The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

[copen]

you're saying that Blonde is better than the previous films? nonsense. have you tried watching it a a 2nd time. it's a chore to get through that thing.
he'll get to make more. he seems to just make them at his own sweet pace. overall, it doesn't seem that he has trouble getting financing for his films.

[domino harvey]

not everyone needs to rewatch a movie within two years of seeing it.
and that’s not a metric of quality in either direction.

[nicolas]

you're saying that Blonde is better than the previous films? nonsense. have you tried watching it a a 2nd time. it's a chore to get through that thing.
he'll get to make more. he seems to just make them at his own sweet pace. overall, it doesn't seem that he has trouble getting financing for his films.

He does have trouble getting the financing for his films. Dominik mentioned that he tired getting Blonde made since 2010/11 and while many executives he pitched the movie to liked his vision but no one wanted to finance it for obvious reasons until Netflix came along.

[Sloper]

For me, the ‘trance-like’ effect in Dominik’s films usually evokes dissociation, a kind of traumatised ‘I’m not here’ response to reality. Jackie in Killing Them Softly is emblematic of this: refusing to engage with emotions, perceiving the act of killing as a slow-motion lullaby, not batting an eyelid when a stranger is shot dead a few feet from him, and calmly refusing to engage with Driver’s bullshit about community and connectedness. It seems rational to adopt this dissociated, ‘killing softly’ attitude to life, given the hard environment Jackie lives in (of which Driver’s bullshit is an insidious component). But I agree with TWBB that there is a dissonant effect here – because the film is, I think, fundamentally about those emotions Jackie refuses to engage with. The killing doesn’t seem like a lullaby to us, it seems painful and horrifying and unnecessary. More than in most gangster films I can think of, I really feel every death – and every punch or kick – on a deep and visceral level in Killing Them Softly. Yes, Driver is trying to manipulate Jackie, but the film makes me feel like we really are connected to each other, like we are interdependent and responsible for each other, and although it’s a cool, cynical gangster film, it’s ultimately very sad. Maybe that’s why it got an ‘F’ Cinemascore rating.

Dominik seems very interested in relationships and codes of conduct and how expectations shift or are inherently different between people, intimate or otherwise. Chopper deals with an antisocial personality type who nonetheless tries and struggles to comprehend and engage with others in some strange scenes (he relays confusion calmly while being stabbed); this film certainly draws those kinds of vulnerable and sensitive dynamics between many characters; Killing Them Softly is squarely focused on a dog-eat-dog world but one where people do care about each other and make attempts to soften or change plans of actions based on sensitivities or expectations; and Blonde amplifies that disconnect while affirming the desire to connect.

That’s a really interesting way of framing it. Your point about ‘expectations between people’ definitely chimes with me: I think he’s very interested in how we project feelings and ideas onto others, or find ourselves playing roles that others want us to play. There’s an implicit message (though not as didactic as a ‘message’) about the importance of recognising that other people have complex inner lives we can’t see, and of listening to and communicating with them – and being vigilant about our (inevitable) tendency to project, idealise, demonise, or whatever. Dominik said in an interview about the characters in Killing Them Softly:

Well, I certainly felt sympathetic towards them all. They all felt like different aspects of myself, in some way. I could put myself in the shoes of each person. I definitely was deliberately trying for that. I’m always surprised when people say, “Oh, I don’t like these people.” They just seem like normal people to me, just in more extreme circumstances.

(Incidentally, Fellini said something similar in an interview about And the Ship Sails On.)

I think this is the key to understanding Dominik’s films: he likes Chopper, Jesse, Robert, Jackie, all of them, and above all he’s interested in what they think, how they feel, and how they interact. However ‘stylish’ the film is, every scene serves the goal of showing us how the characters feel, and getting us to empathise with those feelings. And this is the great irony of how people reacted to Blonde: they said that Joyce Carol Oates / Andrew Dominik hated Marilyn Monroe, but it seemed to me that they (the audience) hated the film’s protagonist, Norma Jeane (with whom Oates and Dominik identified so strongly – I did too). That's not an easy opinion to explain, though...

For all that Jesse James is kind of slow, hypnotic, and trance-like, it puts me into an intensely emotional state, and again those moments of violence affect me in ways that film violence usually doesn’t. There’s something about Ed Miller’s face in his last couple of scenes, the way his eyes roam helplessly around in the darkness; or the way Charley Ford rests his forehead against the door-frame while Robert sadly prepares to fulfil his destiny; or the way Jesse bows his head when he sees Robert reflected in the glass; or the way Zee looks at Robert and says in a broken voice, ‘Have you done this?’, without any anger but as if she’s saying, ‘Please tell me this isn’t real’, or something even more primal that can't really be put into words. Sometimes a work of art just distils all the sadness of the human condition into a few telling details – it leaves me with this lucid perception of what a tragically broken species we are, but also a kind of relief that someone else has noticed this and has similar feelings about it.

i think anyone who's tried to watch Blonde a 2nd time had a real hard time doing so. to me, Blonde is a failure, and it's a shame that he wasted probably over 5 years on making this movie. because the guy doesn't come out with a new movie very often.

I’ve only watched Blonde six times because I have phenomenal self-restraint. I think it might be the best film I’ve ever seen. It’s sent me down a rabbit-hole I will probably never climb out of – in fact it may have driven me out of my mind, so take these comments with a pinch of salt.

[therewillbeblus]

But I agree with TWBB that there is a dissonant effect here – because the film is, I think, fundamentally about those emotions Jackie refuses to engage with. The killing doesn’t seem like a lullaby to us, it seems painful and horrifying and unnecessary. More than in most gangster films I can think of, I really feel every death – and every punch or kick – on a deep and visceral level in Killing Them Softly.

Absolutely. Even though he engages in that kind of cutthroat attitude, the main plot deviates into a secondary one taking center stage, which revolves around Jackie essentially too emotionally tied to certain characters to carry out a hit himself (even if the extent of that is elided), and the messy consequences that stem from involving Mickey - where, again, Jackie has to engage in a situation where he's emotionally connected, even if it's in a strange way the man cannot define. It's drawing a very dissonant line between emotional sensitivity and curt violence, and Jackie makes it clear that killing is a big deal, even if it's also just 'the way things are'. Or maybe that's just 'death', the result, in which case the drama is around 'actions' taken rather than the consequence, which might be taken more trivially because what's done is done. But the act of 'doing', that's filled with emotional and viscerally physiological and existential concerns.

[The Narrator Returns]

I’ve only watched Blonde six times because I have phenomenal self-restraint. I think it might be the best film I’ve ever seen. It’s sent me down a rabbit-hole I will probably never climb out of – in fact it may have driven me out of my mind, so take these comments with a pinch of salt.

My god, I felt like I watched Blonde six times the first and only time I will ever watch it. I think it's lovely whenever someone finds this level of connection in art, but I must admit I'm in the group that firmly believes that Dominik hates Monroe (though he certainly hates the audience a lot more), or at least only extends to her the sympathy one would have for a baby rather than an adult woman (other than her first scene with Arthur Miller). Perhaps her infantilization is the character's dissociation technique like you describe in the first paragraph, but I could not possibly make myself set aside another 165 minutes to test that interpretation. That would be a good lens through which to revisit Dominik's Nick Cave documentaries, though.

[copen]

>>not everyone needs to rewatch a movie within two years of seeing it.>>
>
if it's a great movie, i want to check it out again within a couple of years.


>>He does have trouble getting the financing for his films. Dominik mentioned that he tired getting Blonde made since 2010/11>>
>
yes, but financing for blonde, and a gangster movie killing them softly would probably be 2 very different things.

killing them softly doesn't have much of the 'trance' thing that i mentioned. it's just an extremely well directed movie, of an interesting story (except maybe for the James Gandolfini plot).

and i could never understand the f score for killing them softly.
i'd rather watch killing them softly 15-20 times (which i have) than watch any of his other movies like 3-5 times.
killing them softly is just a magic movie for me.

i really couldn't make it through Blonde a 2nd time. i tried. and then i tried a 3rd time. it couldn't be done.
to me it seemed like 3 hours of suffering. i don't find that entertaining.

[therewillbeblus]

There's a thread for Blonde, where Sloper and I, and perhaps some others, tried to explain why the film isn't just that for us. I'm just glad you're not accusing us of hating women because we like it, so thanks

[copen]

>> I'm just glad you're not accusing us of hating women because we like it>>>

no, it's nothing like that.
it's just such a sad story... i can deal with it once. but after that, i just can't.
but yes, the filming/direction in that Blonde movie is just fantastic.
it's the story that turns me off.

it'll be interesting to see dominik's filmography as it ends up in 25-35 years. he'll do many more great things. but at only like 5-10 years per film, it's too bad for us.

[Sloper]

I must admit I'm in the group that firmly believes that Dominik hates Monroe (though he certainly hates the audience a lot more), or at least only extends to her the sympathy one would have for a baby rather than an adult woman (other than her first scene with Arthur Miller). Perhaps her infantilization is the character's dissociation technique like you describe in the first paragraph, but I could not possibly make myself set aside another 165 minutes to test that interpretation. That would be a good lens through which to revisit Dominik's Nick Cave documentaries, though.

I wouldn’t recommend re-watching a film you hated that much, of course. But I don’t think Oates or Dominik infantilise Norma Jeane in the way that misogynistic discourse tends to infantilise women – I think they’re commenting very incisively, and scathingly, on that kind of infantilising discourse. Moreover, Norma’s feelings about her childhood (and childhood self) are those of an adult woman, even if they are deeply connected to feelings she had in infancy.

This isn’t meant as an accusation against you (though I guess we can see each other’s perspectives as problematic and still discuss this in good faith) but I also think many of the responses to Blonde, the film and the novel, are infused with misogyny and anti-victim sentiments. For instance, I'm sure you don't intend it this way, but the ‘infantilisation’ thing reminds me of claims that feminism (or the MeToo movement in particular) infantilises women, or the ‘coddling of the American mind’ stuff that says we’re being turned into childlike perpetual victims by things that, to my mind, are pre-requisites of emotional and moral maturity. The conservative voices that say this kind of thing often come across (to me) as peevishly, childishly entitled, resentful at having to consider points of view other than their own, and resistant to the societal changes that inevitably occur as we learn new things (about trauma, for instance). And I think some of these attitudes bleed into seemingly progressive, liberal perspectives as well: there’s an interesting book by Rebecca Stringer called Knowing Victims which finds parallels between anti-victim sentiments among right- and left-wing critics, and relates this trend to the rise of neoliberal capitalist values.

I have to say that when people look at Norma Jeane and see ‘nothing but a victim’ or an ‘infant ruled by daddy issues’, I feel the same kind of outrage that Blonde’s critics feel on behalf of Marilyn Monroe: how can you see this complex human being, with her many-layered inner life, and dismiss her so casually? How can so many people talk about victimhood and ‘parent issues’ as though these were inherently shameful things, which will damage Marilyn Monroe’s reputation if they are ascribed to her (even in a piece of speculative fiction)? A lot of this is tied up with complex problems in our attitude towards victimhood, childhood, trauma, and abuse – problems I’ve been trying (and struggling) to get my head around for a while now.

Along the same lines as the Blonde criticisms, a fan of Jesse James might take offence at Hansen and Dominik’s portrayal of the heroic outlaw as a capricious, immature psychopath. Where are the bold robberies? We only see one, and it’s a failure, and throughout that scene Jesse veers between unhinged violence and glazed dissociation. Where is the Robin Hood figure who stole from the rich and gave to the poor? We only see a narcissist who can’t make up his mind whether ‘all America thinks highly of him’ or whether the stories about him are ‘all lies’, but who in any case sees the whole world as revolving around him.

Why is Jesse twisting the ear of a teenage boy and then crying like a baby afterwards, seemingly without even wanting an answer to his compulsively repeated question, ‘Where’s Jim? Where’s Jim?’ – since the victimised boy can’t answer with his mouth covered? The real Jesse would have used violence when necessary to get information he needed, but never against a defenceless child, and never in such a pathological manner, as though he were re-enacting a traumatic memory from his own childhood.

The real Jesse (as his fans would see him) was a Southern loyalist in a civil war that never really ended, still fighting for that noble Lost Cause. We don’t need to think about the horrifying slaughters he took part in as a teenager with Quantrill’s Raiders, or the devastating effects these (and other assorted traumas) might have had on him as he developed into adulthood. That would be infantilising, and Jesse wasn’t an infant, he was a man. Why does Ron Hansen, in the novel, spend so much time portraying Jesse’s fucked up relationship with his mother, who seems blind to her son as a real person and only invested in the melodramatic stories about him that exist in her own mind? And why is Jesse so pathetically compliant around her? The real Zerelda was a fine woman and a good mother, and Jesse didn’t have mummy issues. (The fact that he married his cousin, who was named after his mother, is neither here nor there.)

In Chopper, Dominik drew inspiration from his two-year-old son, and clearly saw Mark Brandon Read as a man whose behaviour was rooted in early-life trauma. Mark goads people like a needy child who doesn’t understand his own feelings, and after hurting them he seems incapable of owning these actions – again, like an irresponsible child. Arguably that film does, in some sense, infantilise its protagonist, but it is also an honest portrayal of the violence committed by this terrifying adult, and an earnest attempt to understand why an adult would do the things Chopper did. Some of the best moments in the film are the scenes between Mark and his father: Eric Bana’s eyes fill with a very subtle kind of angst and sadness when his father speaks admiringly of him; it's the expression of a needy child, a confused adult, and a frightened old man all at the same time.

And why does Jackie Cogan like to ‘kill them softly’, from a distance? Because killing someone up close can get touchy-feely:

Emotional, not fun, a lot of fuss. They cry. They plead. They beg. They piss themselves. They call for their mothers. It gets embarrassing. I like to kill them softly, from a distance. Not close enough for feelings. Don’t like feelings. Don’t want to think about them.

(This and Jackie’s final speech are almost the only parts of the script that are not taken from the original novel.) If you look too closely at a victim, you see a crying infant, incontinent and needy and embarrassing. That’s what we see in Killing Them Softly, when Ray Liotta is beaten to a weeping, child-like pulp. It’s what Norma Jeane, in Blonde, calls the ‘secret self exposed’, and it’s unbearable, so how can we blame the gangsters for dissociating and looking away?

Or you could argue that there’s something profoundly infantile and irresponsible about the embarrassment Jackie expresses, and something even more infantile and irresponsible about the fantasy that we simply put away childish things and become rational, well-functioning adults as we grow older. What Jackie describes is simply the reality of the human condition – at the core of our beings we’re all mewling, puking infants – and arguably a responsible adult should be able to face that reality in themselves and others.

I agree that ‘dissociation’ is also an important theme in the Nick Cave documentaries. One More Time With Feeling was conceived as a kind of displacement, a way of publicising Skeleton Tree without having to do press tours; but it also became the opposite, a way of talking about Arthur Cave’s death in the ‘safe space’ of a documentary made by a close friend, on the understanding that Nick Cave and his family could veto any material they didn’t like.

In one scene, Cave talks to Andrew Dominik about the idea that his dead son is still with him in some sense.

Cave: People say it all the time to me, 'He lives in my heart,' and I go, 'Yeah, yeah, no, I know.' But he doesn't.

Dominik: He doesn’t?

Cave: I mean, he's in my heart, but he doesn't live at all.

This is an ambiguity Cave explores in the song ‘Bright Horses’, which is about the tension between our belief in a transcendent plane of existence and our awareness that ‘Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire… And the little white shape dancing at the end of the hall is just a wish that time can't dissolve.’ An instrumental version of this song accompanies the Arthur Miller montage in Blonde, and it’s understandable that people find that film relentlessly miserable despite very obvious moments of happiness like this: the montage is about a feeling of happiness that we know is false, even in the moment we experience it but especially in retrospect when it replays in our minds. In that context, we’re dealing with the kind of dissociation that traumatised children often develop as a survival habit, and which causes them to dissociate from (and distrust) happiness as well as pain.

The Nick Cave documentaries are obviously more hopeful (as, I think, are the full lyrics to ‘Bright Horses’) because their purpose is not to tell the trauma-story Dominik relates to, but to capture the very different emotions of the people in front of the camera, and how they struggle to deal with their grief but also, eventually, find a way forward. This is from a 2022 interview with Dominik about This Much I Know to be True:

Thus, for instance, in the first documentary, we see Cave “trying to take a step forward in the shadow of his grief; trying to be positive but failing,” says Dominik. Whereas, in the new film, he has integrated the loss into his life. He wants to pass on what he has learnt; that “we are all going to find ourselves losing everything at some point.”

According to the filmmaker, while Cave remains focused on his music, his priorities have undergone a healthy change. Cave’s sense of self is not so much tied to his work, but to the people he loves. “It’s ironic that just as he stops taking his work so seriously, it gets better,” laughs Dominik, “But in the end, how important is work really?”

Interestingly, when asked about his own life beyond work, Dominik is dismissive. “I’m no one.” He says he finds himself at the end of a weird state of working consistently for the past three years and staring at “this empty life stretching all the way to the horizon,” he chuckles nervously. “I am not quite where Nick is. I’d like to be.”

Sometimes, in these documentaries, the camera drifts off into another space, as if needing distance from the emotions in front of it, but also as if looking for a sense of perspective (the first documentary was in 3D), or for another dimension to those emotions. Cave’s voiceover narration reminds us that there is more to his emotional life than the keeping-it-together musician we see through the camera-lens, and I think that’s why this lens feels less menacing and objectifying than the ones through which we see Jesse James and Norma Jeane. In the second documentary, there are many moments when the two cameras (with their different aspect ratios) film each other, as though they are relating and responding to each other. The more we become conscious of the camera’s presence, the more limited (in a healthy way) it seems, the more it seems to represent a friend trying to ‘be there’ rather than an obsessive, parasitic stalker. It ‘dissociates’ to acknowledge that these are human beings with their own inner lives, not to project an annihilating fantasy onto them and paper over their more inconvenient feelings.

the main plot deviates into a secondary one taking center stage, which revolves around Jackie essentially too emotionally tied to certain characters to carry out a hit himself (even if the extent of that is elided), and the messy consequences that stem from involving Mickey - where, again, Jackie has to engage in a situation where he's emotionally connected, even if it's in a strange way the man cannot define.

I kind of think the scenes with Mickey are the thematic heart of Killing Them Softly, even though they technically do nothing to advance the plot. Between Higgins's writing and Gandolfini's performance, Mickey is such a brilliant portrait of a man who is both indescribably loathsome and indescribably pitiable. That moment when Jackie interrupts Mickey's stomach-churning sexual ramblings to ask him if he'll be able to carry out the hit, and Mickey splutters out something like 'What?! Not now?!' is another great example of infantile vulnerability in this film. As you say it's hard to define Mickey's emotions or the nature of his connection to Jackie - but we kind of feel these things on a visceral level.

[Mr Sausage]

This isn’t meant as an accusation against you (though I guess we can see each other’s perspectives as problematic and still discuss this in good faith) but I also think many of the responses to Blonde, the film and the novel, are infused with misogyny and anti-victim sentiments. For instance, I'm sure you don't intend it this way, but the ‘infantilisation’ thing reminds me of claims that feminism (or the MeToo movement in particular) infantilises women, or the ‘coddling of the American mind’ stuff that says we’re being turned into childlike perpetual victims by things that, to my mind, are pre-requisites of emotional and moral maturity. The conservative voices that say this kind of thing often come across (to me) as peevishly, childishly entitled, resentful at having to consider points of view other than their own, and resistant to the societal changes that inevitably occur as we learn new things (about trauma, for instance). And I think some of these attitudes bleed into seemingly progressive, liberal perspectives as well: there’s an interesting book by Rebecca Stringer called Knowing Victims which finds parallels between anti-victim sentiments among right- and left-wing critics, and relates this trend to the rise of neoliberal capitalist values.

I have to say that when people look at Norma Jeane and see ‘nothing but a victim’ or an ‘infant ruled by daddy issues’, I feel the same kind of outrage that Blonde’s critics feel on behalf of Marilyn Monroe: how can you see this complex human being, with her many-layered inner life, and dismiss her so casually? How can so many people talk about victimhood and ‘parent issues’ as though these were inherently shameful things, which will damage Marilyn Monroe’s reputation if they are ascribed to her (even in a piece of speculative fiction)? A lot of this is tied up with complex problems in our attitude towards victimhood, childhood, trauma, and abuse – problems I’ve been trying (and struggling) to get my head around for a while now.

Let me know what you think of this, and maybe it's reiterating conservative criticisms that have bled into leftist-seeming spaces as criticised by Stringer (haven't read her book), but by enshrining suffering, weakness, and vulnerability as modern liberalism has been accused of doing, you risk creating an economy of victimhood where identity, authority, and even attention are centred on degrees of suffering and vulnerability. If so much of modern liberal discourse centres on bearing witness to suffering, whoever suffers the most becomes who gets witnessed the most. This can lead to overstating harm, sure, but I don't mean to use the above to negate victimhood. Just acknowledge that it can cause people, spaces, and communities to centre their identities on victimhood and vulnerability at the expense of things like resilience and healing simply in order to be seen. This is related to the odd mentality where people are accused of eroding the very state of victimhood itself by pointing out that the effects of abuse, say, are not so intense and pervasive as to prevent healing and the capacity for a happy, fulfilling life. Or the similar mentality where giving vulnerable people tools to avoid or prevent victimization is seen as a form of victim blaming (I seem to remember in America one prospective campus self-defense class for women was scuttled due to just such a backlash, but I don't know where to re-find those details, so obviously skepticism is warranted).

So I very much agree with what you're saying re: getting past the long culture of shame and dismissal that shadows topics like trauma, victimhood, and suffering has been a net good. Yet I do see a way where suffering and vulnerability can become fetishized, turned into capital in our attention economy, and given excessive place inside our concepts of identity, authority, community, etc., to the point where other worthy ideas are ignored or rejected. Which is to say there may be a way to criticize Blonde's approach to victimhood as participating in that centring of personal and cultural identity around suffering and vulnerability, and as part of a competing for attention in an economy where suffering and vulnerability are capital, with Norma Jean enshrined as the ne plus ultra, or most attention-deserving example, of what liberal culture now finds most worth bearing witness to. That is, there's a way to criticize Blonde without participating in victim blaming or regressive dismissals of victimhood, suffering, and trauma. Or at least I think. And that's not to say this is what Blonde is necessarily doing.

On a less fraught note:

In Chopper, Dominik drew inspiration from his two-year-old son, and clearly saw Mark Brandon Read as a man whose behaviour was rooted in early-life trauma. Mark goads people like a needy child who doesn’t understand his own feelings, and after hurting them he seems incapable of owning these actions – again, like an irresponsible child. Arguably that film does, in some sense, infantilise its protagonist, but it is also an honest portrayal of the violence committed by this terrifying adult, and an earnest attempt to understand why an adult would do the things Chopper did. Some of the best moments in the film are the scenes between Mark and his father: Eric Bana’s eyes fill with a very subtle kind of angst and sadness when his father speaks admiringly of him; it's the expression of a needy child, a confused adult, and a frightened old man all at the same time.

One of the aspects of Chopper I'll never forget is how Read seems almost improperly connected to his own body and environment. There's that scene where Read's friend repeatedly stabs him in jail, and Read's confusion is not so much why this is happening, but what is happening. He has trouble registering he's even being wounded. His confusion over the situation is so profound that it prevents him even from registering the bodily sensation. It's like he's this disconnected, poorly organized set of personality traits that, because they're unorganized, cannot properly attach to situations and people. So Read will brutally attack someone for petty reasons, then burst into tears and apologies for having done it, and then casually dismiss the whole thing once authorities have arrived. There's no coherence there; he cannot seem to attach any meaning to himself or that situation. Same with his body evidently; he can't attach a coherent reaction to stimulus from it when the context it occurs in lies outside of his conceptual abilities. One of the most fascinating psychological portraits I've ever seen.

[Sloper]

Thanks for your post, Mr S, which as always is very thoughtful and well-articulated. I understand what you’re saying, and I have had all those thoughts myself at one time or another, and probably still do. I also appreciate that you’re couching these points in a degree of uncertainty and framing them as questions, so in what follows I don’t mean to respond as though you have simply declared these things to be the be-all-and-end-all truths about victimhood. You may not be able to tell from this 6700-word post, but I do feel quite passionately about these issues, and some of the things I’m about to say are (deliberately) immoderate and un-constructively harsh towards certain critics and biographers. I hope the reasons for this are clear, and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on any of these topics or to have arrived at a be-all-and-end-all conclusion myself.

Firstly, I think what gets enshrined and fetishised is not victimhood as such, but redemption-through-victimhood. The victimhood has to be conducive to rescue fantasies, even if only posthumous ones. Norma Jean and Marilyn and especially My Week With Marilyn are good examples of this. There has to be some version of the ‘nice guy’ who could have rescued poor Norma if only he’d got there in time, or a tragic error on Monroe’s part that could have been avoided.

My sense is that this rule applies to the broader problem you’re highlighting: pick any ‘enshrinement of suffering, weakness, and vulnerability’, and it’s likely to have a component that mitigates the despair and turns trauma into a satisfying narrative. In Nothing Sacred, what people want is not the terminally ill woman as such, but the symbol of bravery and resilience that the media will turn her into. The victim in Ace in the Hole makes for a great story unless he dies (and there’s no redemptive way of spinning his death). And importantly, in all these stories the ‘victim’ derives no real benefit from the attention: like the mourners at a funeral, it’s the attendees who get these benefits, because it’s a not a question of victims wanting to be enshrined; it’s a question of worshippers wanting an object of veneration.

Trauma victims often voice frustration at the self-serving sympathy and ‘help’ they receive, which quickly curdles when their would-be rescuers’ desire for redemption is frustrated. In Blonde, Joe DiMaggio tells Norma that he wants to make her happy. ‘But I am happy,’ she says, ‘I’ve been happy all my life.’ He barely responds, as though unable to process what she has said, as though she has fluffed her line and he just needs to carry on as best he can. After a pause, he gets up, grabs her gently by the throat, and says, ‘I just want to take you away from all these jackals.’ The sides of the image contract, imprisoning Norma with Joe in a tiny box. He needs to see her as an unhappy victim of the Hollywood jackals so that he can rescue her from them. But she subversively pre-empts his false rescue: when she says ‘But I am happy,’ she means, ‘I know you want me to be happy, so I’ll “be” happy. We established in the earlier scene at the restaurant that if I try to tell you about my actual problems, you’ll switch off and stop listening, and you’ll only perk up again when I start saying the things you want to hear, like how much I love babies. So I’ll be happy – I’ve been “being happy” all my life.’

His rescue is of course not a rescue at all: the domestic bliss he provides for her is just a new kind of hell, and being this version of Norma Jeane is even worse than being Marilyn Monroe. DiMaggio doesn’t really care about what the ‘jackals’ are doing to her, and doesn’t understand the ways in which she has in fact been victimised; his reasons for hating her sexualised image are rooted in his own sexual insecurity, so he goes from ‘feeling sorry for her because she is being fed upon by jackals’ to ‘blaming her for being a piece of meat’.

The problem with Blonde is that it doesn’t give us the redemption that makes victimhood appealing. One of the main things the film is deconstructing is our cultural inclination towards rescue fantasies, as Andrew Dominik has said:

I think she appeals to that strong desire to rescue, and maybe the shadow side of that is a punishment fantasy. I think that that’s not a good thing — if you want to rescue somebody, they probably need rescuing from you. I mean, that’s what the film’s doing. It’s basically saying, here’s this person nobody else in the movie understands, but we, the audience understand everything and wish we could just step in, or we wish they would notice, or we wish they would see her as she is. And it’s constantly thwarted and denied.

The novel and the film mercilessly expose the way that rescue/punishment/sexual/aspirational fantasies are blurred together. Jesse James says to Robert Ford, ‘Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?’ When Norma looks into the camera (which is attached to her) and asks, ‘What business of yours is my life?’, she’s questioning not only what Arthur Miller wants from her as he follows her around the house, but also what we want from her as we Snorri-stalk her through every moment of her life.

This is from Mick LaSalle’s review of Blonde for the San Francisco Chronicle:

[Dominik’s approach] is not just a recipe for bad art, but wrong-headed biography. No one is depressed all the time. No one is an innocent victim in every encounter. No one is entirely without joy, ambition or drive — especially no one who ends up living a life of lasting accomplishment. Perhaps Marilyn Monroe saw herself as the movie sees her, as St. Marilyn the Victim. Yet even if that were true, to make a movie adopting that viewpoint is to commit to creating 166 minutes of pure inertia.

To begin with, LaSalle is making some very sweeping and dubious statements here. Norma is not ‘depressed all the time’ in Blonde, in fact you could put together a fairly substantial super-cut of her smiling, laughing, and ‘being happy’, the Arthur Miller montage being the most obvious example. If these scenes come across as depressive, it’s because – as I said in my earlier post – the film is exploring the way dissociation can impact happy experiences and memories. The idea of the film, as in the novel, is to represent what goes through the protagonist’s mind in the moments before her death, so even experiences that may have felt joyous at the time are infused with a melancholy awareness of what happened next, and of how things ended up. And some people, in fact a lot of people, are depressed all the time in this exact way – depression can be that continuous, and this doesn’t mean it’s a simple, one-dimensional emotion; it can co-exist with all forms and degrees of joy, as it does in Blonde, as it does in me.

So why couldn’t Marilyn Monroe have felt this way? Because she had ambition and drive, and she ‘ended up living a life of lasting accomplishment.’ It’s not clear how she was supposed to know whether her accomplishments were lasting or not, nor do I understand how Monroe’s accomplishments are supposed to serve as a fool-proof antidote to the kind of deep depression which – according to many contemporary accounts – this person did in fact suffer from.

But then comes the most interesting bit: even if Blonde is accurate, LaSalle says, it still should not have been made, it is still ‘wrongheaded biography’. Even if this is the truest account of how Marilyn Monroe saw herself, it is simply, self-evidently, not a story worth telling. The reason LaSalle gives is ‘inertia’: that is, it’s an un-dramatic story. Just the other day, Moira Donegan tweeted:

One reason that it’s hard to make feminist writing narratively compelling is that people don’t want to hear it… But another reason is that true stories of women’s lives ruined by men have no narrative tension: the misogynist cruelty is relentless, the psychic burdens often total, & the available methods of resistance mostly impotent. A story of unremitting suffering is a story with no plot. This means that feminist writing has a double formal bind: it’s got a very narrow audience of willing readers, on the one hand, and on the other, it has a gulf between its moral urgency and its narrative urgency.

But Blonde does not seem dramatically inert to me. It’s one of the most compelling films I can think of, and on all six viewings the 167 minutes have flown by – I can’t believe it’s really that long. What Donegan describes in those Tweets sounds like a very compelling story to me, filled with narrative urgency in a way that tedious, predictable, redemption-through-suffering stories are not. So why does Blonde feel inert to so many viewers?

One clue lies in LaSalle’s phrase, ‘St Marilyn the Victim’. He’s invoking the idea that victimhood invests a person with cultural capital, that it enshrines, idealises, and exalts them. But on a deeper level, he’s expressing a very common form of anti-victim resentment. This resentment is linked to the disappointing ‘inertia’ of the film: a number of other critics have said that Blonde needed more hope, more joy, and even more culpability for the protagonist. This is from Justin Chang’s review in the LA Times:

Because Dominik can’t conceive of Monroe as anything but a victim, he can’t even grant her the respect of seeing her as, at the very least, a participant in her success and her undoing. A smarter, tougher movie would have explored that participation and recognized it as its own kind of power.

We need to feel that she has (or had) a chance of being happy, or we need to feel that her misfortunes were at least partially her own fault (and tell ourselves that this kind of victim-blaming is ‘its own kind of power’). She cannot have been this deeply depressed, and she cannot have been this innocent, otherwise the tragic narrative arc cannot function.

What do we want from stories, especially stories about real people? On the ‘Are You Screening?’ podcast, the hosts offer another formulation of the ‘wrongheaded biography’ critique: ‘If that's how she really was, lie! And if not, why are you showing us?’ The self-contradiction here is very revealing. On the one hand, a biopic has a responsibility to tell the truth; on the other hand, if the truth is unpalatable, a biopic has a responsibility to lie. This is from the ‘Visually Stunning Movie’ podcast:

I can’t relate to her on any level, so I don’t know how I dive into this… I don’t know that I want to dive into the mind of this person, I don’t know that I want to see the world through her eyes, because quite frankly it’s pretty ugly, you know, and it’s lonely. And that’s assuming you can trust it all… Without her able to tell her story – and even then could you trust her version of the story?

When confronted with victimhood, we have a natural instinct to look away, because what we see there is ugly, lonely, and depressing. Acknowledging the reality of what we see would come at a great cost, because it would mean not only engaging and empathising with some very painful experiences, but also coming to terms with the limits of that empathy, the limits of our connections with other people and our capacity to help them – or help ourselves. It would also probably mean coming to terms with problems that we don’t want to think about, and that we can afford to ignore, like abusive structures and systems that we all have to work within, abusive individuals who happen to be our friends, colleagues, and relatives, and (on an existential level) the vivid realisation that we don’t live in a just world, that the universe doesn’t love us.

Anthony Summers, in his biography of Marilyn Monroe, spends a fair amount of time recounting her claims to have been sexually abused, sexually assaulted, and raped during her childhood and early adulthood, but he consistently frames these stories in sceptical terms. He quotes Ben Hecht and Lloyd Shearer’s judgements, in response to Monroe’s claims, that she was a fantasist, and he cites Freud to back up these men’s doubts:

Professional controversy still whirls around Sigmund Freud’s so-called seduction theory, which proposed that the sexual abuse of children by adults was a primary cause of neurosis. Freud himself is said to have abandoned the theory later, shifting to the view that most patients’ claims of sexual abuse are fantasy rather than fact. […] Real or imagined, Norma Jeane would never put her childhood horror story behind her.

Judith Herman, the pioneering trauma scholar, frames this story differently in her 1992 book, Trauma and Recovery:

Freud privately repudiated the traumatic theory of the origins of hysteria. His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients.

I haven’t researched Freud’s work on trauma myself, so I don’t know all the nuances of this. But upon what basis is Summers’ (or Hecht’s, or Shearer’s) scepticism founded? What reason does he have to doubt Monroe’s stories? When Summers discusses DiMaggio’s abuse of Monroe, he couches this part of the story in mitigating language for DiMaggio and grudging validation for Monroe. ‘Marilyn had a succession of lovers,’ we are told, and if DiMaggio found this out, ‘it was remarkable that he contained himself at all.’ When Monroe had an injured thumb, her ‘story in private – and like all her stories it must be treated with great caution – was that the thumb was injured by Joe DiMaggio in a moment of irritation,’ but then Summers tells us that ‘Amy Greene’s account suggests the injury was the accidental result of DiMaggio not knowing his own strength.’ When it comes to the infamous abuse that followed the subway-grate photoshoot, Summers says: ‘Though one must ever be alert for fantasizing on Marilyn’s part, the accounts that follow are hard to dismiss.’ I think this goes beyond a concern for corroborating evidence. It seems to me that Summers wants to dismiss some of Marilyn’s experiences, and that he gives more weight to others’ perceptions of her than to her own point of view.

Any stories that fit into Summers’ preferred narrative about Monroe are treated with a remarkable level of credulity – anything titillating, anything that might tease a conspiracy theory, and anything that makes for a satisfying narrative. As the story goes on, Summers tempers his adoration for Monroe with ‘unsympathetic’ notes so that we will not be overwhelmed by sadness when she dies. He uses judgemental language about her swearing, her drug-taking, and the many abortions he claims Monroe had (‘butcher’s work’), and he relishes the guilt she supposedly felt over them. He places a strong emphasis on claims that she was cruel to Arthur Miller, with little sense of wrong-doing on Miller’s part, and we see her being malicious and cruel to her friends towards the end of her life. She is all the more tragic for being flawed – we shake our heads sadly over her decline and demise, how she ‘died famously but in folly’. We blame the times, and Hollywood, and Monroe herself, and wish it could have been otherwise. But the most important thing is that we get what we came for: ‘Marilyn’s legacy, for all that [i.e. all her suffering and madness], is made of more solid stuff than fantasy. Everyman – to whom, [in her final interview], she had offered her last public aspiration, remains bewitched.’

Donald Spoto’s biography is, in some ways, even more infuriating. He doesn’t even mention most of Monroe’s abuse claims, but when he does – like Summers – he tends to label them as fantasies. For instance:

Marilyn Monroe's statements to the press about the orphanage became more and more fantastic. She added distressing tales of orphanage trauma […] In fact, there was a team of adult employees to cook and clean at the Home, but, to encourage a sense of responsibility, the children were paid five or ten cents a week for less arduous, minor chores suited to the age and strength of each. […] Norma Jeane's time on El Centro was quite decent. […] The legend of her twelve or thirteen foster homes, the whippings, the near-starvation – all these were borrowed from [Eleanor Goddard]'s past and conveniently grafted onto her own when they became helpful in winning press and public sympathy. [Eleanor said:] ‘What I told Norma Jeane that winter made a great impression on her. She felt enormous pity for me, and we became friends very quickly.’

What does Spoto mean when he says ‘in fact’? As far as I can tell from his end-notes, he is basing his refutation of Monroe’s account on official records from the orphanage – but even if he were drawing on the accounts of other children who were there at the same time, these wouldn’t necessarily tell him anything about what Monroe went through. And it’s not clear whether Eleanor Goddard is saying that Monroe appropriated her sob-stories, or whether she’s just saying that Monroe sympathised with her because she’d been through something similar. Maybe Monroe exaggerated her childhood miseries to bolster her public image once she was famous; maybe she had an even happier childhood than Spoto suggests, and she really didn’t have any mental health problems as she grew up; we have no way of knowing for sure. But I think it’s clear that Spoto is shaping his definition of ‘fact’ to tell the story he wants to tell.

He needs Monroe to be a victim in just the right ways, and to just the right extent, so that he can indulge in rescue fantasies that fit with his own (un-articulated) value system. Yes, she had a disturbed childhood, received contradictory lessons and values from the Bolenders, Gladys, and Grace McKee, and all of this affected her deeply; but to use the phrasing from your post, Mr S, ‘the effects of abuse are not so intense and pervasive as to prevent healing and the capacity for a happy, fulfilling life.’ For Spoto to make a similar claim about Marilyn Monroe, he has to deny the more intense forms of abuse she might have suffered.

The real villains in his version of the story are Monroe’s therapists, culminating in the outlandishly malevolent Ralph Greenson (and his familiar, Eunice Murray). The problem with the therapy Monroe received, according to Spoto, was that it made her fixate uselessly on her childhood traumas rather than looking to the future:

Marilyn felt blocked, stymied in her life, in a rut – and no one seemed to acknowledge that her sense of crisis was not necessarily a sign of breakdown, as it was so diagnosed; it could be, on the contrary (indeed, it was), an indication that she longed for her life to move to some new, deeper level as yet unrevealed. […] Isolated and introspective in childhood, she was now asked to focus her attention almost exclusively on that unhappy period. And so she was on a kind of treadmill […] and this became self-defeating. Where were the fresh revelations, the new energies generated to move beyond the childhood? Reasoning about it did not resolve it; understanding did not necessarily lead to acceptance, nor to the alteration of the meaning of the past that contains seeds of possibility for both present and future.

Spoto, 30 years after Monroe’s death and without ever having met her, claims to have an insight into her psychology that her therapists lacked. With their narrow little Freudian minds, they failed to consider an alternative possibility, and notice how Spoto transforms this from a possibility into a fact – ‘it could be (indeed it was)’ – to which no alternative possibilities can be considered.

Don’t get me wrong, these therapists sound pretty fucked up, especially Greenson, and I’m not interested in defending their unprofessional conduct. But maybe the real problem wasn’t that Monroe was trying to work through her childhood trauma; maybe the problem was that psychotherapy in the 1950s didn’t have the tools to help her do this in the right way, or that even if it did, the wider culture around her militated against the possibility of healing, and when Greenson realised this he went completely off the rails in his attempts to save his suicidal patient. I’m not presenting this as a ‘more likely’ scenario, just as a possible one. Spoto wants us to feel that if we had been there, with him, in 1962, we could have saved Monroe from these misguided treatments and helped her find the way forward. But it looks to me like Spoto would have spent a good deal of time mansplaining Monroe’s childhood to her, denying the reality of any stories he didn’t like, presuming to know how she felt and what she wanted, and spouting would-be inspirational stories like this one:

One likes to recall a fascinating moment in 1922, when British archaeologists were unearthing the pharaohs’ tombs. In one mummy case dating from the eighteenth century before Christ, there was found among the usual artifacts a seedling. A member of the team planted and nurtured it, and soon there was a flourishing little mustard tree.

My understanding is that the ‘mummy wheat’ stories have been refuted, but even if they hadn’t, this analogy is of questionable relevance. You might as well point out that embryos can be frozen – but if you put a small child in the freezer, or lock them in a crypt for 20,000 years, the result will not be conducive to some mawkish parable about post-traumatic growth. Spoto is only able to see Monroe as the mustard-seed-that-could-have because he carefully denies those childhood traumas that would suggest serious systemic problems.

It says so much about Spoto’s perspective that he thinks one of Monroe’s ‘true’ friends at the end of her life, indeed the main person who could have saved her if only those dastardly therapists hadn’t prevented him, was Joe DiMaggio. Like many commentators, Spoto sees DiMaggio’s post-divorce attentiveness as evidence that he had reformed and would no longer be abusive…rather than as exactly the kind of ‘attentive’ behaviour victims frequently receive after divorcing an abusive partner (cf. O.J. Simpson).

Spoto simply doesn’t believe that the world is that bad, so of course he thinks of Monroe as a seed that could have grown if only nature had been allowed to take its course:

Enthusiasm and humility, a green hope coupled with the longing to go on, to transcend what had been – rarely has so graceful a spirit been so cruelly silenced. Silenced indeed. Marilyn Monroe died at the mercy of those who believed their mission was to save her – not for her sake, but for themselves. They wanted to own her.

By framing this story, not as his preferred interpretation, but as established fact (‘indeed it was’), Spoto succeeds in ‘owning’ Marilyn Monroe where her therapists failed. She was ‘silenced indeed’ – her true voice prevented from speaking out – but now Spoto has restored it to her. Those others ‘believed’ it was their mission to save her, but they were wrong; Spoto believes it is his mission to save her, and he is right. They were doing it for themselves, though they claimed it was for her sake; Spoto really is doing it for her sake, not for himself, which is why he spends precisely no time at all declaring his own ideological biases or explaining why he feels such an intense emotional investment in this long-dead stranger’s obscure, complicated life.

‘One likes to think’ of the seed in the pharaoh’s tomb, Spoto says. Who is ‘one’, and why does he like to think of this? I don’t like to think of it – it seems like a lot of horseshit to me. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the one who believes in this horseshit is also the one who trusts an orphanage’s account of its own dealings more than the testimony of someone who actually lived there. ‘Nonsense Thymian, this nice bald fellow assures me that the soup here is excellent and the girls well cared for. Now grow up.’

I'd like to look at this line from your post, Mr S, in a bit more depth:

This is related to the odd mentality where people are accused of eroding the very state of victimhood itself by pointing out that the effects of abuse, say, are not so intense and pervasive as to prevent healing and the capacity for a happy, fulfilling life.

Yes, sometimes the effects of abuse are not so intense and pervasive as to prevent healing, but there’s a lot of scientific evidence showing that they often are. It depends on the particular case, and it especially depends on the types of help available to the traumatised individual. Your statement seems obviously true in a sense (every injury and disease could, in theory, be curable) but just as obviously untrue in another (the universe will eventually traumatise all of us beyond any possibility of healing).

To say that ‘no abuse is so severe that you can’t heal from it’ sounds unobjectionably positive, and no doubt it’s what many victims need to hear; perhaps Marilyn Monroe was one of them. But in practice this often is a way of negating victimhood, as the examples above demonstrate. The belief in ‘healing’ can rest on a claim that the original trauma was ‘not that bad’, which is the title of a volume of essays on rape culture edited by Roxane Gay. In the introduction, she says:

It was comforting, perhaps, to tell myself that what I went through ‘wasn’t that bad.’ Allowing myself to believe that being gang-raped wasn’t ‘that bad’ allowed me to break down my trauma into something more manageable, into something I could carry with me instead of allowing the magnitude of it to destroy me. But, in the long run, diminishing my experience hurt me far more than it helped. I created an unrealistic measure for what was acceptable in how I was treated in relationships, in friendships, in random encounters with strangers […] Buying into the notion of ‘not that bad’ made me incredibly hard on myself for not ‘getting over it’ fast enough as the years passed.

What’s so infuriating about the critics, biographers, and podcasters I’ve quoted in this post is the way they ‘diminish experience’: even if this happened to Marilyn Monroe, even if she felt this way, even if she said these things happened to her, we should tell ourselves that they didn’t, or that they weren’t that bad. Perhaps what I’m about to say will reflect badly on me, but my frustration here stems less from ethical concerns than from intellectual ones. These critics, biographers, and podcasters are just so alarmingly fucking stupid. They talk in this supposedly pragmatic, realistic, ‘come-along-now-let’s-be-sensible’ tone, but they’re mired in a state of weak-minded denial about their own emotions, their own preconceptions, and reality itself. They don’t seem positive or hopeful or inspirational to me – they seem scared.

Here are two passages from other pieces in Not That Bad, which I think speak to some of these issues:

Sometimes people tell me that something bad happened to me, but I am brave and strong. I don’t want to be told that I am brave or strong. I am not right just because he was wrong. I don’t want to be made noble. I want someone willing to watch me thrash and crumple because that, too, is the truth, and it needs a witness. ‘He broke me,’ I say to a friend. ‘You’re not broken,’ she whispers back. I turn my palms up, wishing I could show her the pieces.

And then, in a broadcast email, the university finally stated outright what we’d been covertly hearing all semester: Don’t walk alone at night. I read that statement and I thought, This is the wrong message. This is a misdirected, victim-blaming message. I read that and I thought, What bullshit. But I also read that and thought, I don’t. And in a quiet, complicated place within me – where logic gets bullied by fear, and fear masquerades as protection – thinking those words, I don’t, made me feel safe.

The friend ‘whispers’ because they are scared; the victim-blaming message is ‘fear, masquerading as protection’, and what it is ‘bullying’ is not some dear little snowflake we need to feel sorry for, but logic, truth, reality. Put it this way: if I lived in a community where I was at risk of being attacked and raped, I would not want to be taught how to defend myself. I would want the community to do the logical, rational thing and face reality: find out why these attacks are happening and figure out how to stop them. Frustrating as it must be when these closed-own self-defence measures are objectively effective, I can well understand how people would want to shut them down, perceiving them as an actively unhelpful distraction from the real issues that need to be addressed.

The problem is in the framing of these as ‘tools to avoid or prevent victimisation’ – the rape culture that causes the victimisation is still in place, so nothing has really been avoided or prevented. You also say that ‘getting past the long culture of shame and dismissal that shadows topics like trauma, victimhood, and suffering has been a net good’, but we haven’t got past it, precisely (among other reasons) because we believe that we have. I suspect you would agree with that as well, and I don’t mean to over-simplify your comment. But I think that phrase, ‘has been’, speaks to the same tendency as your previous ‘not so intense and pervasive’ comment. It’s the tendency (which I share) to want to believe things are not that bad, that they are getting better.

Andrew Dominik responded to the backlash against Blonde by saying that people in general – and Americans especially – tend to ‘jump to solutions rather than looking at the trauma.’ Most of us are probably familiar with how this works on an interpersonal level, when we try to solve a friend’s problem rather than simply listening to them (which is what they want). Is this about wanting attention, wanting to be seen? Yes, in a way. What I take issue with is the false premise that says attention, or ‘being seen’, is a form of capital that the individual accumulates in an ‘attention economy’. I think this premise is symptomatic of a mindset that is prevalent in our culture, that sees people as objects with more or less value, defined by their more or less valuable possessions, achievements, qualities, emotions, etc.

The idea that ‘attention’ as such would be worth anything to anybody seems to me nonsensical. Even the most narcissistic attention-seeker is not really seeking attention, they are seeking (however dysfunctionally) a relationship, a sense of connectedness to other people, which depends on those people acknowledging the reality of the attention-seeker’s experiences and feelings. The notion of the attention-accumulating individual goes hand in hand with its antithesis, which we are meant to aspire towards: the self-actualising individual who (like that resilient little mustard seed) draws upon their own inner resources and acquires the skills they need to grow and be happy. As Rebecca Stringer puts it in Knowing Victims: ‘Central to neoliberalism as a form of governance is the establishment of a personal responsibility system, by which the sphere of state responsibility contracts in the same measure as personal responsibility expands, privatizing social risk.’

Judith Herman’s research on victims/survivors of abuse refutes a number of common preconceptions. For one thing, victims are not nearly as fixated on vengeance (carceral or otherwise) as we tend to assume, and what they want tends to be more about their relationship with the perpetrator and (most importantly) the community than about their own status or the amount of attention they are getting. By the same token, it is often the broken relationship with the perpetrator, and especially with the community, that causes the most damage and makes the trauma harder to move on from.

The utopian ideal that Herman envisions is not a never-ending pity party where today’s top victim is enshrined and celebrated for how broken and vulnerable they are. It’s simply a community where people acknowledge reality. A abused B; B was affected in these ways; B needs X, Y, and Z to help them recover. A’s power and reputation enabled them to do this; that power and reputation need to be reconsidered, as do the deeper implications of what has happened, however painful and difficult this is for us as a community…because a community that buries its head in the sand about this kind of thing will not only cause terrible pain and suffering to the individuals whose experiences are denied (let’s assume we’re too hard-nosed to care about that) – it will also, more pragmatically, be unable to function as a community, because its members will get into the habit of burying their heads in the sand about everything that makes them uncomfortable, and a lot more problems will go unacknowledged and unsolved.

Here, I think, is what Joyce Carol Oates is saying in Blonde, and what Andrew Dominik (true to form) faithfully carries over into his film. Perhaps Marilyn Monroe experienced life like this. Perhaps the very worst stories she told about her life, and the most depressive comments she made or was reported to have made, were also the truest. Not ‘definitely’, just ‘perhaps’. We make flippant comments about the ‘casting couch’, but what might that experience actually have been like? We have all kinds of fantasies about Marilyn Monroe and JFK, but what if their encounter was just like any number of encounters women have had with what we euphemistically call ‘playboys’ and ‘womanisers’? What if, without sentimentality and without enshrining her, we believe in her traumatic experiences, and believe that they affected her in the ways that modern research shows they tend to affect people, and we simply entertain the possibility that she experienced this level of despair (which, by the way, is not as extraordinary or outlandish or beyond the realm of human experience as so many viewers would like to believe)? What might this thought-experiment tell us about our perceptions of Marilyn Monroe and people like her, including the rescue fantasies we have about her and the damage they can cause?

Like Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James, Blonde is about how we see the world through our own individual lens, and how other people see us through theirs. Kazuo Ishiguro, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said that ‘Stories are about one person saying to another, “This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”’ That’s all Blonde is, in essence: a clear-eyed look at how an individual might experience life, and an open question to us inviting us to respond.

If you want to understand any given moment in the film, you just have to bear in mind that it is portraying Norma’s feelings – the fictional character’s, not the historical person’s – which are often feelings about how she is perceived by others, through different lenses and for different reasons. People see her and DiMaggio in the window-seat and perceive this as an image of intimacy, of a united couple where there were once lonely individuals. But Norma, reading her ‘two become one’ poem to the uncomprehending DiMaggio, experiences this moment as one of isolation, in which she is finally left alone in the frame (two become one, in a different sense).

Seeing this, we are not supposed to think, ‘I guess that’s how it really was.’ Here’s what I think: ‘Why do I read that famous image as romantic? Why do I read the images on my friends’ social media feeds as though they were reliable indicators of how those people feel, and how happy they are, even though I should know better? Why was I surprised when one of my friends took his own life a few months ago, and why was the first image that sprang into my mind a Facebook photo of him smiling with his wife and children?’

When Elis, in The Passion of Anna, shows the photo of his wife smiling, then reveals that she had a migraine when the photo was taken, do we cease to perceive this as an image of joy and reinterpret it as one of pain? Or does the smile represent a true emotion that was clouded, at the time, by the perception that she had a migraine? Do we reflect that, after all, we can’t rely on the photo or the knowledge of the migraine to determine what this person was feeling – can we learn to read images, and people, with this in mind?

Even a miserable git like me needs some form of redemption in a story, and the redemption in Blonde is implicit but extremely powerful: it says that we can express what life is like for us, and we can try to understand the experiences of others; paradoxically, though, we can only do this by acknowledging that others’ feelings are not directly accessible to us, by being aware of our (inevitable) tendency towards projection and rescue fantasies. We need to be aware of that impulse to look away when someone’s experience makes us uncomfortable, and resist the urge to say that they’re just looking for attention (or to find other ways of dismissing them). They are trying to tell us what life is like for them, and we need to try and understand. In short, Blonde makes me think that we, as a species, could be connected in the ways that Judith Herman suggests a community should be.

On the other hand, the reactions to Blonde make me long for the ape revolution or for a giant blue planet to come hurtling out of space to destroy us.

One of the aspects of Chopper I'll never forget is how Read seems almost improperly connected to his own body and environment. There's that scene where Read's friend repeatedly stabs him in jail, and Read's confusion is not so much why this is happening, but what is happening. He has trouble registering he's even being wounded. […] So Read will brutally attack someone for petty reasons, then burst into tears and apologies for having done it, and then casually dismiss the whole thing once authorities have arrived.

That’s a great description of how Bana plays that scene and others. One of the underlying issues we’re talking about here is the operation of internalised blame, and Chopper is a fascinating take on this. Dominik said that one of his key discoveries about Read was that he was much more dangerous to people he had wronged than towards those who had wronged him. If you betrayed and stabbed him, he would be sad and disappointed and mocking; but if he shot you at some time in the past, you would be in real trouble when he ran into you again. Dominik explained this as Read’s way of validating his own sense of inner ‘badness’, but also externalising that guilt and attacking it. Somehow this makes sense of the fact that he both cannot feel the wounds inflicted on him and cannot acknowledge others’ wounds as consequences of his own actions (‘Look what you’ve done!’).

[Mr Sausage]

I was trying not to make my post into polemic because what I wanted wasn't to argue, but to hear your own thoughts about ideas that had occurred to me. And you gave me what I was hoping for, a thorough, intelligent, well-thought out analysis that I enjoyed reading and mulling over. By-the-by, have you read Mary Gaitskill's review of Oates' book, or moreso, Gaitskill's essay on rape, trauma, and victimhood, The Trouble with Following the Rules, which was written in the 90s but reads contemporary? They're both in her book, Somebody with a Little Hammer, and given your interests well worth your time, whether you agree with her or not.

Firstly, I think what gets enshrined and fetishised is not victimhood as such, but redemption-through-victimhood. The victimhood has to be conducive to rescue fantasies, even if only posthumous ones. Norma Jean and Marilyn and especially My Week With Marilyn are good examples of this. There has to be some version of the ‘nice guy’ who could have rescued poor Norma if only he’d got there in time, or a tragic error on Monroe’s part that could have been avoided.

My sense is that this rule applies to the broader problem you’re highlighting: pick any ‘enshrinement of suffering, weakness, and vulnerability’, and it’s likely to have a component that mitigates the despair and turns trauma into a satisfying narrative. In Nothing Sacred, what people want is not the terminally ill woman as such, but the symbol of bravery and resilience that the media will turn her into. The victim in Ace in the Hole makes for a great story unless he dies (and there’s no redemptive way of spinning his death). And importantly, in all these stories the ‘victim’ derives no real benefit from the attention: like the mourners at a funeral, it’s the attendees who get these benefits, because it’s a not a question of victims wanting to be enshrined; it’s a question of worshippers wanting an object of veneration.

Your use of the word "redemption" made me think of the common religious narrative where suffering is holy. Christianity is the biggest purveyor of that, with their symbol in the early days of Christ as a fish being abandoned for that of the cross, ie. the instrument of his torture and murder. This birthed martyrology, the cultural obsession with proving devotion through ever greater feats of suffering, and the canonizing of saints through their own experiences with suffering. You quote Mick LaSalle dismissing Norma Jean as "St. Marilyn the Victim", and what we mean when we dismiss someone in that way is that they do not have the importance to insist on their own suffering in the way saints do. They are not holy, so they have no business insisting on the importance of their suffering. It's how we diminish people. So suffering both confers holiness and cuts people off from holiness if they're perceived to be from an insufficiently elevated station. But what stations are sufficiently elevated, and who decides?

In modern liberal thinking, especially that influenced by online leftist spaces in the past decade, it's the degree of vulnerability and historical suffering of your identity group. Norma Jean is a woman, so she is part of an historically marginalized group and therefore vulnerable; but she's also white, which means she's part of an historically privileged group and less vulnerable. So under modern liberal leftist thinking, she and the movie are open to the accusation of privileging Norma Jean because of her whiteness when there are women of colour who are more vulnerable, and therefore ought to have more place in the attention economy that bears witness to suffering. In leftist parlance, this is erasure: white privilege allowing stories of white suffering to eclipse stories of suffering from minorities, when the latter have a more pressing need to speak and be witnessed given their historical erasure. Has this accusation been lobbed at Blonde? I'm not making it myself, just noting that how we deal with narratives of suffering is to form layers or hierarchies of deservedness, and we've been doing it for a long, long time. Suffering was once an aspect of religious holiness, but under more protestant or secular modernity, political ideologies are used designate the equivalent worth. Dogma is still involved, but now the dogma of identity politics (this is not a backhanded attempt to dismiss identity politics, just name the concept at work).

Anyway, to circle back to Christian suffering conferring holiness, the biggest example of that in film is The Passion of the Christ, a movie of explicit torture worship that wishes to locate the divinity of Christ specifically within his inhuman ability to withstand and accept the human experience of physical suffering. Contrast this to The Last Temptation of Christ, which tries to locate the humanity of Christ through Jesus' experience of mental suffering, another essentially human experience. Suffering is an essential component to both movies, but in only one of them is that experience also holy. So here's my maybe unexpected question: what is the relationship between The Passion of the Christ and Blonde? I'm not trying to be glib; these are two very intense examples of suffering narratives, both of which are working through the concept and representing it at length using major cultural figures. And both have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of enshrining suffering as a holy experience. What do they share and where do their differences lie? Do they reveal something about each other? I have no idea, but at some point I may sit down and watch both back to back and see what comes out of it.

[Sloper]

By-the-by, have you read Mary Gaitskill's review of Oates' book, or moreso, Gaitskill's essay on rape, trauma, and victimhood, The Trouble with Following the Rules, which was written in the 90s but reads contemporary? They're both in her book, Somebody with a Little Hammer, and given your interests well worth your time, whether you agree with her or not.

Thanks for the recommendation. I hadn’t read ‘The Trouble With Following the Rules’ before and found it really insightful. I should put a content warning here, because I’m going to spend a bit of time discussing Gaitskill’s (and others’) comments about rape in Blonde, and some of this may be more triggering than the above comments on this theme.

It’s easy, I guess, to be offended by Gaitskill’s comments about what does and does not constitute rape (e.g. in this interview), or her agreement with her older friend that she (Gaitskill) ‘raped herself’. But she explores her feelings in a very thought-provoking and nuanced way, reflecting on how her views are shaped by the culture she grew up in, and how things have changed in recent years. Her (in some ways problematic) comments about modern consent culture actually have a lot in common with Molly Manning Walker’s exploration of this issue in her brilliant film, How to Have Sex – there’s a scene in that film which is all about the ambiguity of ‘getting consent’, of ‘getting someone to say yes’, and how this can interfere with the way people actually communicate and negotiate each other’s feelings. Walker’s millennial take on this is obviously more ‘progressive’ than Gaitskill’s, but I think they’re at least taking part in the same conversation.

Gaitskill has reviewed both the novel and film of Blonde. It’s striking that Gaitskill (in 2000) found many of the same flaws in the book that she finds in the film, and her more positive comments about the book seem pretty vague to me. It’s not just that she doesn’t read it in the same way I do – you could approach it from many different perspectives – but I honestly think that if I came to this review looking to understand the novel better, I would be left feeling confused. Gaitskill finds the Norma-associated voice in the novel ‘silly and affected’, but notes that there are two other voices – one that is ‘Oates the essayist’, and another that is ‘stereotypically male’. She sees the first voice as ‘the strongest’ because it asserts that something terrible is happening, and because it is ‘finally dignified by its genuine grief at the suffering of the fictional Norma Jeane Baker’…which makes it sound like this first voice is dignified when it detaches from Norma Jeane and becomes a pitying observer of her pain.

I think that all three voices are Norma Jeane’s, and that the whole novel only makes sense when you grasp this point. If Oates-the-essayist and the-stereotypical-male are seen as literally distinct voices that Norma’s has to compete with, and sometimes shout over, that suggests a somewhat layered text but one with an ultimately limited view of the different perspectives that are contained in this individual character’s mind.

In a 2000 interview, Oates described it like this:

The novel is a posthumous narration by the subject… The voice, point of view, ironic perspective, mythic distance: this curious distancing effect is my approximation of how an individual might feel dreaming back over his or her own life at the very conclusion of that life, on the brink of extinction even as, as in a fairy tale, the individual life enters an abstract, communal ‘posterity.’

Twenty years later in another interview, she expanded on this idea:

Norma Jeane is in a posthumous dimension telling us about her life in her voice: she's imagining all these other voices, or they're people talking about her after her death; some are real, some she imagines. Almost always people underestimated her.

Just as Norma collects voices and identities as she plays different roles (and as she contemplates motherhood: ‘Baby’ is one of these inner voices, not a talking foetus and certainly not Pro-Life…), so the people around her, real or imagined, are incorporated into her internal life. Even when the things they say are recognisable quotations from historical figures who talked about Marilyn Monroe, these statements are absorbed into and filtered through the lens of Norma’s consciousness. This is very true to my experience of how my own identity is continually shaped by a sense of how I interact with others, how I perceive them, and how (I think) they perceive me.

One effect that Oates creates many times in the novel is to have someone else making pronouncements about Norma or Marilyn, in confident and strident terms, and then refute these pronouncements with a depiction of Norma’s actual experiences. This is not an omniscient narrator proving how wrong people were about this misunderstood person, like a biographer setting the record straight: it is an attempt to portray the experience of knowing (or believing) that you’re being misunderstood by others, which goes hand in hand with an awareness of how hard it is for you to understand other people.

I like Gaitskill’s observations about ‘the American fixation on glamor and ugliness as locked together in a grotesque polarity, feeding off and heightening each other’, and how ‘the banal and the infinite crisscross and then run together garishly’ in Blonde. But I’m not sure what it means to say that ‘the seriousness of [Oates’s] passion honors her subject,’ and Gaitskill’s conclusion leaves me wondering what exactly she is ‘blown away’ by in the novel. She finds it silly, but then forgets what she was snickering at…but then doesn’t seem to explain why.

Just as Joyce Carol Oates sees Marilyn Monroe as a deeply underestimated figure, so I think that many critics underestimate Oates and her complex protagonist. Like Gaitskill, they see passages that appear silly and they feel the impulse to mock them, without realising that this is a writer in total control of the voices and tones she is deploying, which are after all voices and tones that everyone has inside them. (James Joyce would be a relevant point of comparison here.)

In Gaitskill’s review of the film, she refers back to her comments about the ‘three voices’, and how this effect ‘suffuses [Oates’s Norma] with complexity and conflict that gives her great dimensionality despite the heavy unvaried portrayal of her victimhood.’ But the next passage shows, I think, the limitations of her empowerment-oriented sense of what ‘dimensionality’ means. Gaitskill focuses on the Some Like It Hot sequence, which she says is:

portrayed in the movie as the collapse of a broken, empty person who hates and feels humiliated by what she’s doing. The scene in the book is different: there is terror and tragedy yes; actors have to work from and transmute their own emotional landscape and, given the well-documented trauma of Monroe’s early life, her landscape must’ve been a difficult one. But I don’t take lightly the reference to Medea: pure dark power emerging from the surface of sugar and fun. In Euripides’ play, Medea is a scorned, vengeful woman who murders her children to punish their father […] To have this figure emerging from Monroe during a moment of creative crisis does not suggest brokenness and collapse. The image suggests power and magic working to synthesize contradictory depth and force, transforming it into an enchanted mask of supernatural beauty that ripples with brilliance—hell yes, it could be terrifying to go so deep and pull all that raw force into such a perfect, streamlined persona.

This description is a huge over-simplification of what we get in the book. It stacks the deck relentlessly in favour of depth, force, beauty, and brilliance, culminating in something ‘perfect and streamlined’, ditching and dismissing Oates’s protagonist in the process.

In the passage in the book, Oates begins by linking Norma’s stage-fright to the traumatic memory of her miscarriage, with a passage representing Norma’s inner state. The narrator, the dying Norma reflecting on her life, describes herself (as she often does) in the third person:

her boast of having no fear of physical pain was revealed as the reckless boast of an ignorant & doomed child, & her wickedness would be punished, losing this baby she loved, oh she’d loved more than life itself yet had not the power to save. So Sugar Kane recalls & freezes midway in a comic recognition scene kissed by C as a female impersonator before a nightclub audience.

Already you can see several identities mingling here: the would-be powerful Norma transformed into ‘an ignorant and doomed child whose wickedness would be punished’ (a sort of punitive school-master register here, like a villainous authority figure in a 19th-century novel), and a similarly archaic, sentimental, protesting-too-much tragic heroine lamenting the loss of her baby (to escape from the knowledge that Norma wanted to lose it, for reasons both the novel and the film make entirely understandable), and then the incongruously matter-of-fact voice of the screenwriter spelling out stage directions, as though even Norma’s stage-fright is part of a script she’s following, with Some Like It Hot merely a script-within-a-script.

The next passage, the one Gaitskill quotes from in her review of the novel and recalls in her review of the film, adopts a stream-of-consciousness Billy-Wilder-voice (though it takes a few lines to realise it’s him), which is really Norma’s stream-of-consciousness evocation of Wilder’s inner and/or outer voice:

She’d freeze she’d walk off the set staggering like a drunk woman sometimes she’d shake her hands at the wrists so hard, it was like a hurt bird trying to fly she wouldn’t let any of us touch her if the husband was there she wouldn’t let him touch her the poor bastard in this shimmering mostly transparent gown they’d concocted for Monroe showing these mammoth boobs & the twin cheeks of her fantastic jelly-ass & the dress dipped low in the back showing the entire back to practically her tailbone there was this tragic terrified woman emerging out of Sugar Kane like a confectioner’s sugar mask melting & it’s Medea beneath it was a sobering sight Monroe would press her hands against her belly sometimes her head, her ears, like her brain was going to explode she’d told me she feared a hemorrhage I knew she’d had a miscarriage in the summer, in Maine she’d said You know it’s just a network of veins? arteries? holding us together? & if they burst & start bleeding? In the rushes there was this entirely different person there was the true Monroe I always thought “Sugar Kane” by any other name If she’d have let herself be just “Marilyn” she’d have been all right Yes I hated her then I’d have fantasies of strangling the bitch like in Niagara but looking back I feel differently all my years of directing, I guess I’d never worked with anyone like Monroe she was a puzzle I couldn’t solve she connected with the camera, not with the rest of us she’d look through us like we were ghosts maybe it was Monroe beneath that made Sugar Kane special she had to get through Monroe, to get to Sugar Kane who’s all surface maybe what’s “surface” has to be achieved by going deep by being badly hurt & by hurting others

When Norma imagines Wilder seeing the sugar-mask melting to reveal ‘Medea beneath’, she is thinking of how he must have seen her as ‘this tragic terrified woman’, specifically because of the miscarriage for which she feels responsible. When you look at this passage in full, rather than the truncated version Gaitskill provides, very little of it suggests that Norma sees Wilder as seeing her as the powerful Medea; and even when he does acknowledge the power of that pained, tragic version of herself beneath the mask, he only sees this as powerful insofar as it facilitated the creation of the ‘all surface’ Sugar Kane. It’s as if Norma is thinking, ‘He saw my outer shell melt away to reveal the tragic baby-killer underneath; he thought I was like Medea, who murdered her children; and he thought the Sugar Kane he saw in the rushes was the real me, that I should have just let myself be Marilyn and I would have been alright; he wanted to strangle me at the time and only felt differently in the company of that “true Monroe” that remained on the screen, “all surface” – not the monstrous Medea he glimpsed underneath.’

Yes, there is a sense in Norma’s reference (via her imagined version of Wilder) to Medea that there is a kind of furious power in that tragic inner self – I love Euripides’ Medea, especially because I think we’re supposed to root for Medea, and I love how powerful she is. But Gaitskill’s description of this power seems to downplay the rage and despair of Medea, which she expresses through outlandishly violent acts against Jason’s would-be wife and her father, as well as her own children. The opening of the ‘Sugar Kane’ passage in the book is one of the most harrowing portrayals of this kind of rage-and-despair-fuelled power that I have ever seen in a piece of fiction. It makes me think of Marilyn Monroe burning Hollywood (and its inhabitants) to the ground. But it’s not ‘power and magic working to synthesize contradictory depth and force, transforming it into an enchanted mask of supernatural beauty that ripples with brilliance’ – that’s Gaitskill uncritically buying into Wilder’s assessment of Marilyn Monroe, which Norma experiences as his way of not-seeing her. And it’s telling that, in her review of the film, Gaitskill does what most critics do, and simply asserts that the film is an empty portrayal of victimhood, without really engaging with the film’s content or how it responds to the original text.

There is a revealing exchange in the comments below Gaitskill’s review of the film. One reader posts their own Substack review, Ban This Dumb Blonde From Netflix, in which they ‘set the record straight’ about Monroe and the casting couch. This post draws on Monroe’s autobiography to establish that, in fact, she ‘never gave in’ to producers who wanted to have sex with her in exchange for roles. The writer sums this up as follows: ‘Reality: Marylin did not sleep with any casting director, let alone to secure a role —> Blonde: she lets the first casting director she meets rape her.’

First, the autobiography is really no such thing – it is based partly on notes Ben Hecht wrote, which were based on his conversations with Monroe, and as I mentioned before, Hecht openly admitted that he regarded many of Monroe's claims as fantasies. This so-called autobiography was completed by yet another writer long after Monroe’s death, and is full of extra material that has no relation to Hecht’s notes.

There is also Wolves I Have Known, a 1952 article written by Monroe (‘as told to Florabel Muir’), about how she’s had to fight off various predatory men in Hollywood, and how smart women need to know how to do this (‘Whether a girl survives among a pack of wolves is entirely on her... If she plays the game straight, she can usually avert unpleasant situations and she gains the respect for even the wolves’). Even if we take this cleverly written publicity piece as an undiluted representation of Monroe’s experiences and feelings about rape culture, it’s full of comments that would be considered victim-blaming today – and there are other sources suggesting that Monroe did have to have sex with powerful men in order to get work. Karina Longworth, on her ‘You Must Remember This’ series about Monroe, sums up the evidence by saying: ‘I have no reason to doubt her claim that in the 1940s, sexual coercion was endemic to the culture of freelance pin-up posing. It was certainly endemic to the Hollywood casting process.’

The ‘Ban This Dumb Blonde’ Substack post is a great example of how people ‘defend’ Marilyn Monroe against Blonde, by saying that the real Monroe was not ‘dopey enough to get raped by a studio boss’ (a quote from the ‘Who Diss Been Watching’ podcast). I’ve read hundreds of reviews and listened to well over a hundred podcasts about Blonde over the last couple of years, and there is something nightmarish about the regularity with which people repeat variations on these same comments. Yes, there’s a nuanced conversation to have about how portrayals of rape (especially male-authored ones) can be problematic, but so often in the Blonde discourse the drift of the conversation is, ‘Marilyn Monroe was never raped or abused, and it’s just as well because if she had been I would despise her for it.’

Gaitskill replies to this author’s comment by saying:

I finally read your post. Its really good. […] I had heard that Monroe didn't do casting couches, but I haven't read her own account. If I had I would've been more outraged too!

It’s especially interesting to consider this in the light of Gaitskill’s other writings and interview comments about the evolution of our culture’s attitude towards rape, and her (very frank and self-critical) discussion of her own past refusal to consume any media that didn’t portray women as empowered, which she defines as a ‘very P.C.’ attitude. Misogynists attack female empowerment all the time and have a vested interest in portraying women as weak victims. But misogyny also, more insidiously, uses the language of agency and empowerment to blame victims and to foster (usually implied but sometimes overt) contempt for the disempowered, which in turn impacts the way we see perpetrators. Here’s another comment from Gaitskill:

For example the Kennedy interlude: yes he was known in reality to treat women cavalierly […] But it is questionable to me in terms of bigger reality that any a man like that with decent self-esteem would be that gross, right away, to a the most famous and beautiful woman in the world at that moment. He'd have to be a sadist and a slob to an unusual degree. And that concern aside, its just not dramatically interesting. […] Really? Such a consummate artist and professional beauty? Even if it's believable (which to me its not) its so one-note following so many other gruesome moments that you stop being able to feel anything.

What does it mean to ‘treat women cavalierly’? This is a euphemism that buys into the ‘Camelot’ mythology, seeing JFK as the kind of boys-will-be-boys playboy who would have been right at home at Arthur’s Round Table – prone to getting into scrapes due to his sexual indiscretions, but always true to the principles of chivalry when push came to shove. He can’t have been that much of a sadist and a slob. If he had been - and this is really crucial – then his actions would have degraded Marilyn Monroe as well, undercutting her status as ‘the most famous and beautiful woman in the world’, ‘a consummate artist and professional beauty’.

This isn’t an argument about factual accuracy, it’s a larger point about how we see JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and others like them, and what kind of stories we make up about their interactions (which, palatable or unpalatable, are all made up). Men of a certain status simply do not behave like this with women of a certain status. I’ve come across a depressingly large number of reviews calling Norma Jeane a ‘disgusting, promiscuous whore’, or a ‘whore with no redeeming qualities’, because of the JFK scene in Blonde, often without mentioning that it’s a rape scene – and certainly without noticing that the only disgusting, degraded person in that scene is the President.

This makes me think of how people see Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, and their need to construct a story around them that aligns with familiar, comfortable roles. People need to see Depp in a certain way, but they also need a certain kind of woman not to be victimised in the way that Heard was, and so you get the reality-bending vilification of Heard, the absurdly contradictory defences of Depp, or supposedly ‘neutral’ clap-trap about mutual abuse. Behind it all is a complex web of problems: most obviously a basic misunderstanding of how abuse works, and how power dynamics work more generally; but also something like what we see in the texts discussed above, where a certain level of victimhood cannot be seen or tolerated, partly because of what it does to our image of the victim (memes of the weeping Amber Heard bear a strong relation to memes of the weeping Norma Jeane) but also because of what it does to our image of the perpetrator. The victim and perpetrator are never just themselves, they are also aspects of us and of people we know. For all that I’m being critical of Gaitskill’s comments, I do think her reflections tell us something important about how this ‘complex web of problems’ I’m describing can be rooted in very personal feelings. I hope I’m not crossing the line into presumptuous psychoanalysis of a stranger by noting that what Gaitskill says about her own experience – of rape and rape culture – is an important piece of context for her assessment of Blonde.

You quote Mick LaSalle dismissing Norma Jean as "St. Marilyn the Victim", and what we mean when we dismiss someone in that way is that they do not have the importance to insist on their own suffering in the way saints do. They are not holy, so they have no business insisting on the importance of their suffering. It's how we diminish people. So suffering both confers holiness and cuts people off from holiness if they're perceived to be from an insufficiently elevated station. But what stations are sufficiently elevated, and who decides?

I remember Amber Heard saying in court, ‘I’m not a saint’, to try and forestall the perception that claiming victimhood is inherently self-idealising (pretty sure she tried to distance herself from the word ‘victim’ as well). And yes, ironically this becomes a way of degrading someone by portraying them as hubristic and arrogant. This has a bearing on the Jesus movies discussed below…

In leftist parlance, this is erasure: white privilege allowing stories of white suffering to eclipse stories of suffering from minorities, when the latter have a more pressing need to speak and be witnessed given their historical erasure. Has this accusation been lobbed at Blonde? I'm not making it myself, just noting that how we deal with narratives of suffering is to form layers or hierarchies of deservedness, and we've been doing it for a long, long time. Suffering was once an aspect of religious holiness, but under more protestant or secular modernity, political ideologies are used designate the equivalent worth.

Perhaps, but off the top of my head I can’t think of any reviews or podcasts that level this particular accusation at Blonde. People generally see the film as an insulting hit-piece on a white woman, not an exaltation of her, so they’re not likely to wish that Dominik had shone this same degrading light on, say, a famous woman of colour instead. And perhaps those ‘layers or hierarchies of deservedness’ are part of the problem I was discussing above, because our culture’s definitions of deserving victims, or celebrities worthy of celebration, are rooted in a political ideology that favours strength, resilience, hope, and aspiration.

There was one podcaster who said, ‘I don't want to make light of any of this, but when you have so much dark stuff thrown at you it becomes almost comical; it's the Precious effect.’ The similarities and differences between Blonde and Precious (and how critics have responded to them) are a whole other can of worms, but I think the comparison is worth noting in relation to your question. Armond White and others saw Precious as a degrading caricature of ‘black pathology’; Angelica Jade Bastien, a black critic who writes powerfully about her own sense of connection to Monroe (and Monroe’s ‘madness’), criticises the ‘display of pure pathology’ in the Some Like It Hot sequence in Blonde. The phrase ‘pure pathology’ makes me kind of furious: it a quasi-respectable way of saying ‘just crazy’, and it shows a contempt for Norma Jeane that is not unlike White’s contempt for Precious and her mother (‘dumb and innocent, crazy and evil’). But there’s something interesting here about what is at stake when portraying trauma and victimhood, and what kinds of redemption a story needs to incorporate to be politically responsible. It’s easy to see why Precious was generally well received whereas Blonde was not, but also why the former was despised by some for the way it (seemingly) sucked up to white liberal elites with its particular brand of triumph-over-adversity, while the latter was despised for the way it (seemingly) fed into misogynistic perceptions of women as dumb, innocent, crazy, and hopeless.

Anyway, to circle back to Christian suffering conferring holiness, the biggest example of that in film is The Passion of the Christ, a movie of explicit torture worship that wishes to locate the divinity of Christ specifically within his inhuman ability to withstand and accept the human experience of physical suffering. Contrast this to The Last Temptation of Christ, which tries to locate the humanity of Christ through Jesus' experience of mental suffering, another essentially human experience. Suffering is an essential component to both movies, but in only one of them is that experience also holy. So here's my maybe unexpected question: what is the relationship between The Passion of the Christ and Blonde? I'm not trying to be glib; these are two very intense examples of suffering narratives, both of which are working through the concept and representing it at length using major cultural figures. And both have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of enshrining suffering as a holy experience. What do they share and where do their differences lie? Do they reveal something about each other? I have no idea, but at some point I may sit down and watch both back to back and see what comes out of it.

I hadn’t seen The Passion of the Christ before now, so thank you for prompting me to finally do so – it was an interesting watch, and I’m looking forward to the theological commentary track on the DVD, as I’m morbidly interested to delve into what Gibson intended here. I absolutely hated the film, which didn’t surprise me, although it wasn’t the two-hour torture-fest I’d been led to expect. (That’s one similarity with Blonde, whose focus on suffering is often exaggerated I think.)

I have no stomach for torture-porn films and haven’t watched any since Saw, which I was dragged to unwillingly. What really bothers me about such films, and about a lot of horror films, is their tendency to portray victims as deserving of their fate – something I remember we once talked about (probably 15 years ago) in relation to Seven. Although I was relieved that Passion wasn’t quite as relentlessly gruesome as I had heard, its portrayal of suffering raises fascinating questions on the topic of deserved/undeserved pain.

Near the end, Dismas (the good thief on the cross) says that he and Gesmas (the bad thief) deserve their punishment, unlike Jesus. Gesmas laughs, but then a crow flies down to peck his right eye out. This recalls an earlier moment when a flail catches Jesus’ right eye, which remains gruesomely injured for the rest of the film. But it also recalls a line early on in The Last Temptation of Christ when Jesus says that God is a bird that descends upon him and pecks his head. I don’t know what Gibson thinks of the Scorsese film (Paul Schrader: ‘I’m sure he was one of those people who subscribed to the Vatican's view’) but Passion seems like a pretty thorough rebuke to the earlier film’s approach to Jesus and his suffering. It’s as if Gibson is saying, ‘No, this is what Jesus was like: it wasn’t God pecking at his head, it was a Roman flail; and if God pecked anyone’s head it was the bad thief's, for being mean to Jesus.’

Scorsese begins with suffering, with Jesus pained by his own sense of sinfulness, his unwanted sense of purpose, and of course by the flail with which he whips himself and the studded belt he wraps around his waist. But what really pains him is the ‘pity’ he feels for everything in the world, for the Romans’ Jewish victims but also for the Romans themselves – for everyone. The suffering comes from ‘love’, from a sense of connectedness with other people, and we see this vividly in Willem Dafoe’s eyes when he looks at Magdalene, Judas, and others; and we see a complex interplay of love and anger coming from their eyes as well. This relates to what I was talking about near the top of this post, the way people communicate and navigate their own and each other’s emotions, the way we (try to) feel what others feel, and our sense that this struggle is the essence not only of love but of everything we do on earth.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist so I struggle to connect with some of this, but overall I find Last Temptation moving in ways that I’ve never found any other Christ story. It’s like Blonde in that it’s an attempt to explore the way we engage with such an iconic figure, and why we make certain assumptions – and call them ‘truth’ even though we couldn’t possibly know – about who this person was, what constituted their value, and what their inner life was like. Both films are asking: what if this person felt this way? What if it happened like this? And whether it did or not, what if this is a legitimate way to interpret what happened? And why is it heretical to even ask?

It was ironic that Paul Schrader, of all people, said that Blonde was a near-masterpiece but shouldn’t have been about Marilyn Monroe. It has to be about her, for the same reason that Last Temptation couldn’t have just been about some fictional saint (or country priest) struggling with his faith. Both films are partly about that feeling of outrage (‘Not my Jesus! Not my Marilyn!’) that Schrader is expressing. They challenge us to see these icons as human beings, not in the perfunctory way that most Jesus or Marilyn films do, but in a way that entails looking into their eyes and the eyes of the other characters they are interacting with, and trying to connect with genuinely complex, difficult emotions. When a film does this well, it is truly uncomfortable, and I think Last Temptation and Blonde are great examples of this.

In Passion, the interplay of characters’ gazes is also integral to what the film is doing, but the intent is very different. When people look into Jesus’ eyes, they see something divine and are moved by it. This is what Pilate and his wife talk about when he asks how you sense ‘the truth’ when you encounter it. We’re supposed to see this truth and divinity in Caviezel’s eyes (which sometimes turn yellow, suggesting a kind of holy fire perhaps?) but also reflected in the highly emotive eyes of the sympathetic people who look at him. Because this is the ‘Passion’ of the Christ, Jesus’ eyes typically communicate suffering, and those who truly see this react with pity. Even some of the Jewish high priests are visibly disturbed by the level of suffering being inflicted on this man, and when others delight in this suffering they are clearly not looking into Jesus’ eyes, not seeing the truth in front of them, crowing over his pain like the empty-eyed crow that pecks Judas’ eye out.

The gurning displays of grotesquerie from bystanders, like Gesmas’ cackling, is supposed to be seen as a rejection of the dignified pity that makes us human, but which – crucially – seems to be reserved only for Jesus. After all, he doesn’t deserve this suffering, and we do. Barabbas is clowning around for the crowd, then he turns and makes eye-contact with Jesus, and for a split-second he sobers up – then he turns back to the crowd and resumes his clowning. We glimpsed a spark of pity, a recognition of Jesus’ divine passion, but then Barabbas snuffed it out again; this is what sinful humanity does. Some of us, like Judas, only realise we’ve done this when it’s too late to repent, and then our sins catch up with us and we get horribly tortured for all eternity, and Gibson takes a grim delight in this that I find truly sinister. When we see Judas’ or Gesmas’ suffering, we are not supposed to respond with pity. We see the terror in Judas’ eyes, and we fear becoming like him and seeing the things he is seeing, but we also rejoice in his damnation, which places him beyond our capacity for pity. Gesmas’ eye is pecked out, so there is nothing to connect with there, we just fear being him and rejoice that we are not him. Even Jesus’ flailed eye remains visible enough to see the divine passion glowing through: this is what we should look at, connect with, and find reflected in ourselves. It’s easy to focus on the film’s disturbing relish for Jesus’ suffering, but what I find more disturbing is the relation between this and the film’s relish for the sinners’ punishment.

I’m always confused by the idea that Jesus died for our sins, that his suffering represents a taking-on of the burden of humanity’s sinfulness. We’ve sinned, so we deserve to suffer; God magnanimously sends his son to take on that suffering for us; Jesus is without sin, and yet his suffering in some way represents sinfulness; we’re supposed to suffer at the sight of his suffering, so we are suffering after all; and Gibson seems determined to make us suffer as much as possible, to be overwhelmed by our sinfulness as embodied in Jesus’ agony and by his innocence which makes that suffering undeserved. I don’t know how to untangle all this, except to say that it seems to reflect a deeply confused attitude to suffering, punishment, guilt, and innocence; it’s almost as if Jesus, his sympathisers, his tormentors, Judas, Gesmas, and the camera-eye itself are all different aspects of the same identity, stabbing its own eyes out, stabbing out other people’s eyes, and torn between seeing both acts as ennobling persecution and just retribution, between a sense of eyes watching with pity, eyes watching with callous sadism, and eyes watching with cold, divine judgement. Gibson’s film made me think of Chopper, desperately externalising his internal trauma and sense of guilt, then whining ‘Look what you made me do’ at his hapless, wide-eyed victims.

In Gaitskill’s review of the film Blonde, she calls it:

A dispiriting, actually sadistic spectacle especially considering that it’s based on a beyond-words extraordinary, uniquely gifted, tough and graceful artist who’s hard-won success and glamor is rightly celebrated and revered 60 years after her death—glory which doesn’t show up for a minute in this movie.

When I read this, I feel like I’m hearing The Passion of the Christ rebuking The Last Temptation of Christ. It reflects a view of Marilyn Monroe that, to me, feels just as alienating and dehumanising as Mel Gibson’s view of Jesus. That word ‘rightly’ seems like a compliment to Marilyn Monroe (she is celebrated and she deserves it) but I find it dogmatic (we celebrate her rightly, i.e. in the right way). It insists on a correct way of seeing Monroe, in which she is transcendent (beyond-words), raised above other humans (uniquely gifted), ennobled by suffering (tough, hard-won) and by how well she dealt with it (graceful), and most importantly invested with a value that lives, with us, beyond her life and death. Her glamour is like the holy glow around Jesus, and her glory is a consequence of our reverence. To depict anything other than this is ‘dispiriting’ for us, and ‘actually sadistic’ – towards us or towards Marilyn? That line often gets blurred, but many people talk about Blonde as though it truly has the capacity to make Marilyn Monroe suffer, which suggests a very dispiriting conception of the afterlife. But it’s a bit like the idea that we make Jesus sad when we blaspheme against him. The tearful saviour lamenting our sinfulness is like the weeping Marilyn who spends eternity tracking her media profile, or the ‘tearful father’ who cries over his separation from Norma and over her disappointing conduct (and who turns out not to exist).

Assuming that Christians are right and Jesus really was the son of God…maybe, for all its inventions and deliberate anachronisms, Last Temptation gets closer to the emotional truth of who Jesus was than the equally human-authored gospels do. In The Assassination of Jesse James, we see the assassination as it ‘really happens’ (within the fictionalised world of the film), then we see the Ford brothers re-enacting it on stage. The re-enactment is accurate in all the ways we expect biopics to be, in all the ways that critics wanted Blonde to be, and in all the ways that Gibson’s Passion aspires to be with its historical and linguistic authenticity. Everything that happens on that theatre stage happened in real life, every detail corresponds to an objective fact: Jesse learns of the arrest of Dick Liddil, he appears genial, he takes off his guns, he gets on the chair to dust the picture, Bob shoots him, Zee runs in and screams; Bob is telling the truth when he says, ‘And that’s how I killed Jesse James.’

And yet this stage play completely fails to capture the emotional truth of the earlier scene. The Ford brothers might have portrayed the scene more accurately by deviating from the facts; Ron Hansen and Andrew Dominik might be capturing that original emotional truth in their re-telling of the story, in a way that the Ford brothers’ 800 performances did not. We can never know, of course, but this is part of the ‘passion’ that Scorsese and Gibson are portraying in their films: the mystery of our own and other people’s feelings, especially the painful ones. Without getting too corny about it, this is also the mystery of what we call ‘love’, and if God is love and Jesus is a human-shaped emblem of that love, arguably nothing is more important than our sense of how we connect with Jesus on an emotional level.

Gibson is as concerned with this as Scorsese, but his way of portraying emotions and relationships makes me feel deeply despondent. Gibson’s Judas is like the Robert Ford of legend, the craven coward who betrayed his closest friend, to be vilified for the very act that raised his victim into glory. Scorsese’s Judas is more like the Robert Ford in Dominik’s film, his betrayal an expression of genuine anger and resentment in some ways, but also of a kind of ‘love’, a recognition that this is not only what must be done, but also what his friend wants him to do. Scorsese and Dominik show people interacting in a way that I recognise and identify with; whereas it frightens me to think that people recognise and identify with the interactions we see in Gibson’s film.

Put it this way: I feel more sympathy for Markie (the Ray Liotta character) in Killing Them Softly than I do for Gibson’s Jesus, and I see a far more incisive commentary on the interplay of pity and callous sadism in the faces of the gangsters beating Markie than I do in the snarling faces of the Romans in The Passion of the Christ.

[copen]

What about the short scene in Killing Them Softly, towards the beginning, when they're in the car getting ready to rob the poker game. Scoot McNairy leaves the car first, and we stay with Ben Mendelsohn alone in the car for about 15 seconds, as he's considering exactly what he's getting ready to do, and lets out a heavy sigh.
could that possible match your 10000 word dissections?

[soundchaser]

I, for one, am thrilled every time Sloper graces us with a 10,000 word dissection.

[domino harvey]

Yes, agreed. Sloper is using this forum to its fullest potential instead of resorting to using it as a hit and run Twitter alternative, and anyone calling him out for being too loquacious should really make sure that what they contribute is even in the same sport, never mind league

[swo17]

Yes, I can only wish I had the time, energy, and insight to contribute as well as Sloper does

[Sloper]

What about the short scene in Killing Them Softly, towards the beginning, when they're in the car getting ready to rob the poker game. Scoot McNairy leaves the car first, and we stay with Ben Mendelsohn alone in the car for about 15 seconds, as he's considering exactly what he's getting ready to do, and lets out a heavy sigh.

That is a great moment. I think Russell is responding to Frankie's complaints about what a lousy job he's done preparing for this robbery - we get to spend a few more seconds with Russell and his self-loathing. It's like the earlier moment when Russell tells the story of the woman who said she wanted to kill herself after having sex with him, and Frankie says, as if trying to reassure him, 'Oh they all say that,' and Russell just humours him and says, 'Yeah.' A lot of people call these characters 'stupid', as if this were Burn After Reading or something, but they're all painfully aware of their own inadequacies and the terrible decisions they're making.