Blonde (2022)

Some of the controversy and complaining around Blonde that I’ve heard has come from people who couldn’t name another Andrew Dominik film when asked. Admittedly, there are plenty of people who would be interested in a film about one of the most famous actresses of all time, but you only need to watch the trailer to realise that Blonde is absolutely not ‘a film about Marilyn Monroe’. Domink’s past output has been, at times, quite brilliant to say the least; his debut Chopper (2000) was a terrifically bold and at times blackly comedic take on the life of criminal turned author Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, and his follow up, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is one of the best films of the 00’s. Blonde is one of the most harrowing films I’ve seen in a while, but just because it’s incredibly bleak and touches upon opinion splitting subjects, it doesn’t make it egregious or offensive or, as some have coined it, ‘unwatchable’. It’s not easy to pin down one or two things that Blonde is ‘about’ necessarily, but it repeatedly depicts Norma Jeane Mortenson (who became Marilyn Monroe) as a child, as her Mother became more and more unhinged resulting in her trying to drown her own child. Norma’s inroads into the film business are fraught with both the sexist nature of the industry of the time, combined with sexual assault, which Dominik doesn’t shy away from showing us. By doing so he offers the audience the slimmest of insights into the brutal physical and mental scarring that Norma is dealing with when she slips into the shoes of Marilyn, an alter ego that may have initially been coined to offer some sort of escape from past trauma for Norma, but in the end turned into a character that she despised, as real life and past trauma combined to completely consume her. If only a quarter of Dominik’s film (based on the 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates) were true, the life of Norma/Marilyn would not have been a happy one. There have been criticisms of the film that Monroe was happy at times and that Dominik never shows us- but this chastising is inert; the film isn’t interested in Monroe’s life per se, it’s more of an exploration into the, at times, horrifying decimation of a woman’s physical and mental health with reflection on her incredibly difficult childhood. The Independent’s review describes the film as ‘trauma porn’; to even use the word porn in relation to the films’ sequences of nudity or sex seems insulting, the idea of titillation is so far from the mind of the viewer for the duration that to suggest it is baffling. More pressing perhaps is the controversy surrounding Monroe’s abortion in Blonde, which has resulted in the film being called ‘anti-abortion’, seemingly because it shows a CGI fetus in a womb at intervals. Whatever your opinion on abortion, depicting what it is isn’t offering an agenda either way; it’s simply showing what it is and offering a illustration of how damaging it can be. Mercifully Dominik doesn’t present us with sequences in this regard that run too far, although they play out long enough to make you feel pretty down. Blonde isn’t an offensive or misogynistic film at all, but it’s certainly a difficult watch; Dominik should be applauded for the boldness of his film making, despite it not being the easiest film to like, or indeed anywhere near his best work. 7.3/10