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:
Mr Sausage wrote: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.
Mr Sausage wrote: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!’).