out.
The result is that Blonde continuously showcases a female character onscreen, victimized by the male characters around her, with little to no agency afforded to her character. What makes this even more twisted is that Marilyn Monroe is a notoriously hyper-sexualized figure in American history, and this film continues to perpetuate the male gaze and the abuses women endure by stripping Marilyn of her agency and her humanity… yet again.
Unearned Melodrama
From the first five minutes of this film, I was fuming. This was the foreboding cloud for all that was about to unfold in the next 2 hours and 46 minutes. In the first few minutes of this film, we see the gut-wrenching experiences Norma Jeane endures as a young girl. We experience her mentally unstable mother's attempt to drive them into the California wildfires, followed by an attempt at drowning her in the bathtub in graphic detail. We also watch her neighbors take her in to care for her, only to trick her and drop her off at an orphanage a short while later.
Experiencing the trauma of a character in a film needs to be built upon a bedrock of empathy and investment in the character in order to be effective. Blonde throws us into these long, detailed, and incredibly graphic scenes of this character’s trauma only minutes into the film, without spending the necessary time to build the emotional investment into these characters. I believe this is a misguided use of melodrama. And unearned melodrama feels manipulative.
To clarify, I don’t believe that character empathy is driven by the sheer amount of time spent with the character. The issue isn’t the fact that this character’s traumatic sequences happen so early in the film. The primary miss is that the film wasn’t able to efficiently build that level of empathy in me to warrant such intense content. In masterful filmmaking, character empathy can be built incredibly efficiently, only minutes into the film, sucking us into the story and world of these characters we so desperately want to follow. In Blonde, the use of unearned melodrama sowed in me a lack of trust in the film to carefully and respectfully steward my emotional investment.
I rarely finish watching a film and leave truly fuming. Most films I don’t care for cause me to disengage, or they serve to be a fascinating exercise in unpacking and analyzing the filmmakers' original vision and what went awry. The analysis of films that did not work is often just as illuminating as the films that knock it out of the park.
In the case of Blonde, I was fuming as the film ended. Watching a hyper-sexualized female character, utterly devoid of agency and humanity, get dragged from scene to scene, enduring trauma and abuse, was horrifying and infuriating. And the way the film manipulates the use of melodrama simply treads on the delicate relationship between film and viewer. There is a precious dance that happens between the audience’s willingness to give their hearts over to the film bit by bit and the film’s wise stewardship of this emotional investment in its beloved characters.
Blonde is problematic in both the gender themes it communicates and its misguided filmmaking approach.
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