“Blonde” on Netflix: Like a piece of meat – culture

This isn’t a feel-good film, says one who saw it early on, “it drains you emotionally.” Halfway through she took a break and had to get some fresh air. “The last days of her life were brutal.”

Joyce Carol Oates said so in an interview with the New Yorker, Andrew Dominik’s Netflix film of the same name was based on her novel “Blonde” about the hard life of Marilyn Monroe. The novel is from 2000, written long before the “Me Too” debate sharpened and changed the view of the relationship between men and women in show business, especially in Hollywood. In her novels and short stories, Oates devotes herself to the dark side of the American psyche, the horror of repression and suppressed desires. “Blonde,” she says, “is my ‘Moby Dick’https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”

The story is a horror play about a young woman in her fifties who gets caught up in the machinery of the Hollywood system and slips into a terrible loneliness, which then ends with an overdose of pills under circumstances that are still unclear to this day. The absolute horror comes at the end, a rendezvous with the president, it is about John F. Kennedy. Marilyn is being dragged through the hotel corridors by two Secret Service men like a piece of meat, the President is lying in bed and is on the phone, she has to suck him off, and meanwhile he is watching big space rockets on the television.

The story of the unfortunate Norma Jeane Baker, who made a career as Marilyn Monroe, is known from dozens of books and photo volumes. “Blond” is a novel, not everything in it is factually documented, and the film has exaggerated some things. Marilyn is an unloved child, the mother wants to get rid of her, has to be committed to an institution, paranoid schizophrenia. Marilyn is then considered an orphan, she does not know her father’s name, he is an important man in film production.

Marilyn reads Dostoyevsky, the men laugh at her for it, exploit her, privately and at work

Exploitation reigns in Hollywood, especially of women. Marilyn is sensitive, she reads Dostoyevsky, the men make fun of it, and once an audition ends in rape. No better are the men who pretend to protect them. For example, Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star who marries her, but then gets upset by the fabulous scene Billy Wilder shoots for The Seven Year Itch when a blast of air from the subway shaft blows her skirt up. The camera slowly pans over the group of men watching the filming with horny enthusiasm. Even the father, who keeps writing to Marilyn from a distance, from invisibility, admits that he didn’t buy a cinema ticket for this film. The purism of the fathers, a nasty form of monopolization.

Only Arthur Miller is different, the novelist and playwright, Adrien Brody plays him with the arrogant tenderness of the intellectual. Marilyn is happy with him, she’s getting away from Hollywood, but then there are miscarriages, and she realizes he’s taken her marriage as the subject of his writing.

Actors never forget their technique, the men moan in the interview when Marilyn immerses herself emotionally in a role. Andrew Dominik initially wanted Naomi Watts as Marilyn, but as work on the project dragged on, she outgrew the role. Then after many years he found the Cuban actress Ana de Armas, who acted twice in great films with Daniel Craig, “Knives Out” and the Bond film “No Time to Die”. Ana de Armas, like Monroe, is not blonde, and she lacks that naivety with which Marilyn lent an incredibly easy innocence to seemingly vulgar roles. Andrew Dominik lays out the film in a complex way, quickly switching between color and black-and-white scenes. In the end, however, he slips into tragic pathos, as he did in his equally long film “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” with Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. The tangled strands in Marilyn’s hairdo become a constant sign of her state of mind. The critic Richard Brody stated that it was a kind of directorial sadismMarilyn, the victim, the object.

Exploitation is merciless in Hollywood, but not necessarily to be brought down to a common denominator. Marilyn is upset when she learns that she’s supposed to be getting $500 a week for the movie Blondes Prefer, but Jane Russell, the film’s black-haired second wife, is getting $100,000. And the film has blondes in the title.

Fathers don’t cry… A daughter’s relationship with a father, Freud warned early on, is far more complex than the Oedipus complex that brings son and father together. The invisible father confirms his presence to Norma Jeane, promising her that he will show himself at some point. They are letters like imaginary inner monologues. For a time, Marilyn roams Los Angeles nights – this is a made-up episode – with two boys who are gay, so really a girl’s best friends: Cass and Eddy (Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams). They have famous Hollywood dads, Charles Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, and they suffer from not counting next to them. In our home, Cass notes, everything is focused on the father. With Marilyn, they enjoy the freedom to reinvent themselves. As a triangle, as twins, just three. After Cass’ death, Marilyn receives one last card from him: “There never was a tearful father”.

blonde, 2022 – Director, Script: Andrew Dominik. Based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Camera: Chayse Irvin. Editor: Adam Robinson. Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis. Starring: Ana de Armas, Lucy DeVito, Adrien Brody, Sara Paxton, Bobby Cannavale. Netflix, 166 minutes. Streaming start: 28.9.2022.