I loved this. I can understand why a lot of people don’t, and I need to preface the below by saying that I don’t want to try and invalidate anyone’s reactions to
Blonde. Clearly, people have good reasons for disliking or even hating it, especially since it deals with such triggering subject-matter in such a provocative and insensitive way. This post is just meant to explain my own positive reaction to the film, so please take it in that spirit…
Blonde is virtually a remake of one of my favourite Antonioni films,
La signora senza camelie: there's a scene in that film where Clara talks about watching herself on screen, and having to tell herself 'Sono io, io', which the subtitle translates as 'It's me, me', but which I think is also a play on 'I am me'; she doubts the reality of the person on the screen and of the person watching. That moment is directly echoed in
Blonde when Norma Jeane sits in the cinema saying, 'That creature up there, it's not me'.
But the connection goes deeper than that, I think. This is a horror film in the same way that
La signora is – for all that it has a lot in common with
Mulholland Drive and
Inland Empire, I don’t find it as viscerally scary as those films, but frightening on a more profound and existential level. It makes Marilyn Monroe’s smile-for-the-camera seem as chilling as Clara Manni’s, and it taps into the same vein of nightmarish alienation that animates Antonioni’s films.
Ana de Armas here reminds me of Gillian Anderson in
The House of Mirth (who in turn has always reminded me of Bette Davis in
The Letter). It’s a tremendously controlled performance, a character who is often regulating and limiting her every gesture – because she has to – but de Armas simultaneously manages to show all the complexity and intensity of the emotions simmering beneath this artificial façade. I think this is one of the most impressive feats an actor can pull off, because it must require an astonishing amount of thought, calculation, and subtlety, and yet has to come across as completely real and natural (or naturally unnatural, I guess).
I love this film’s unashamed contempt for classic movies:
All About Eve,
Niagara,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
The Seven Year Itch,
Some Like It Hot, they all get it in the neck. We see these films being made, or projected onto a screen for a slavering audience, and they’re made to look exploitative, abusive, and crass. Good. It undoubtedly helps that I don’t like any of these films, and that I’ve always found Monroe’s performances in them vaguely disturbing (though impressive and accomplished in lots of ways). But I also tend to like films that befoul their own nest (as I think Louis B. Mayer said about
Sunset Boulevard), showing up the art of cinema for what, on one level, it undeniably is.
I’ve really enjoyed reading this thread, especially the discussion between TWBB, HinkyDinkyTruesmith, and swo17.
HDT, there’s so much to respond to and engage with in your posts, and I need to spend longer thinking about them (and delve deeper into the morass of discourse that now surrounds this film), but I just want to offer a few responses in the next two paragraphs – probably underlining some things TWBB and swo have already said more clearly.
Yes, it’s annoying when people write off critiques (of films they like) as facile and sophomoric, without engaging with them in good faith. But I get the impression from some of what you say that you think there is a ‘right’ way to understand artificiality and performance, a ‘right’ interpretation of Norma Jeane’s attitude about ‘being Marilyn’, and a ‘right’ way of understanding ‘what classic films were even doing’. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood you. In any case, your comments about all these issues are really thought-provoking, and for instance I’m sure you could put forward a scathing critique of
La signora senza camelie on the basis of what you say about preconceptions surrounding women, acting, make-up, etc. I would love to hear that critique.
But it’s not inherently misogynistic to make a film about a woman who performs, adopts a new persona, and feels a loss of identity. You could argue that this particular film does so in a misogynistic way, and I’m also interested in hearing more of that interpretation of
Blonde, or of any film, but it feels less like a ‘good faith’ interpretation if it seems to be informed by such absolute statements. I agree with you that performance can be a vehicle for truth, and I love classic films more than life itself, and I can believe that Norma Jeane may well have had no sense of inner conflict about being Marilyn – maybe she even said as much, I have no idea. But I don’t think it’s inherently problematic to challenge these ideas, and personally I love the way that
Blonde challenges them. Anyway, I wanted to chuck these thoughts into the above discussion in case they seem constructive, but I apologise if I’ve taken your comments in the wrong way.
When it comes to critiquing others’ critiques of this film, here is one – from a very well established male critic – that I find problematic. Near the start of his review in the New Yorker, Richard Brody says this:
Richard Brody wrote:The character endures an overwhelming series of relentless torments that, far from arousing fear and pity, reflect a special kind of directorial sadism. In an effort to decry the protagonist’s sufferings, “Blonde” wallows in them. It depicts Monroe as the plaything of her times, her milieu, and her fate, by way of turning her into the filmmaker’s own plaything. The very subject of the film is the deformation of Monroe’s personality and artistry by Hollywood studio executives and artists; in order to tell that story, Dominik replicates it in practice.
And this is the last sentence of the review:
Richard Brody wrote:You’ve got to hand it to Dominik: he doesn’t only outdo the ostensibly crass showmen of classic Hollywood in overt artistic ambition but also in cheap sentiment, brazen tastelessness, and sexual exploitation.
I don’t want to dismiss this whole piece, some of which I found quite incisive. But Brody seems unwilling to engage seriously with the idea that the film
deliberately embodies the exploitation it comments on; or that its cheap sentiment, brazen tastelessness, and sexual exploitation are purposeful. It’s like calling the violence in
Funny Games hypocritical without acknowledging that the hypocrisy is, at least in part, intentional. Brody simply points to various moments in the film and says that they are grotesque, vulgar, crude, straining for poignancy, and sophomoric; that the film violates and mis-uses the character’s body; that its effects render her trauma ridiculous; as if all these aspects of the film are there by accident.
To labour the point, you can recognise these as deliberate choices and still critique them, still think the film is a pile of shit. But if you think Dominik has spent 10 years making this three-hour epic without ever realising that a guilt-tripping foetus, or the image of stars turning into sperm, or the comically relentless fixation on daddy issues (all details that Brody singles out)
might appear a bit crass and overwrought – if you assume that these are earnest, straightforward attempts at poignancy – then I think it’s fair to say that you are not engaging with this film in good faith.
The way the camera leers at de Armas’s body in the
Seven Year Itch photoshoot, for example, is grotesquely exploitative and uncomfortable, and by that point in the film it’s actually quite hard to watch. You want to look away, and you really should. Yes, this film embodies the very abuse and exploitation it portrays, and for me the effect is to induce a Haneke-like sense of self-loathing and nausea, making me question why I watch films, what I get out of them, what I project onto them. It would not have that effect if it were not in itself vulgar and grotesque and exploitative, if it were instead tasteful and sensitive and responsible, because then I would feel less compromised while watching it – I would feel like I was on the ‘right’ side of this issue, looking at this suffering person from an enlightened perspective.
I do find
Funny Games quite annoying, and one reason I find
Blonde less so is that (as TWBB has argued very well) it focuses intensively on the subjective experience of the ‘victim’, which I don’t think is true of Haneke’s film. What this means is that, at the same time as I feel nauseated by what this film is showing me and the way in which it does so, I also feel like I am the person this is being done to – I identify with Norma Jeane. When she vomits into the camera lens, I feel like I’m vomiting into it with her.
Now maybe this is problematic in itself; maybe it’s sort of not okay for me to say I identify with this character (or for the film to make me think I identify with her), given that I stand zero chance of experiencing most of the things she goes through.
But for what it’s worth, here are the two main reasons I identify with this fictional version of Marilyn Monroe:
First, Dominik has described this as a film about ‘unloved people’, and without sharing too much, I can say that the film rang very true for me on this level.
Second, I think one of the key details in this film is Norma Jeane repeatedly saying, ‘What business is it of yours?’ It seems to me that the film offers a very clear answer to this question, regardless of who it is addressed to: ‘none at all’.
No one is ever going to make a biopic about me, so what I’m about to say might seem laughable. But I mean it very seriously: if anyone
did make a biopic about me, especially if it were a tasteful, responsible, sensitive, sympathetic film about the worthy causes I supported, my professional achievements, and the positive relationships I had with other people, alongside tasteful depictions of my struggles and hardships, I would tell the makers of that film to fuck off and die and bury their film in a landfill site.
I would then tell them to grow a fucking spine and do the job honestly: to wallow in my misery until it seems ridiculous, to use every technique at their disposal to let the audience know what a bunch of exploitative, trespassing vultures they (‘they’ being the film-makers and the audience) really are, and to make everyone involved feel thoroughly sick in the process. Whether people were using me to get their rocks off, to become better informed about my life, to feel a sense of empowerment, or to ‘learn something’ about the human condition, as far as I’m concerned it would all be exploitation and appropriation, and again, I would tell
all of these people to fuck off.
When I say I identify with Norma Jeane, in no sense am I saying that I know what it was like to be Marilyn Monroe, or to be any woman, or to be any person besides myself. What I am saying is that this film is a vivid and powerful expression of how, in my experience, it feels to be an unloved person amongst unloving people. The Norma Jeane I see in this film is a powerful, complex, talented person – just like me, clearly – to whom no one can relate except through abuse of one kind or another. And when I hear (some) people criticising this film, I hear people who have no idea what it’s like to live like this, and who therefore don’t understand what the film is saying, and who don’t want to understand because it wouldn’t make them feel good. That’s undoubtedly unfair and reductive. But my experience of life sometimes makes me unfair and reductive about the rest of you fuckers, and if you pay attention, this film will explain why.
