The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by the Auteur Andrew Dominick

Blonde is a very “sexy” movie — so why does it repulse us?

For a certain type of cultural critic, the apparent sexlessness of contemporary American film is a real concern. “Movies aren’t sexy anymore” is an oft-repeated complaint, and not one that is entirely unfounded — when reviewing the landscape of mainstream cinema, it does feel like we have somehow moved to a distinctly less erotic place than in previous decades. Where the problem arises is when you ask these critics to describe what was “sexy” before that is missing now. We still have hot movie stars, and cultural norms have shifted such that more than ever can be shown onscreen, but there seems to have been some fundamental shift somewhere. So what is it?

Some blame the recent proliferation of export-focused, sanitized properties as exemplified by the boom in superhero films, but the trend has apparently been developing since at least the 1990s. Others claim that it is just a net reduction in explicit sex scenes on screen that is the problem, yet these same critics are forced to admit that the Golden Age of Hollywood was “deliciously provocative [through use of] innuendo and ingenious workarounds.” While there is no consensus of cause, it appears as though it is not actually who or what is seen onscreen that is driving this discussion around eroticism in film, but something baked into film production itself. But if the images we literally see onscreen don’t make our movies (and our stars) sexy, then what does? 2022’s Blonde seems to be the only mainstream film in recent memory that has even attempted to grapple with this question in a serious way, by focusing on the creation of the symbol of Hollywood sexiness — Marilyn Monroe. And what we get out of this is a surprisingly impactful look at the types of actions it took — and that we were willing to permit — to create movies and stars that our culture at one point considered meaningfully, unanimously, “sexy.”

Directed by Killing Them Softly’s Andrew Dominick and starring Ana de Armas, Blonde is a nearly 3-hour-long adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name. A fictionalized biopic, it begins with a pre-Marilyn Norma Jeane Mortenson being almost drowned in a bathtub by her schizophrenic mother before being sent to an orphanage while her mother is institutionalized. The film takes liberties in following her major career beats — from the creation of the Marilyn Monroe persona, to her highly publicized marriages and love affairs, to her nearly infinite list of starring roles and modeling gigs — finally ending with her real overdose and death in 1962.

From her first days in show business, we are shown the lessons our fresh-faced actress is taught about what audiences and creators will demand if she is to succeed in the industry. While attending her first audition for a film role, we watch as she is immediately silenced and raped by the film’s producer. Norma Jeane is shut down, Marilyn Monroe is christened, and she gets the part. Similarly, following her emotionally charged audition for a role in Don’t Bother to Knock, we hear the writing team musing that “That was pretty bad, wasn’t it? Like watching a mental patient, maybe. Not acting. No technique.” Of course, she was also mocked for seemingly being too invested in the technique of embodying this role (“I think I could be ‘Nell’. I k-know – I am ‘Nell…’”), but that is irrelevant. As an actress, she has nothing to offer these men. At the scene’s end, we see what her casting will really bring to the film, as the director moans “Sweet Jesus. Will you look at the ass on that little girl.” Marilyn Monroe as a potentially serious actress is shut down, Hollywood’s new little girl is discovered, and she gets the part.

And so it goes, as Norma Jeane is forced to endure degradation after degradation alongside her stratospheric rise. For each smart business decision she makes and strong screen performance she gives, there is sure to be some public or private punishment awaiting her. Even in the happier days of her life, such as in her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller, she gains some peace only when she can empty herself out and be filled with something else, something taboo. In this case, not a crude sexual fantasy, but rather the pseudo-pedophilic remembrance of Arthur’s estranged first love, a young girl named Magda:

Arthur: I should call you Marilyn, shouldn’t I? Or is that just a stage name? 

Norma Jeane: You could call me Norma. That’s my true name.  

Arthur: I could call you Norma, if you prefer. Or, I could call you…’My Magda’. 

Norma Jeane: Oh, I’d like that. 

Arthur: My secret Magda . . . But maybe “Marilyn” when others are around so there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings.

Norma Jeane: When others are around, it doesn’t matter what you call me. You can whistle. You can call me, ‘Hey you!’

We watch as she is violated by studio execs and presidents alike. We see her, nearly naked, apologize as she is beaten by her pro-athlete husband. We see multiple shots from within her cervix as she is given two separate forced abortions. Even the miscarriage that signals the decline of her and Arthur’s marriage is made visible, as we watch the blood pool in her white dress while she screams for Arthur to “Help [her]! Save the baby! Daddy, for God’s sake! Deliver the baby!” Through a near-endless stream of personal humiliations, Norma Jeane is forcefully transformed: into the nubile blonde, and the polyamorous sexpot, and the ghost of Magda, and finally the incorruptible dead starlet.

Dominick and de Armas are unflinching in their commitment to the tragedy unfolding before us, to the point that it sometimes enters the realm of kitsch. At one point, we listen as her second unborn child audibly pleads with her to not abort it. During the recreation of the famous white dress photo, we watch from knee-level as the camera pans repeatedly around her lower half, interspersing held images of her panties with slow-motion shots of men hollering and spitting at her in a near-ecstatic frenzy. And this is to say nothing of the minute-plus extreme closeup shot of her performing forced fellatio on John F. Kennedy. Even at the film’s conclusion, as we watch our star dying of an intentional overdose, Dominick cranks what we see almost into the absurd, dissolving the frame of her dying body into a smokey image of her unknown, mysteriously estranged father before cutting back to show her soul literally decoupling from her corpse. 

If there is a legitimate formal criticism to level at Blonde, it arises from this extremity. The repeated CGI-rendered shots of unborn babies floating in her womb do read as unserious over time, and having her literally argue with the fetus growing inside her was a bit much. Additionally, I understand what Dominick was trying to do with the kidnapping scene preceding her second abortion, but it is shot so campily as to feel more like a Paranormal Activity knockoff than a serious depiction of immense psychosexual terror. As for de Armas, her depictions of the drug and alcohol-fueled haze of Norma Jeane’s later years start off overly exaggerated and end with a performance echoing teenagers pretending to be drunk. Being willing to go to the extreme made this movie what it is, but it did lead to some unfortunate misses, especially in its final quarter.

Where the response to this film falls completely flat, though, is in those critiques that have to do with the apparent disrespect the film shows towards Norma Jeane, de Armas, or women in general. Dominick has received a great amount of criticism due to a shallow reading of the film as about little more than a girl longing (and lusting) after her father. It was accused of depicting its subject as humiliatingly childlike, a helpless girl constantly crying out for “daddy,” making the dead actress a vessel for gratuitous depictions of abuse. He has certainly done himself no favors in this area — you can almost feel him smirking when he tells interviewers that he enjoys offending audiences and that “we’re living in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered . . . And if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them.” But those reviewers who lazily complain that de Armas is topless for too much of the film (almost 10 total minutes of screentime), or that her voice is too breathy and lustful to be taken seriously, or that the assault scenes are too numerous or too graphic, seem to be missing the real questions the film is forcing: this sort of total objectification and forced-submission to scandal, regardless of its exact historicity, got us Marilyn Monroe. Do we want a return to the sexiness of Monroe’s Hollywood? If so, are we willing to confront what built it? Was Monroe sexy because she herself was sexy, or was she sexy because she was a part of Hollywood love triangles and potentially sleeping with the leader of the free world? Was she sexy because of anything unique to her, or because we could gut her and fill her with whatever turned us on?

Blonde is a film that makes viewers stare down the barrel and consider what it is we are looking for in “sexy” cinema. In casting de Armas, the film secured one of the only faces working in the types of films that critics seem to be calling for — as a sexually sadistic home invader in Knock Knock, as the leading woman in the erotic thriller Deep Water, and as a girlfriend/sex hologram in Bladerunner 2049. As Netflix’s first NC-17 film, Blonde was free to put almost anything it wanted on display. And of course, it is about the work and life of a star whose alleged sex tape can pull millions of dollars to this day. This film booked the sexy lead to play the sexy subject from a sexier time of cinema, but the film itself is thoroughly unsexy. It is cold, perverse, voyeuristic, and brutal. And by being willing to be cold, perverse, voyeuristic, and brutal, it succeeds in seriously engaging with the current cultural moment. This is the sort of thing that went into “sexy” movies back then, so is this what we are asking for? Or is something like Blonde what it means to be sexy now? It is not a prudish film, nor is it a film that suggests sex on screen is inherently bad. What it is is an honest film, and one that asks the audience to be honest about just what it is that we want.