Blonde (2022)

NC-17, which makes me nervous to even write about it.  I know that there's this political buzz about why this movie is NC-17.  Guys, it's pretty vulgar all throughout.  I honestly think that Marilyn is nude more of the movie than she isn't. There's a lot of sex stuff that's pretty graphic.  I choose not to write those words on my blog, but it leaves little to the imagination.  But the more upsetting thing about the movie are the forced abortions that happen in the movie.  There's domestic abuse of both the physical and emotional manner.  It's got a ton of language.  It's just misery for about three hours.  NC-17

DIRECTOR: Andrew Dominik

My hook today is about how everyone loves hyperbole.  We do.  Absolutely, everything is either the most or the least.  It's the best movie or the worst movie.  It's filthy or its innocent.  I know that my student didn't come up with this, but he's made it his own.  "This is definitely one of the movies of all time."  While I don't think that Blonde is great by any means --and I will be complaining about the movie for the majority of this blog --it's also not this travesty.  Do I think that Ana de Armas deserves the Oscar for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe? Probably not, but that's because I think the character is a little too Oscar-baity for me as opposed to the quality of her acting.  (The only reason that she would get it is for the misery that she probably had to subject herself to in the process of making this movie.) 

But the big one?  The "Does-this-deserve-to-be-NC-17?" question.  Gosh darn it, this one kind of annoys me.  I kind of already touched on it, but this is absolutely a vulgar movie of the worst kind.  For those in the know, Blonde is at the center of one of Fox News' many trumped up (pun intended) controversies.  As someone who is a Pro-Life Democrat (nobody likes me with that label), do I think that the movie has a Pro-Life message?  Yes.  It does and it is kind of insane that the message exists in a movie.  Do I think that the libs are slapping an NC-17 label on this to keep it quiet?  No.  That's the dumbest conspiracy theory today.  (I had to add today when I realized how bad conspiracy theories were getting.) Most of the film is about the sexualization of Marilyn Monroe / Norma Jean until she ultimately has to deal with mental and physical scarring from a world that demands that she be sexualized.  Now, I am making this movie, I would probably minimize the actual on-screen sex stuff.  But that's a take that is beyond my pay grade as a guy who has a self-funded blog with a minimal readership.  

But the movie really goes all in with the sex.  Here's me, devil's advocate, claiming that I get what Andrew Dominik is doing.  It's one thing to talk about Marilyn being sexualized.  It's something that is part of the collective consciousness.  But there's something cheeky about Marilyn's abuse in that light.  The sexualization of Marilyn Monroe was quickly recontextualized into something healthy.  By showing the sex and the violence that is associated with sexualization, the movie quickly becomes almost a horror movie when it comes to how Marilyn was treated.  And, as a guy who is objectively looking at the film, it works.  But then there's the problem with making the movie almost three hours long.  I talked a little bit about this with All Quiet on the Western Front.  Both of these movies are probably now known for being visceral portrayals of real-life atrocities.  But as time goes on in these very long films, the brutality becomes something it absolutely should not be: mundane.  If the goal of Blonde is to leave the film with the scarring that Marilyn went through, you can't keep going to the same well.  It just becomes something abhorrent, but oddly boring.  It's getting us desensitized to things that should still be traumatic by the end of the film.  Unfortunately, we were just waiting for the movie to end.  If the goal is to make people horrified by sex acts, but you just ended up making us accustomed to sex acts, what's the point?

I'm really going to go into a dangerous place with this next one.  Please go through the whole argument before you judge me because there is something I want to communicate quite badly.  In terms of structure and tone, there's something eerily similar between Blonde and The Passion of the Christ.  Breathe.  I'm not done. The structure of both films is about brutality.  These are movies that are meant to destroy and they absolutely do.  I remember sitting through The Passion of the Christ and everyone just sat watching the credits in silence.  It was a powerful experience.  I have a handful of DVDs that I own that I haven't watched my copies of.  Sometimes, it's just that I'm watching new movies all of the time.  But in the case of The Passion of the Christ, it's too much for me to view again.  I eventually will probably watch it, if for no other reason than watching it.  But I adored The Passion of the Christ while disliking, for the most part, Blonde.  Part of that comes from the end goal of the film.  The title The Passion of the Christ names Jesus "the Christ".  It comes from a place of religious reverence.  I am pretty sure that non-Christian audiences probably dislike that movie for the same reason that I don't really like Blonde.  It seems like a lot of torture for a time at the theater.  But when there is religious significance to the actions happening on screen, it becomes this moving experience.

This begs the question, then, am I so divorced from humanity that I can't watch Blonde as a moving experience? I don't know.  I think that I'm actually quite empathic when it comes to the plight of the individual.  After all, Death of a Salesman is one of my favorite plays.  I teach it every year and mourn the sacrifice of the common man.  (I'm a very good person, as you can tell by my blog.) But Marilyn is something different.  I applaud Andrew Dominik for regularly returning to the name "Norma Jean" throughout.  I love that Norma treats Marilyn like the other because it humanizes her.  But Marilyn Monroe is part of the cult of celebrity.  She transcends the cult of celebrity.  She's so rooted in who we are as Americans that it is hard to see her as a person.  And because Marilyn keeps the Marilyn voice, even when she identifies as Norma, there are no moments where I can't see Marilyn instead of Norma trapped inside the shell of Marilyn Monroe. Yes, there's empathy for the entire film.  It's not like I wasn't moved by it.  But in the same way that someone of a different faith views The Passion of the Christ, gaining little from the movie beyond the two-hour torture marathon, I gain little from the rape and torture of Marilyn Monroe for three-hours.  It's not Norma Jean.  It's cultural icon Marilyn Monroe and I don't worship at that cult.

It's not that I run out of things to say, but I always find myself returning to the following touchstone: "Is the world a bad place?" I may be treading on the same ground over-and-over again, but it is nice having it in one place.  When I was younger, I vascillated between thinking the world was mostly good with a few bad people and the inverse, that the world was bad with a few good people. As an adult, something in me is broken and I'm firmly convinced that we're not good and that only a few of us genuinely want to make the world a better place.  That's where I stand when I watch something like Blonde.  So many people are awful to Norma Jean.  Some of them make sense.  Considering that we're post #metoo, we know that people in power abuse those looking to survive.  The movie doesn't shy away from that and nor should it.  (Note: I just realized in this moment that I referenced Death of a Salesman, forgetting that Arthur Miller is a character in Blonde considering that he married Marilyn Monroe.) But I'm talking about Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson, Jr.  These characters confuse me and frustrate me about life.  I mean, that's the point.  Mission: Accomplished, movie.

Cass and Eddy intially represent this kind of sex-positive, no shame element to Marilyn's life.  If the entire world is trying to either sleep with her and use her, or shame her for her sexual history, Cass and Eddy are meant to be the alternative for that.  They seem to invite her into this secret circle of progressives who take care of Norma Jean as one of their own.  Yes, their actions are extremely sexual.  From an outside perspective, we acknowledge that their interactions were not completely altruistic.  But it also seemed like an alternative lifestyle.  (If Andew Dominik is politically motivated, which he may or may not be, it would scan that he presents the liberal left as wolves in sheeps' clothing.)  It's when she is forced to have her first abortion from seemingly Cass's child, they almost thrill in tortruing her. It all seems petty.  Now, I think we read up on this and the whole polyamorous relationship with Eddy and Cass was overblown for tabloid headlines.  But let's pretend that this was real.  Sure, it's written by someone who had to make villain characters.  But it just seems depressing to have these evil characters who have no motivation for their evil.  Marilyn is out of their lives and they still mentally scar her years later.  It actually would make a lot of sense if the filmmakers were taking a conservative position, showing that the Hollywood elite get their kicks out of misery.  That demonizing of the left is pretty standard.

I don't know about this movie, guys.  It's got some things.  But while I often rail about overly long runtimes, this movie's runtime is the thing that hurts it the most.  There's nothing to really gleam onto.  It's just bleak abuse for almost three hours.  Golly, we had to split it up over multiple nights and it was actively a chore to sit down and watch more of the movie. That's not good.