One of the most anticipated titles of 2022, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde positively crashed and burned by the time the first wave of reviews started rolling in. When it reached Netflix, the damage had already been done, and the film’s reputation was unsalvageable, despite the allure of Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. The divisiveness doesn’t deter the star, however, who believes Blonde is misunderstood.
“It was not a movie that was made to please people or to make people like it,” de Armas told The Hollywood Reporter. Blonde takes from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of the same name to tackle Monroe’s historically scrutinized public life, but, the Oscar nominee is right, it doesn’t do it in any kind of pleasing way, because Monroe’s life was far from pleasing either.
Instead, Dominik doubles down on the objectification of the famous actress as the sex symbol, the pin-up, and the blonde bombshell, in a constant tug of war with the aspirations of an increasingly disenchanted Norma Jean. To do this, Blonde is shamelessly graphic, sexual and violent. In the words of de Armas, “It is a hard movie to watch.”
The actress, who has gone on to receive an Academy Award nomination for the role, doesn’t think her director’s approach is a disservice to Monroe, but quite the opposite. By not holding back, Blonde is exposing the true horrors of the industry that both built and destroyed that who was possibly the biggest star of the 20th Century. “That’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes for other people in the business,” she continued.
The main point of contention was never with how the industry is portrayed in the film, though, but rather the arguably excessive torture porn Dominik puts the image and memory of a dead woman through. The question remains if the two are indeed inseparable, or if there really was a more respectful way to effectively portray just how horribly Hollywood treated Monroe.
De Armas argued that there’s yet another layer of meta meaning to Blonde, based in the role the audiences have always played in the well-oiled machine that is the entertainment industry. Complacent at best, accomplices and even perpetrators at worst. “I feel like the movie also makes the audience feel like participants. We contributed at the time, and we still contribute, in the exploitation of actors, people in the public eye. We, the audience, do this,” the actress said.
“I feel like it’s possible that some people have felt like [someone] pointed a finger at [them], de Armas concluded.
Blonde is streaming on Netflix.
