Director: Andrew Dominik
Writer: Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates
Director of Photography: Chayse Irvin
Editor: Adam Robinson
Music: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Notable Cast: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Julianne Nicholson, Lily Fisher, Bobby Cannavale, David Warshofsky, Xavier Samuel, Evan Williams, Garret Dillahunt, Rebecca Wisocky, Caspar Phillipson
I have never seen a Marilyn Monroe movie. Not one. More? I will never see a Marilyn Monroe movie. Look, I’m not gonna lie here, this is where a not insignificant percentage of you drop off permanently. But if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I hate old movies. Hate. And musicals? Forget it, scoop my fucking eyeballs out with a rusty spoon while waterboarding me, why don’t you? I know I know, what do you want from me? I was born in the modern era and that’s what I like. While I appreciate what old movies did to blaze a trail, the fact still remains, old movies suck. I know it. You know it. Most pretend they don’t, but the reality is they’re no better and oftentimes worse than average NYU student short films. The writing can be okay, but in general old movies are stilted, poorly acted, poorly edited stage dramas. And the music is truly, gobsmackingly fucking awful.
In my mind, modern filmmaking began in the 1960’s with Godard, Kubrick and 007. That’s when movies started to feel like movies, and it only got better from there (until the past 10 years, but alas…). All that is to say I have no affinity for Marilyn Monroe, she takes up no space in my subconscious, I’ve never owned a pillow or poster with her likeness on it, nor has anyone I have ever known, so far as I can remember. There is no cherished, sacred memory of dear Marilyn for me to have spoiled. She is merely a pop culture figure who lived and breathed and died before I was born. No more, no less.
Andrew Dominik is a filmmaker I greatly admire. While I appreciate Chopper for what it is, visceral, raw, genuine, I’m just not a huge fan. Same with Killing Them Softly. Where the near legend status was born for Dominik was with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, perhaps a top 20 all time film, if you ask me (and a subject for a future post I’m eager to get to). I saw Assassination at 11pm in Manhattan in a near empty theater and proceeded to be blown away. That doesn’t happen often, so when it does, I pay attention. If Dominik had done NOTHING after Jesse James, I’d still regard him as one of the greatest filmmakers ever, that is how much I love that flick and what it does. I remember being pumped for Killing Them Softly as a result, and leaving the theater somewhat disappointed. So, when I heard his next movie was going to be about Marilyn Monroe, my heart sank. As previously noted, I have next to no interest in her and was lamenting him wasting his talents on some biopic.
Then I saw the movie.
1ST 5 MINUTES
Watch the 1ST 5 Minutes of Blonde by clicking here...
I was not excited in the least for this movie. I saw no trailers, read no reviews. It wasn’t until I opened Netflix one night I even knew it’d been released. That was how severe my lack of interest was. And then the autoplay thing happened where Netflix just starts playing a clip of the film whose thumbnail you’re hovering over, and it was the part where Marilyn’s on the red carpet for the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And while I know it is not the 1ST 5 Minutes, which we’ll get to, it was part of MY 1ST 5 Minutes with this film. You’ve got exploding flashbulbs, whip pans, a sound drop, a scream, lush photography, a dope music cue… I turned to my wife and asked her if we could watch it right then and there. I was fucking hooked. It’s a nearly three-hour movie and it was already past 9:00 PM. Apparently, I have an affinity for late night screenings of Dominik flicks? My wife is the best and always accedes to my desires, cinematically speaking. And this was no different.
We started the film and I was immediately smacked in the face by that obnoxious Netflix logo/gong, which to me, usually signifies complete garbage. Netflix is the fucking worst, their original shows are almost as universally terrible as their original films are terminally forgettable. My friend gave me a password, which was how I even had Netflix in the first place to even see Blonde was released. Their new policy makes this now impossible, but I’m resourceful, and can watch this film whenever I like, despite the fact it has not been and by all appearances will never be released on physical media like 4K Blu. Some Netflix films get the Criterion treatment, but that’s for their Oscar bait mainstream crap that offends no one. Blonde is simply too controversial, artistic, and challenging to ever get a fair shake by the scumbags who police that shit.
Plan B logo comes up next. Better! Then the Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score kicks in, and we see a few quick shots separated by fades to black, and deduce we’re seeing photographers taking pictures of Marilyn and the famous billowing dress on the subway grates moment, all timed to the music perfectly, and then we see a slightly extended shot of a 1950’s film crew worker adjusting one of the giant Klieg lights, his back to us, like a God summoning Promethean fire. Then another crewman turning a light, and another, to where we see the inner workings of this old filmmaking equipment and it is GLORIOUS! All these little gears turning, insanely dope old tech. Cut to our first extended look at Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, completely overexposed to the point she looks angelic, spectral even. The music continues…
The title “Blonde” comes onscreen, followed by “Los Angeles 1933.” Remember how a short time ago I relayed my utter hatred for old films? Oddly enough, I absolutely LOVE that era in terms of the reality for the people trying to make it in movies back in the 30’s, 40’s and even 50’s. Can you imagine moving to L.A. in the 1930’s to make it in the pictures? What the fuck would you even do? How do you even begin? How do you get there? Train? There’s no internet, no real research you can do. What, you just show up to a studio and ask for work? It boggles my mind how ANYONE back then was able to make it, yet make it some did, and for an elite few, to stratospheric heights. Actual immortality. That’s so wild to me.
But it all begins somewhere, even for icons, and for Marilyn it begins with a childhood in Los Angeles, of all places. Can you believe growing up in L.A. back then? Amazing. You’d think she was from some Podunk Midwest town, somewhere dusty and plain, but no, Marilyn was one of the few movie stars who was actually FROM Los Angeles.
When we cut to Marilyn as a little girl, played by Lily Fisher in what may just be the best child performance I have ever seen, considering how young she is and the emotions she needs to convey (her eyes are incredibly large and expressive), she’s riding in a car with her mother, Gladys, played by Julianne Nicholson (an actress I first saw on Law & Order and immediately thought was going places, so it was good seeing her here). This sequence is filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which, you should know, I’m an absolute sucker for a boxy 4:3 cinematic presentation. I love the dimensions. Don’t get me wrong, I love some super wide 2:40:1 anamorphic shit too, but there’s just something about the boxy format, especially when dealing with the past of almost 100 years ago (which is fucking insane when you think about it. Marilyn Monroe grew up almost a century ago? Fuck).
The cinematography here, aside from the dope 4:3, is amazing. A beautiful, washed out, sun dappled palette, that belies the horrors forthcoming. It seems little Marilyn’s mother has a birthday surprise for her. What could it be?
She leads Marilyn down a dark corridor with her eyes covered until revealing the surprise… a slightly scuffed and worn framed picture of Marilyn’s father, who the little girl has apparently never met. The shot of the picture with Nicholson’s arm extending from the upper left corner and pointing, is when I really knew this picture would be fantastic. I already had hints, but here is where it was cemented. And the way the music plays continuously throughout this entire sequence is nothing short of genius. It works almost too good, like the score in Under The Skin, like the film itself composed the score somehow, and not a human being, or I guess, two human beings in this instance. Music is so fucking important to a picture’s success, and too many filmmakers give it such short shrift, which is why I think modern day cinema sucks balls. I rarely hear a score I want to purchase. In fact, the Blonde score, along with the soundtrack singles they released for HBO’s The Idol (a fantastic show that explores similar themes of the malevolence of fame and L.A., and was similarly dismissed by the same idiotic critics of this film), are the only soundtracks I’ve purchased in the last couple of years. Really unfortunate.
Then there’s an amazing over the shoulder push in on the picture of the father, where in the middle of the shot we see Marilyn’s mother’s face reflected in the picture, as it glides over the father’s face, right before she takes the picture off the wall. She has bizarre dialogue… how the father has a beautiful, important name, but one she can’t reveal. He clearly looks like Clark Gable. Something’s off. And creepy. She brings the picture closer to Norma Jeane, but won’t let her even hold it, and tells her no one can know about it, and she can’t tell anyone she’s even seen the picture. The shot of Julianne Nicholson’s face throughout is great. There’s this weird lens flare (speaking of which, this movie has some of the best lens flares I have ever seen, none so good as here and the scene when filming Some Like It Hot where she flips out) or something going on, sorry I’m not a D.P., but it almost completely washes her face out, and raises the tension considerably. The mother is not all there. Especially after Norma Jeane asks of her father, “But, where is he?” and her mother kind of looks off, half out of it, and we hear the sounds of a fly buzzing. YES!
Then we cut to a fantastic quick zoom in of an old time telephone ringing and then whip pan over to a shot of Nicholson’s hands shakily carrying a lit match over to a cake with candles in it. “Mmm. My hands are shaking. Is this room vibrating? In California, you can’t tell what’s real and what’s just yourself.” What a line! And it rings true for me as someone who lived in L.A. for a few years. I’d sometimes be lying on the couch watching TV, and swear the apartment was shaking slightly. It was unnerving. Doesn’t happen to me on the East Coast, but living out there it’d happen routinely, so I empathize with Mommy here!
We then cut to a scene, shot from inside a dresser drawer, where she talks about how Norma Jeane used to sleep in that drawer when she was a baby because they were so poor, “but it was good enough for us, wasn’t it?” She shuts the drawer on the camera, plunging us into black, and that’s the 1ST 5 Minutes of Blonde! I don’t know about you, but I’m hooked. This is already a super weird flick, skewed perspectives, push-ins, zooms, interesting sound design, fantastic music, great performances, sweetness and terror, foreboding as all hell. As a biopic, maybe this movie fails, I don’t know. But as a horror flick about Hollywood? It’s fucking amazing, and in my mind, the best movie of the past 5 years, easily. And it is all on display in the 1ST 5 Minutes.
2ND 5 MINUTES
Oh yeah, this movie is so good, we’re doing a goddamn 2ND 5 Minutes! Slow push-in on Norma Jeane’s mother as she plays a somber, slow version of Fur Elise on the piano, as a poster of Charlie Chaplin in City Lights looks on ominously (great foreshadowing here). As usual, the shot of the mother is washed out, always like she’s only half there. We now get our first taste of the magical realism that pops up from time to time, as we push in on the picture of Norma Jeane’s alleged father, and hear him speak in voiceover, then his lips start moving as he finishes the monologue on screen. He promises he will one day return and claim her. Norma Jeane sleeps peacefully, or so it seems.
The next sequence is an absolute standout, with Norma Jeane’s mother taking her on a car ride through a Hollywood that is now a literal hell pit filled with fire, smoke and ash. The music here is incredibly evocative and mood inducing, dark and insistent, as Norma Jeane and her mother drive further up into the Hills, toward the blaze. Lily Fisher is unbelievably good here, really connotes the abject terror a child her age would be in, being taken care of by an unhinged lunatic who is seemingly suicidal. It’s harrowing to watch. Imagine being a little kid, and your one source of security and stability in this world is neither secure nor stable, but rather patently nuts? And on top of that, little Norma Jeane forgot her stuffed tiger, her most prized possession, which for anyone who has kids or remembers being a kid, forgetting your little stuffy or blanky is world ending type shit! It’s upsetting to watch. My wife had a very tough time with this entire sequence of Norma Jeane as a little girl. She loves the film, and has watched it with me at least 3 times, but she gets emotional at this sequence every time, which to me shows how powerful it is. The images of the fire, the ash floating in the apartment, the wide shots inside the car as they plunge deeper into the smoke, all accompanied by some of the best music ever put to celluloid.
The rest of the flick
The continuation of the childhood sequence just gets darker from here, with Norma Jeane’s mother slamming the poor girl’s head into the car’s dashboard when the child has the temerity to ask a question about her father.
We cut to a bathtub scene, the mother is naked, the child is naked, it’s hard to watch, like you shouldn’t be allowed to view this intimate moment. It’s immediately uncomfortable. When Norma Jeane’s mother tries to drown her in the bathtub, and Ana de Armas kicks in with the narration (can I just note how much I love when narration pops in unexpectedly in a movie that is not narrated? It works SO WELL here!) explaining her mother’s reasoning for wanting to kill “the child,” it’s great. Unexpected and oddly touching, making you sympathize, ever so briefly, with an apparent child killer. It’s really courageous filmmaking and from the little I’ve read, a lot of people stopped watching before we even see her as “Marilyn Monroe.” I simply don’t understand such philistinism. It’s obviously a work of art, which is evident in the 1ST 5 Minutes. Not all art satiates. I wish more people would understand this. But I sometimes have an affinity for the darker, more macabre aspects of this life, perhaps because nothing so dark ever touched my life at a young age, at least, not that I can actively remember.
The rest of the film can be divided into 4 parts. Marilyn’s early career and rise/Cass and Eddy tryst, marriage to and divorce from Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller sequence, JFK sequence/the end. I’ll get to each part in equal measure, but the clear standout is once Adrien Brody appears repeating the word “Magda” over and over and over again in narrative whisper. Films produce an emotional reaction in me that is oftentimes hard to verbalize and express intellectually, odd as I am writing this Substack and trying to do the very thing which I find difficult. Such is life. As soon as the Miller sequence begins, with an amazing washed-out exterior shot of 1950’s Astor Place in Manhattan as Miller’s typed pages are whipped by the fierce wind, I’m nearly in tears, and that is not a joke. I sometimes see something so breathtaking in film that I don’t cry, per se, but my eyes fill with water and I feel something in my gut. I felt this numerous times over the course of this film.
The first section with her rise to stardom and troika love affair with Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward “Eddy” G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) is a fascinating look at the dichotomy of those who grew up in fame versus those who merely grew up in L.A. The commonality being “abandoned” by their father, only the men were abandoned emotionally while Marilyn was abandoned both emotionally and physically. Their jealousy of her being able to create who she is out of whole cloth, while they are tied to their family name and can never escape the shadows of their famous fathers (even though they’d be abject nobodies without their fathers’ names). It’s really good stuff. One of my favorite bits is when Marilyn goes to meet Cass and Eddy at the actor’s studio, and finds them together at a piano playing Fur Elise, which ties nicely into the beginning with her mother, and Cass gets up to slow dance with Marilyn, while Eddy plays a different, wonderful piece of ethereal music on the piano. The scene is simultaneously sweet and eerie, but again the music carries so much weight and conveys so much that it makes the filmmaker’s job a little easier.
I love the way Dominik shoots the first time they all make love, with these odd stretched out images. It was a nice way to illustrate the way sex turns us inside out and brings us to new places completely outside our normal existence.
Norma’s audition for Don’t Bother To Knock is another insane display of Ana de Armas’ range and honesty as an actress. She’s so good in this scene, only to be summarily dismissed as a generic hot chick by the assembled men doing the screen test (their chuckle at her having read Dostoevsky is a nice touch). But she gets the part, and why? Because the scumbag director thinks she has a nice ass. That’s it. Her ass. This is the world Marilyn Monroe inhabited. For some reason this makes people angry, not at how it was, but for Dominik simply presenting it as it was. Truly bizarre.
But my favorite part of this section of the film is the scene on the beach at night, shot in widescreen, in a truly sumptuous black and white that is just so thick and lush for being monochromatic. Would love to know how they did it, but whenever I read those in-depth articles in American Cinematographer, my eyes glaze over as the technobabble becomes too much to overcome.
The troika talk of Gemini, the fated twins, and look to the stars in the sky where Gemini is, and we get one of my favorite shots in the whole film, an extended push in to outer space. YES! Outer fucking space. That’s one of the moments that brought tears to my eyes, cause it’s perfect, yet totally unexpected. An extended shot of the cosmos, complete with nebulae, in a movie about a 1950’s Hollywood actress? And then the stars turn into sperm, which segues into Marilyn’s first pregnancy, which she ends up terminating to make Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in a wild, fiery dream sequence where she seems to rescue herself as a baby from the drawer that was her crib. Powerful shit, shot and scored magnificently.
The next section deals with her marriage to and divorce from Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, known simply as, The Athlete. This section is not as long as the others, but contains just as much greatness, including my favorite shot in the film, which we’ll get to. This section introduces the element of Norma’s absentee father writing her letters, promising her that they’ll soon meet in person. This leads to an odd moment on the red carpet for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which I detailed in the intro, where Norma’s constantly wondering if her father is about to show up. It’s incredibly sad and deflating each time she’s disappointed, the first time being when she thinks her father is waiting at her hotel, only to find DiMaggio waiting instead, and not only that, waiting so he could propose to her, in what is probably the most awkward scene in the film. Needless to say, they’re completely mismatched, he’s still the Italian kid from the neighborhood that made it big by being able to hit a ball with a stick, while she’s a movie star from the West Coast whose whole image is about sex and fantasy. She is also much too smart, thoughtful and wordly for him. This conflict reaches its zenith as she films the infamous billowing dress on the subway grate scene for The Seven Year Itch.
Dominik realizes this is the whole thing, the iconic moment, arguably what Marilyn is most famous for. And he does not hold back. What a sequence, shot in mostly slow motion, with that fantastic Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score, alternating between color and black and white, as well as different aspect ratios, it’s a fantastic, but quite dark look into the leering, voyeuristic, objectifying nature of Marilyn’s world, and the salivating men who live to ogle and consume her. At one point toward the end of the sequence, the camera is behind Marilyn, pushing in as the wind blows her dress up, revealing her underwear, and as the dress billows, the camera racks focus, her dress goes blurry, and into focus comes Bobby Cannavale as DiMaggio in the crowd, looking on in disgust, with a permanent frown etched on his twisted face. His lone, stoic, pissed off mug, amongst the hundreds, even thousands of men laughing and clapping and hollering, is quite a sight. Easily the best shot in the whole film, and my Favorite Shot, which is saying something, because I could easily name 10 different shots in this flick that could vie for not only best shot in the film but one of the best shots I have ever seen. In case it’s not clear, I love this movie!
And look, I’ll be honest, I won’t pretend to understand dramatically and thematically the varying aspect ratios and switches from color to black and white and use of various film stocks. I read somewhere that the color stuff is when she is Norma Jeane and the black and white is when she’s Marilyn, but it doesn’t seem to fit so neatly. All I know is it works. It feels right. You can sense the voice and the hand of the filmmaker at work, but it doesn’t distract, far from it. It elevates the film to a realm beyond. Much like how David Lynch refuses to explain his films or do director commentaries, I don’t really want to know the whats and whys and hows of the filmmaking techniques. I like the magic. And speaking of Lynch, I would LOVE to know what he thought of this film. Hard to believe he didn’t go wild over it, but who knows?
And now, we get to the Arthur Miller section. Just sublime. Hard to quantify why exactly this entire section resonates for me, but it’s the true beating heart of the film, with an absolutely towering performance by Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, known simply as, The Author. One of the reasons for my fondness of this section is the way Arthur and Marilyn’s relationship loosely mirrors my own relationship, as I am a big nosed, bespectacled Jewish guy from NYC who writes, while my wife is a bit of a blonde bombshell I met while living in L.A. The way this section starts is genius, as detailed above, with the audition for Magda. Dominik deftly uses a freeze frame and blurry POV to liven things up a bit, until we get to the tender scene between Norma and Arthur in the bar/cafe, where she blows his mind with the analysis that Magda couldn’t speak English and just pretended to be able to read a poem given to her. Brody’s reaction to this is so true, so well played, you can really feel how these two seemingly disparate creatures fell in love with each other. I almost always get teary eyed at this part, it’s incredibly well done, simply shot, with a fantastic end shot in vertical 9:16. Followed by newsreel inspired footage of their marriage announcement. The crew did a remarkable job recreating iconic moments throughout Marilyn’s life. Perfectly seamless.
One of my favorite scenes among many is when Marilyn is walking through their Connecticut house. She’s happy, in love, secure, taken care of, maybe for the first time in her life, and the music reflects this. Until she suddenly comes upon a page in Arthur’s typewriter, the music abruptly stops as the camera zooms in on the typed page, revealing that Arthur has broken his promise to not use their conversations and experiences in his own dramatic work. As she reads, the color temperature of Norma’s shot fades from warm to cool as she realizes the implications. The first cracks are appearing. This is what I’m here for. Take me on a fucking ride! Slap me in the face, don’t put me to sleep! Dominik delivers like a mofo. And can I just comment for a second on Norma calling all the men in her life “Daddy?” It’s weird and kind of obvious, yet amazing at the same time. It’s so singular, in a way I can’t really articulate. But it works. The way Ana de Armas says “Daddy” in that cutesy pie hushed voice is great. “Oh Daddy,” indeed.
We then cut to one of my favorite shots in the film, a simple black and white shot of Arthur sitting on a chair, pensive, thoughtful, and he says my Favorite Line in the film, in that great Brooklyn accent, “Darling, where do you go when you disappear?” Like the shot, it is a very simple line, but full of so much meaning, and ultimately, what dooms their love. She’s too much for Miller. And the way she answers, desperately begging him not to make her go back to Hollywood, how she just barely escaped with her life. His reaction is to merely keep staring at her, he has no answers, and no idea really how to handle someone like this. He doesn’t understand her at a base level.
He keeps all this to himself though, as the next scene demonstrates. He’s speaking on the phone with a friend, focusing only on the good aspects of Marilyn, her sweetness and inherent goodness, as she goes through pregnancy with their child. “It wouldn’t occur to Norma to be cruel.” We then cut to what is arguably the most controversial scene in the film, though for the life of me, I have no idea why. As someone who is not very political, I take things as they are. When I see a pregnant woman imagining a conversation between herself and the unborn child she carries within, I find it interesting and touching, almost heartbreaking, considering the dialogue. I think I read something that said this scene could cause women to second guess terminating a pregnancy! Oh no! Can’t have that! What is this modern-day bullshit that only allows one experience when it comes to abortion, like somehow if a woman is not excited or, heaven forbid, even upset at having to end her pregnancy, it means she is some crypto Nazi fascist who wants to subjugate women? I know I’m being reductive, but have you seen some of the commentary around this aspect of the film? It’s absurd, bordering on insane.
In the scene where Marilyn communicates with her baby, and externalizes the conversation she has with herself, still wrapped up in guilt over her first pregnancy, the baby expresses fear that she’ll “hurt” it like she did the last time. It is very tough, incredibly gut-wrenching material, in my eyes, and it makes me emotional each time I see it. The way it is shot through a “thorny” rose bush only adds to the drama by using a potent metaphor for the entire issue. The final, epic rack focus from Norma to the rose is one of the best shots in the movie.
She eventually loses the baby (in a great horror scene on the beach), which starts her final descent into madness, drugs and psychosis, and this section of the film is probably some of my favorite shit in the whole movie. The dark aspects of Hollywood and fame are something that gets me up in the morning. It’s one of my favorite themes to explore, and when done well, which is rare, it really transcends the form.
From her being constantly drugged up by studio doctors to keep her anxiety and freak-outs in check while filming Some Like It Hot, to her driving through Beverly Hills and seeing all the fathers out with their families for the 4th of July, repeating over and over through heavy tears, “Look, Norma Jeane, that man is your father,” to purposely (?) crashing her car into a tree, to coming home to Arthur, whose face is literally blank and distorted (great use of CGI), to the truly horrific and hallucinatory sequence of her hearing a baby cry over the incessant ringing of an unanswered telephone (much like the unanswered telephone in the beginning with Norma’s mother. Who’s on the other end?). The film, which up to this point had merely been flirting with horror film tropes, now fully embraces them, and takes the flick to a whole new level.
Which leads to my Favorite Scene in the film. Norma Jeane is distraught, out of it, inconsolable, and her trusty make-up man, Whitey, who is also an abusive piece of shit under his surface niceness, shows up to get her ready for the red-carpet premiere of Some Like It Hot. He starts doing her make-up, despite her tear strewn face, as Norma pleads for Marilyn to come, like she’s summoning some entity from another dimension to possess her. As you’ve seen in this very article, I flit between calling her Norma and Marilyn constantly, not really knowing which name to call her by, which exemplifies what the film is ultimately saying about the duality of fame, and the split between public and private personas. The way Norma talks about Marilyn in the third person, like she is some separate being and not an integral part of who Norma is. She sits there in the mirror, begging and praying for Marilyn to not abandon her, Whitey soothes her, keeps repeating “she’s coming, she’s coming, she’s almost here,” and the camera slowly pans around her to the mirror image, where we see “Marilyn Monroe,” not crying or upset, but laughing and blowing an air kiss, perfectly made up for the premiere, her public image a complete subversion of who she really is.
The soundtrack kicks in with one of the best tracks Cave and Ellis composed for the film, I Love, Love, Love You All, and we cut to a wide black and white shot of Los Angeles at night, the spotlights shining in the distance (almost the same music cue was used for the beginning “Hollywood on fire” sequence, which is fitting, as both scenes represent a truly hellish vision of Los Angeles, one where it is literally in flames, and another where demonic forces devour you). I don’t know what it is, but this music track with that shot of old Hollywood is just everything. Again, hard to put the emotions it brings up into words, but it encapsulates everything I feel and have experienced about the dual light and dark of Hollywood and the movie industry in general. “A sunny place for shady people,” to paraphrase Somerset Maugham.
Arthur, Marilyn, and the man who raped her to start her career, Mr. Z(anuck) (David Warshofsky, a criminally underrated actor), show up in a limo (love the cigarette hanging out the chauffeur’s mouth) to throngs of men and (a few) women clamoring for Marilyn. She gets out of the car, the music swells, and we get a slow-motion POV dolly shot of the men along the red carpet screaming Marilyn’s name, but something is off, their mouths are abnormally large, as they literally and metaphorically want to consume Marilyn. CGI is overused in film, and often looks terrible, but when used in select doses, to augment the reality of our characters, it can be transcendent, like here. The camera eventually finds Marilyn again (the way the camera seems to float through this scene is breathtaking), basking in the demonic adoration, as Arthur Miller looks around, concerned, almost too aware of the implications of the obsession she provokes in others, and the abyss he’s being pulled into. He is not comfortable in these surroundings. Cut to inside the theater, the score goes very dissonant as abstract images play on the movie screen, the premiere ends, and cut to black. So ends the Arthur Miller sequence of the film, and the last time this film will have anything approaching a happy fate for our starlet. While it didn’t seem possible for this film to get any darker, the next sequence truly plumbs the depths of celebrity hell.
Her marriage to Arthur Miller over, Marilyn disappears into a haze of drugs and alcohol. The next sequence of her doped up on the airplane intercut seamlessly with her at premieres of her films like they occupy the same space is a really interesting visualization of the jumbled life of an inebriated and addicted celebrity who never knows if they’re coming or going. The editing here is phenomenal. But the standout is the entire JFK sequence, from her arriving to his hotel, being delivered by the Secret Service pimps “like meat” to his suite, where The President (as he’s called in the credits, played brilliantly by Caspar Phillipson, whose resemblance to JFK is so uncanny I half thought it was a deep fake and they actually put JFK’s digitized face onto an actor) brutalizes her sexually while his aides sit outside, completely unbothered by the assault taking place on the other side of those closed double doors. After JFK is done using her for sexual abuse, her beaten and bruised body is dragged back to her room, again past all the President’s aides whose nonchalance illustrates a darker reality about the 35th president and his “dalliances.” I swear, as a JFK assassination nut, and someone who is a great admirer of JFK and what he tried to do to turn this country around from being controlled by the intelligence apparatus initiated by Truman in WWII, I am almost of the belief that he deserved the fate that befell him that Fall day in Dallas. Almost.
One of the few missteps in the film must be highlighted here, though, as it bothers me every time I watch the film, and seems to be a late addition. After JFK’s assault, Marilyn is in an all white bathroom, urinating (in pain) on the toilet, looks screen left and the camera pans left until just a white screen remains, which then cuts to Norma waking up in a mud mask and screaming. Her make-up artist Whitey rushes in and they share a laugh over her confusion. The whole scene is really dumb and unnecessary, and then the camera pans left again, fades to white, the pan continues until finding Marilyn standing naked in front of the mirror in a white bathroom, where she realizes she is pregnant, yet again (but the fetus looks different, there’s a darkness to it, as it was conceived during rape). In my mind, this part was shot and intended to play without that mud mask interruption. I have no idea if this is true or not, but I feel like Dominik or someone close to him felt there was such unrelenting darkness for so long at this point that they needed a moment of levity or something, and they just shoe-horned in this obvious non sequitur to lighten things. But it just doesn’t work, and interrupts the flow of the scene as originally intended, where Marilyn’s new pregnancy follows the rape by JFK. In a nearly three hour movie, there’s bound to be missteps, and thankfully, this is the only one in the whole film, but it’s a big one.
Here we come to the scariest scene in the film, where Marilyn wakes up naked, the film stock now some greenish night vision, the veins in Marilyn’s chest really pronounced, creating a sick, ghastly look. She wakes up in a daze, looks around, and as she gets out of the bed, we see a man in a trenchcoat with his back against the wall in her room, unmoving. She doesn’t notice him. This is easily one of the most terrifying shots of the last few years of cinema or television. The reveal of that guy just standing there watching her is so fucking scary. As she makes her way through the house, she sees more men in suits and trenchcoats with flashlights in her house, until they finally abduct her and bring her to some sort of operating room. Marilyn starts laughing, thinking it is all a dream, and the sequence is shot in a truly hallucinatory fashion. The doctors and nurses assemble for what will be Marilyn’s third and final abortion in the film. And I swear, the way the music compliments the abstract, dramatic lighting choices here is nothing short of wondrous. It works so well, and is incredibly unsettling as we get a second POV shot from inside Marilyn’s vagina as the medical instrument is inserted and we see the doctor’s eye peering in at the fetus he is about to terminate. I get why people think this is too much, but art should never be safe, or comforting, in my view, and the more uncomfortable a piece of art makes you, the more we should all examine why that is. Is it really because it’s tasteless, or because you don’t want to face the harsh reality of what this kind of shit entails? Who knows really. My point being, when art doesn’t provoke, is it really art, or just a palliative to put you to sleep? Go watch your shitty superhero movies, I’ll take these kind of upsetting, unsettling films over those anytime, anywhere. Blonde is what art should be, what art should aspire to be. Impossible to overstate how good this film is, and from Netflix!
Later on, Marilyn finds out Cass Chaplin is dead, and that he had a final gift for her, one she is not really interested in receiving, perhaps because she senses on some pre-conscious level that it contains her ultimate undoing. The package contains her old stuffed tiger, and a note which reveals, in devastating fashion, that the man she thought was her father writing her those letters, was in actuality Cass, either fucking with her in the most despicable way imaginable, or perhaps trying to instill some hope in her that the father she has so desperately wanted to know all those years was finally going to show up. Needless to say, this years long emotional manipulation precipitates her ultimate death at the hands of booze and drugs, either intentional or not. One of the final images as she dies is that of her father’s picture, surrounded by heavenly clouds, then a starfield, then extinguished fireworks. Darkness.
The biggest star in the world, dead. Someone who should have had everything, in reality, had nothing tethering her to this world. And yet there’s still people that are like, “why didn’t you show Marilyn starting a production company? Or marching for civil rights?” Because honestly, who doesn’t want to watch a three hour movie about someone starting a fucking company?!? The critics of this film are not serious people, they’re silly children who need a binky and a baba, and maybe a cookie. This film is about how people can hold on to childhood trauma throughout their lives, and no matter how “successful” they become, that inner child’s hurt and pain never goes away, and in fact invites more and more dark forces and energy into their life. Norma Jeane was unable to break the cycle of trauma she inherited from her mother and deadbeat father. Despite all her riches and fame, she succumbed, rather than transcended.
Blonde is the kind of movie that reminds you why movies are the ultimate art form. They combine the visual, the auditory, and the literary into one delicious package. Blonde is its final form. And for that, I am grateful. Ana de Armas turns in a truly monumental performance, absent any hint of self-consciousness, and Adrien Brody nearly matches her in terms of how he inhabited his role. Both are award worthy performances, that is, if we didn’t live in a joke of a country that detests challenging works of art.
The One Sheet
For such a great film, it pains me, PAINS ME, as a collector and lover of film posters, to admit that the marketing campaign for Blonde was fucking terrible. This must be where Netflix took over, as I do not see Dominik’s fingerprints on these at all. But who knows really what went wrong here. Is it Netflix, because they feel marketing isn’t as important when it’s just getting someone to click a thumbnail as opposed to having them come to a movie theater? Is it because the powers that be hated the film and decided to just phone it in? Whatever the reason, the following posters are what we, unfortunately, are left with.
First is the main poster most of you are probably familiar with. It is a super dull, super boring, extreme close up of Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. It’s terrible, and gives exactly ZERO clue as to what kind of film this would be. I can understand why Marilyn fans watching the film based on this one sheet would be pissed. This poster promises some Lifetime Movie of the Week shittiness, not an avant garde, art film tour de force. The tagline is good, though. I do love a good tagline.
This next one is a takeoff on pinup magazines from back in the 40’s and 50’s, I guess? Not terrible, but too cutesy and kitschy for such a dark film. Again, this poster gives zero hint to what the actual movie will be about. Total failure. And why is it Sept. 8th on the sign she is holding but at the bottom it says Sept 28th? Is this even a real poster or a fan made one? Hard to tell these days.
The next one is pretty bad, as well, just from a graphic design perspective. It’s boring. Can you imagine wanting to buy this and put on your wall? I certainly can’t, and I’ve bought literally hundreds of posters over the years. Yet, this poster does something the others don’t, and at least alludes to the darkness you’ll find.
The next poster is another takeoff on a magazine cover, this time I’m guessing Vanity Fair, based on the font? Interesting insofar as that idea goes, but it still falls flat. Not only that, I’m not even sure this is an “official” poster. I usually go to IMPAwards.com for my digital poster needs, and if it is not listed there it can sometimes mean it is not a real poster, but a fan creation. That may be the case here.
This last poster is easily my favorite, but still one I wouldn’t purchase. At least this one has interesting, original imagery, and gives some clue to the dual nature of Norma Jeane/Marilyn. And in the film, Norma Jeane is distraught and emotional, her mirror image is the happy, perfect Marilyn Monroe. Here they got it all jumbled up. Unreal. And like with the last poster, I cannot confirm this was an official one-sheet.
Netflix is tough. After the film was released, they would use various thumbnails in place of a proper poster, like a still from the film with the word Blonde on the bottom. I just don’t think Netflix gives much of a shit about marketing. It’s all about the landing page, pushing you to watch this or that disposable piece of shit. Would love to see the metrics for Blonde, and where people stopped the movie, never to return for the rest. Truly mind boggling considering just how great the 1ST 5 Minutes are.
I gave Netflix a lot of shit in this post, deservedly, but I give them nothing but the biggest kudos for taking a chance on material like this and trusting Dominik and his vision. Much like David Lynch/Showtime/Twin Peaks Season 3, I have no earthly idea how Blonde got funded, produced and released, but I am extremely happy it did. Feel blessed to have been alive to see this film.
How about you? Was this film too much, or just right? Does the 1ST 5 Minutes tell you exactly what kind of film you are about to watch? I certainly think so!
See you in two…