Blonde…

Strap in folks, this is a long one.

I went into this movie trying my best not to let the controversies have any effect on my opinion. I definitely understood the criticism, but every time I'd hear the film simply described as exploitative, defaming, and undignified, I thought "Isn't that the point?". Obviously it's not something any of us WANT to see, but I thought it'd be using a fictitious approach to tell very real truths that no one wants to admit about parasocial relationships and the fact that so much "entertainment" was created from brutality.

Now, having seen the movie, I totally agree with what everyone is saying, though I don't think it's quite as simple as everyone makes it out to be.

When you're making a film about exploitation, you have to ride a very fine line to make sure the film itself doesn't become as exploitive as the characters in it. You need to maintain some objectivity and simply view events for what they are. Unfortunately, this movie isn't objective. It doesn't depict any of Norma-Jean / Marilyn's aspirations, humour, intelligence, and pretty much any molecule of happiness in favour of only portraying all the negativity of this fictional "what if" version of the person. In fact, one of the ways they rewrote history was by making her childhood significantly worse then any reports indicate. Obviously this is a fictional interpretation, but to me the narrative of a happy and naive person suddenly being shocked by the darkness of the industry sounds far more intriguing than a person simply bouncing from one abuser to another for 3 hours.

I absolutely don't think they should ignore the trauma and manipulation, because making a totally happy movie centered around this person would go against the entire thesis of this story. Sometimes it's necessary to have a dark movie. Some movies need to show us sides of life which we'd much rather pretend don't exist. BUT, when the film loses all humanity and the respect for the character (and the real life person), then that darkness serves no purpose anymore.

Schindler's List is obviously a very difficult movie, and it's meant to confront you with the awful reality that millions of people went through. But that movie isn't just a 3 hour compilation of torture. It shows us life outside of the darkness so that the difficult scenes have a genuine impact. Blonde on the other hand is pretty much exactly that. There's no story in this movie beyond Marilyn just being abused. Never for any particular reason, never correlating to a larger goal or point. That's when it becomes exploitive.

I don't want to be one of those people who simply resort to saying this movie is basically a porno, because this is not meant to be enjoyed and it's designed for reflection on how the facade of a celebrity is a sham. But that idea doesn't come across very well when the only thing you do to reflect on it is to have your character get assaulted non stop.

There are constantly scenes that continue affirming the sexist ideas of the time, and not in a subtextual "That's the point" kind of way. Most scenes show little to know awareness of this, they just accept that this version of Norma is submissive and unintelligent. A large portion of the film is about her relying on the men around her to fill the void of an absent father, in fact the very next scene after the climactic moments of Marilyn and Joe's relationship is the introduction of her next relationship with Arthur Miller. It feels strange that they focus on this when clearly she couldn't have become famous without a certain amount of assertiveness and guts. Shoehorning in the narrative of her having a victim mentality every second of her life just doesn't make sense, and it takes away any possibility of tension.

There's no genuine psychological breakdown, or any attempt to create pathos and examine why this version of Marilyn has a victim mentally and feels she can't fight back. The worst part is that since she spends 90% of the movie either crying, naked, throwing up, or getting assaulted, it stops becoming confronting or poignant in any way. It normalises it. When it stops being shocking, that's when the film seems to engage in the same exploitation it sets out to critique.

Now, obviously this is the main point of discussion, but all this controversy definitely takes away from the fact that there were people who didn't write or direct this movie who worked their butts off in their roles. Chayse Irvin's cinematography perfectly captures an old school, dream like quality which is a very fitting contrast to the subject matter; and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis deliver a very thoughtful and atmospheric ambience as per usual. I did find the production design to not be very immersive, but I think that may have been intentional to create a claustrophobic feeling where you're not exactly supposed to look around the world in wonder. Personally I would've thought it'd be wise to show the bustle of the city and the lifestyle of the time in order to then contrast the darkness, but that's barely the biggest issue.

I do have a criticism about the format changes throughout the movie as well. Different scenes are shown in different aspect ratios, and sometimes it changes mid scene. Sometimes it's black and white, sometimes it's in colour. This can be a very powerful filmmaking tool to separate sections of the film, but it needs to be very clear what each change represents. Here it feels like it happens for no reason. Sometimes we're in black and white 16:9 watching her as an adult, then it's 4:3 in colour as a kid, then that same section changes to black and white.

In interviews Andrew Dominik says there's no story reasons for it, but these changes are meant to replicate the movies and photos that we'd recognise from that time. So if we're in a scene where her most recent film was in black and white 16:9, that'll be the style, or if it was in colour 2:35:1, so on and so forth. It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't come across at all. The idea kind of loses its meaning since there are lots of scenes before she's an actress, and most of the time we don't even know what time we're in or what projects she's working on so we're not going to register what fuckin aspect ratio correlates. So in execution, it just felt like a way to keep the audience on their toes.

In fact, these interviews that I watched for this review were quite revealing. You can tell a lot about a movie from seeing how much conviction a director has in the press, and whenever Andrew Dominik was asked complicated questions about the thesis of this film or about his connection to Marilyn, he gave shallow answers that seemed as if he had barely given it thought. He seems to have very little interest in Marilyn as a person, and he doesn't seem to have a strong idea of what he wants this film to say. So it makes sense that very little energy was put into giving the character qualities we can relate to or admire, let alone giving her some respect as a person.

The movie is trying to be this very unconventional and subversive biopic, and on the surface that's absolutely true. However deep down this is in many ways a very basic and uninspired biopic which doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said in much more interesting ways. When you try to look into what this movie is actually trying to say, it's a very simple message of how real people can be damaged by the effect their persona has. I don't think it takes several graphic rape scenes and abortions to get that across. So now we have to go through all of that while gaining no new food for thought, in a movie which has no real cause and effect and thus no reason to be invested or care. Just as it seems the movie itself cares very little for Marilyn and often seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in watching her suffer. So it looks like I was wrong, this is indeed textbook exploitation.