Creative producer and writer Anna Bogutskaya gave her take on the new Netflix film and compared it to other productions that talked about the artist's life
Netflix's new film Blonde debases Marilyn Monroe's legacy with its lurid depiction of her trauma and abuse. Why does popular culture always get her wrong? asks independent film programmer, writer and creative producer Anna Bogutskaya.
Think of the actress, and certain images will instantly come to mind: the red, slightly parted lips; the sleepy siren eyes; the platinum blonde hair; and that voice, breathy, as if she's just woken up and can't wait for you to join her in bed.
Her friend the writer Truman Capote described her as a “platinum s3xual explosion.” Marilyn evokes s3x and simultaneously misery, thanks to the way her troubled personal life was closely examined. Since her death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, what made her an icon also led people to dehumanize her again and again.
She was portrayed as a fool, a diva and a tragedy. Her flaws are often expressed in the same breath as her achievements, as if to diminish her charm and talent. There is also a mystery to Marilyn, something elusive that can lead to indulgence by superficial filmmakers.
Most of the films and series that dramatized her life focus on her rags-to-riches story and quickly jump to her disappearance, her difficult personality on the set and her problems with important men, from her marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller to her relationships with the Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby.
By focusing on the tragedies of her life and exaggerating the abuse she suffered, they weaken her, decades after her death. “There is a disempowerment of her as if she were a child-victim, who became an adult-victim, who died a victim. “If we only talk about the beginning and the end, we undermine her qualities. We take away her chance to live,” says Bolton.
Bewitching
Yet the mystery of Marilyn is not that of her rise, but of the extreme contradictions of her life. She was a generational talent, a movie star with undeniable charisma, charm, fantastic comic timing and an aggressive, disarming frankness.
To see her on screen, even today, is to fall under the spell of cinema. The contrast between her carefree on-screen persona and her supposedly tortured off-screen existence has become the compelling core of her narrative: the woman-child, the success-tragedy, the hated beauty, the unloved romantic.
Her premature death remains a favorite conspiracy theory involving the Kennedys and the FBI and is included in Blonde, both the book and the film. “People have a hard time reconciling the fact that someone so exceptional met such a banal end,” Bolton said.
But why the endless impulse to reduce her to a sad cautionary tale? “There’s something in the puritanical part of our nature that says, ‘those Hollywood people, they have so much and deserve so little,’” writer and film critic Farran Smith Nehme tells BBC Culture.
And because Marilyn was the biggest star of all, it’s as if she deserved these “relentlessly pessimistic” portrayals of her life, Nehme believes. In the wave of 1980s and 1990s films and TV series about Marilyn and other Hollywood celebrities in which she appears, she is shown at best as a tragic woman, at worst as a wild woman.
The two Marilyns
Focusing on the tension between Norma Jean Baker and Marilyn Monroe, the woman and the movie star, some even cast two different actresses to play the roles.
The first to do so was Larry Buchanan, with his Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976), in which Misty Rowe plays the title role; The film ends with her transformation into the explosive blonde. Then, in Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn (1989), Paula Lane plays Marilyn.
And with the latest film about the movie star, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Blonde (2000), her legacy was once again debased.
Oates’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a fictionalization of Marilyn’s life, told from the point of view of a deeply traumatized and lonely woman, in love with movies and the idea of love, but hopelessly crippled with father issues that infect every relationship she has.
An earlier version
Dominik’s is not the first film adaptation of Oates’ book. In 2001, Joyce Chopra directed a TV movie starring Poppy Montgomery, also titled Blonde, which channels the cruelty of Marilyn's life without the surgical coldness of Dominik's film.
In a less exploitative and more psychoanalytic adaptation, Montgomery plays Marilyn as an overly grateful and naive woman-child, saying please and thank you to the very men who reject and degrade her. Yet there is at least an element of joy in this woman as she enjoys her success, and the film ends without putting her (and us) through her sad demise.
Dominik, for his part, turns Marilyn's story into body horror. He fixates on her body all the way to the gynecological. The artist is not merely objectified (the first shot we see of her is her buttocks during the filming of The Seven Year Itch, 1955), she is poked, probed, raped, subjected to two forced abortions, and physically and emotionally abused.
Blonde seems intent on destroying Marilyn Monroe the woman and perverting her image by showing us none of the talent, ambition, or pride in her work. Almost every moment shown is harrowing, and Ana de Armas (who plays Marilyn) cries almost constantly throughout the film’s 2-hour 45-minute running time. It’s torture porn with a dash of Hollywood gloss.
Same old story
“Please don’t make me a joke,” Marilyn begged an unnamed interviewer near the end of her life. But Hollywood’s cruel joke was to turn her into a train wreck, reducing her legacy to a series of messy love affairs, daddy issues, and addictions.
Biopics on the big screen and television have tried to explain her away many times, but they always come back to the same narrative: that of a victim, a tragic beauty. Is there really nothing more worth saying about her?
According to Lucy Bolton, a lecturer in film studies at Queen Mary University of London, our enduring fascination with Marilyn Monroe is rooted in the ease with which we can mould her to fit different stories. “She represents different narratives – the victim narrative and the absolute essence of female s3xual glamour and irresistibility, in her own life and in retrospect,” she said.
“She is a poster girl, as well as an actress and comedian. People relate to her as someone who struggles and tries very hard to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress,” she added.
In the 1996 TV movie Norma Jean & Marilyn, Ashley Judd plays Norma Jean as an aggressively ambitious young actress, fully aware of her appeal and potential, but uncouth.
For the first time on screen, she swears and has a hot temper (something Truman Capote also suggests in his conversational portrayal of Marilyn in 1980's Music for Chameleons), where he angrily declared, “Girls get movie contracts because they have relationships with the right people.”
When she transforms into Marilyn, played by Mira Sorvino, Norma Jean becomes a kind of abusive ghost, an apparition who constantly belittles Marilyn and can only be drowned out with pills and alcohol. Dominik's approach is a bit more subtle. As her Blonde progresses, Marilyn becomes a kind of guardian angel for Norma Jean, someone she calls on when she needs courage and protection.
But it is that transformation that is recreated in every biopic: that of waif Norma Jean Baker into Marilyn Monroe the movie star, as a superhero given her power. And very few of the films that purport to tell us “what really happened” focus on what really made Marilyn so successful: her work.
From One to (Hopefully) Many
Her transition from model to actress was forged after she met influential agent Johnny Hyde, whose lover and protégé she would become. With Hyde’s guidance and contacts, her career took off, and by 1952, she was “the box office’s atomic blonde,” with three lead roles in that year’s releases and a contract with Fox.
Hollywood amplified her image as a s3x bomb. Promoting her starring role in Niagara (1953), the tagline was full of innuendo: “Marilyn Monroe and Niagara, a raging torrent of emotion that even nature cannot contain.”
Her name got top billing and her image was a massive presence on most posters. “If you are born with what the world calls s3x appeal, you can either let it destroy you or use it to your advantage in the hard struggle of show business. It is not always easy to choose the right path,” Marilyn told The Chicago Tribune in 1952.
The same year, one of her most enduring roles, that of the endearing gold-digger Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, would cement her in the dumb blonde persona that Marilyn found so frustrating and limiting. “She felt like she was constantly being put in these dumb blonde musical comedies, but even in those roles she is smart and shrewd,” noted Bolton.
Her image may have made her famous, but her talent made her endure. Her determination to be taken seriously took her to New York, to the Actor’s Studio. Yet even at the height of her popularity, her efforts were mocked, and in 1956 a whole book (a whole book!) was published entitled Will Acting Spoil Marilyn Monroe?
Biopics choose to forget that central part of the story, the one in which she became an extremely successful and well-paid actress, who challenged Fox for underpaying her and founded her own production company with Milton Greene, Marilyn Monroe Productions.
The exception, perhaps, is My Week with Marilyn (2011), a light-hearted remake of the troubled making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), the only film produced by Marilyn Monroe Productions.
Told from the perspective of her real-life (and enamored) set assistant Colin Clark, on whose memoirs the film is based, with actress Michelle Williams playing her, it is the only example that at least attempts to recreate Marilyn's allure. Williams captures Marilyn's sensuality without relying on her s3x-bomb image.
Although there are hints of the darkness that will consume her in the near future, the focus is on her work and her will to get ahead, as well as the crippling insecurity that Marilyn somehow transformed into brilliant comic moments.
And there is hope that something like this will happen again. Nehme believes there is a generational shift that is inspiring a reappraisal of Marilyn Monroe: “Younger film critics are coming back to her work. They are very interested in the role she played in creating her own persona.”
If you look at her work, she notes, “you start to see how unique and clever her choices are, to make the plays as funny as possible.” And if Dominik was surprised, as she said in a recent interview with Sight and Sound, that people still watched (and enjoyed) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I was not.
Her image may be universally familiar now, but watching her act is always a revelation. Her feline femininity in Niagara, her shy awkwardness in The Prince and the Showgirl, her witty banter in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Her awareness of how she was perceived permeates every performance and informs every choice.
So if she couldn't capture the star power that is Marilyn, the best thing Blonde can do is inspire more people to see her films.
