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Blonde
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In 1989, I was a juror for a small film festival in
Australia. Love in Vain, a student
film by Andrew Dominik, already came with its whispered legend, true or not: at
35 minutes, it had exceeded the prescribed length for such an assignment; it
was aiming to be taken as a ‘real’ film, complete with the already famous Noah
Taylor (from The Year My Voice Broke,
1987) as male lead, and a music score by the legendary Hugo Race; it was a
‘scandal’ on several levels, including the filmmaker’s supposed wish to make
spectators feel as if they were “on a drug trip” (the vain/vein pun in the
title was screamingly evident). I retain a vivid memory of its deliberately
over-saturated colours, its hallucinatory longueurs,
its drug-underground fatalism, its adoption of a pose of stoned stupor. It
anticipated many films to come, both in Australia and abroad – from Angel Baby (1995) to Requiem
for a Dream (2000) – and looked back to grunge epics in other media such as
Herbert Selby Jr’s novel Last Exit to
Brooklyn (1964, filmed by Uli Edel in 1989).
Dominik in ’89 was a canny player already hooked up to
a hip scene in Australia of actors, musicians (Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, &
co.) and writers, as well as to their grab-bag of cultural reference points and
obsessions (William Burroughs, punk, Goth expressionism, etc.). In those years, Dogs in Space (Richard Lowenstein, 1986)
offered the slightly more affable, bland, audience-friendly, middle-of-the-road
version of this sensibility, while John Hillcoat’s Ghosts … of the Civil Dead (1988, with Cave and Race on board)
served it up raw, with an emphasis on spooky, paranoid politics (state
incarceration, the society of surveillance, mind control, etc.). So the maker
of Blonde is the guy who imperiously
regards Marilyn Monroe’s films as mere “cultural artefacts”, without the
slightest intuition that his work, too, is 100% of its time and culture.
Dominik’s subsequent career leading up to and
immediately following his striking debut feature Chopper (2000) got involved with music video (an ubiquitous recourse for all the
filmmakers and most of the musicians of this quasi-underground scene), and
second-unit work for Terrence Malick – whose narrative approach and
pictorialist aesthetic was to wield a decisive influence on Dominik’s first
American gig, The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), although the director himself
insists on Barry Lyndon (1975) as his
guiding star. Killing Them Softly in
2012 signalled a surprising departure by Dominik into a kind of social realism,
with its heavy-handed commentary on ‘Obama’s America’ laid atop a grimy crime
story. While moonlighting in advertising (the Behind the Mac campaign) and juggling (as all filmmakers do)
various possible feature projects, Dominik made another significant
professional contact in David Fincher (handling two episodes of the latter’s Mindhunter series in 2019), and pursued
his bond with Cave in two intimate documentaries, One More Time with Feeling (2016) and This Much I Know To Be True (2022).
Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates’
imagining of Marilyn Monroe’s life and death, starring Ana de Armas, was shot
in 2019; like Annette and The French Dispatch (both eventually
released in 2021), its mooted premiere was held up at length by complications
induced by the pandemic. As I write this, Blonde has just appeared on Netflix, and has already been subject to a storm of
commentary, ranging (as with everything these days) from logorrhoeac opinion
pieces to one-word tweets. I shall not attempt to rehash this public ‘debate’,
which tends to hysteria and total vagueness at both extremes of the
like/dislike gauntlet – except to pluck out this line from Sarah Churchwell (as
quoted by Angelica Jade Bastien), author of The
Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe: “Marilyn
was not only a fiction; she was not simply an icon. And it is wishful thinking
to believe that focusing exclusively on the surface does anything but make her
superficial”.
Dominik would certainly concur with that
premise – to focus exclusively on the surface – if not with its attached
judgement: he has made it brutally clear on the publicity trail that he is not
concerned with the reality of Monroe, only her images – specifically, the
iconic still-photographic images (he even went to the surviving rooms and sites
where they were shot). Time and again, the scenes of Blonde find their way to the uncanny recreation of one of those
photo poses – even (or especially) at the moment of Marilyn’s death.
But why? So what? An empty life as an
image, meaningless death as just another pose – Blonde gives us little more than this by way of subject, theme or
orientation. It gets worse when – and this paragraph is the last time I’ll draw
upon the director’s ghastly, posturing, interview pronouncements, I promise – Dominik
reiterates his basic position in relation to the material: “It’s about a person
who’s going to be killing themself”. A strange remark and a weird vision, that
not only calls back to overdetermined, rabidly anti-showbiz downers from
previous eras such as Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965) or Star 80 (Bob Fosse, 1983), but (far worse) smacks of a certain moral judgement: Marilyn
was always on a death-driven kick, it was her inevitable destiny. She lived as
a ‘whore’ to the image-industry (the windblown dress of The Seven Year Itch [1955] is given an interminably Gothic
treatment, Weegee-style), and she ultimately gave in to the
‘madness’ that had dogged her since childhood.
Dominik describes his film as a “howl of
pain or rage”. Pain there is in Blonde,
aplenty. But pain or rage, which is it to be? If it’s the latter, than rage
over what, precisely? Patriarchy? The film industry? ‘Broken homes’? Western
society? I was reminded of the old 1980s punk-Goth mantra about some
unspecified but frightfully all-pervasive fear (“Whether it’s God or the bomb, it’s just the same …”), now turned by Dominik
into an equally all-purpose anger.
But what’s it all about, Andy? What does this rage refer to in the real,
material world?
It’s that howling which is the real key. Right from Love in Vain, Dominik’s alibi has almost always been the emotional
immersion of the spectator: know what it feels like to shoot drugs, be a crazy
criminal, grieve a child’s death, or be Marilyn Monroe! Live in the heads of
these extreme characters! It is an intriguing exercise to try to map the
cinematic genealogy of this current – and often rather shallow – craze.
Dominik – whose 2012 fave films list for Sight and Sound included Lynch, Coppola,
Malick, Polanski and Scorsese, mostly post-1970 – swims in a particular lake of
contemporary, immersion-at-all-costs directors: Darren Aronofsky, Amat
Escalante, Gaspar Noé (the foetal and inter-uterine imagery of Enter the Void [2009] returns in Blonde) … This tendency is underpinned
by a very selective grasp of Stanley Kubrick’s legacy, inspired especially by Full Metal Jacket (1987). Provocation, shock and a direct plunge into extreme mental-emotional
states are the by-words of this style.
The historical timeline of influences here
is not terribly deep, or broad, or even well-understood by some of its
flashiest practitioners. In Dominik’s Top 10 list, only The Night of the Hunter and Sunset
Boulevard from the ‘50s, and Marnie from
the ‘60s, get a guernsey – all tending toward various degrees and strategies of
expressionism. (The absence of Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray or Robert Aldrich
from this hit parade is surprising.) It’s precisely the opposite of a more
reflective, multi-layered cinema – the cinema that, in Pascal Bonitzer’s
formulation, explores the ability to “represent and narrate, figure and show simultaneously”. Paul Thomas Anderson, to give a
counter-example, started off squarely in the immersive school but has
progressively moved toward a more ‘classical’ position, particularly in Phantom Thread (2018). But Blonde is a pristine example of the
malaise in contemporary filmmaking that Bonitzer had already diagnosed in 1988:
movies that “figure without showing and show without figuring, represent
without narrating or narrate without representing”.
From the start, Dominik has been an
enthusiastic member of a lightly cinephilic generation that takes the entirety
of its subject matter and most of its stylistic options from the admired work
of others. It’s much worse than any sin of this sort that the Nouvelle Vague
generation ever committed. Chopper,
for instance, was ersatz Scorsese, just as The
Assassination of Jesse James … was cut-rate Malick. So,
There are also various bits of European
art cinema as filtered through the American allusionists (including Paul
Schrader). I thought of Bernardo Bertolucci three times while watching Blonde: institutionalised, mad parent
from The Conformist (1970); youthful
threesome (here involving Charles Chaplin Jr & Edward G. Robinson Jr!) from The Dreamers (2003); and the same oneiric images from Niagara (1953) as used in La Luna (1979).
It’s an old complaint, I know, to target movies-that-obsessively-feed-on-other-movies
(which was exactly Noël Carroll’s early ‘80s argument against the burgeoning
American ‘cinema of allusion’), but Blonde sure does strengthen one’s resistance to filmmakers “focusing exclusively on
the surface” in this resolutely superficial way. And its style-tricks (every
kind of play on colour, screen format, deframing, focus, etc.) hit a deadly
point of repetition not very far into the 166-minute running time, as if
Dominik and his collaborators (DOP Chayse Irvin speaks of “respecting no rule”
– it’s an anti-Lumet, destructured free-for-all in this way) simply ran out of
ideas for clever variations.
That example of La Luna keys us into something specific about Blonde – if not quite unique to it. What was Bertolucci doing with
the Italian-dubbed, surreal clips from Niagara,
and with the image of Marilyn? Sowing (with a deft hand) disorientation,
confusion, a surreal collapse of registers in a wild flight of the imagination.
So, let me play Devil’s Advocate to myself for about three seconds: near the
start of Blonde, in the too-long section
devoted to young Norma Jeane’s difficult days with her deranged Mom (Julianne
Nicholson) – like in Chopper, Dominik
is a total sucker for these super-explanatory scenarios of too-close Mom and
too-absent Pop, “dollar book Freud” indeed – there is a spectacular sequence
devoted to everything seemingly being
on fire. The landscape, roads, homes, the air, everything outer and inner, soul
and psyche included: it’s all going up in flames. I flashed onto Werner Schroeter’s
masterpiece Malina (1991), or any
number of expressionist pieces in which external and internal traumas melt into
each other, undecidably – and for those moments, I was intrigued by Blonde, wondering what this sequence
promised, and where this film would go.
The film fully squanders that promise in a
succession of grossly handled, quasi-horror tableaux: forced abortion while
losing consciousness; the secretive interlude with JFK; a drug haze of suicide.
But the central principle here – the blurring of boundaries in the name of
immersing us in Marilyn’s depression and ‘madness’ – is, in itself, not
instantly reprehensible. Mulholland Drive (2001), another of Dominik’s favourites,
did remarkable things with the confusion of acting and being, an aspect to
which Blonde is clearly indebted. Aronofky’s Black Swan (2010), to which Blonde has also been rightly compared, was a film that I thought had some compelling
psychodramatic bite (on my single viewing of it, at least). Confused,
hysterical, and all that, sure – part of a tradition that includes much of
Oliver Stone’s output – but worth kicking around in one’s head for a while (I
did so in my book Mysteries of Cinema).
Dominik’s work in Blonde is more on the level of a different Aronofsky stinker, Mother! (2017), or (an older, more
obscure, Aussie reference) Ray Lawrence’s insufferable Bliss (1985) – films that relentlessly churn the wheel of
uninteresting metamorphoses, endlessly flip the real/unreal levels, to the
point where nothing grips at all. This is the type of stuff that hack reviewers
mistake for ‘surrealism’, and instantly align with the far more rigorous
narrative dispositifs of Lynch or
David Cronenberg.
I do not concur automatically (as so many
currently do) with the critique of Blonde that claims the main problems of the film to be a Marilyn who “lacks agency”
(or – what a sin against the Bechdel Gospel – doesn’t talk with other women!),
and is not presented as a creative, thoughtful artist … and/or a Dominik who
“lacks compassion” toward his heroine, and abuses his “male gaze”. (Films – by
anybody of any identity-orientation – that “represent and narrate, figure and show simultaneously” tend not to be
reducible to a Male Gaze.) For
starters, fictive distortions – aka High Concepts – have been the ever-vaulting
norm for mainstream showbiz biopics since at least Man on the Moon (Milos Forman, 1999), Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, 2002) and The Life and
Death of Peter Sellers (Stephen Hopkins, 2004) – frequently veering to the grotesque. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) is, alongside Blonde, simply the
latest in this line-up – and, in fact, Dominik would have done well to heed the
twist of that film in displacing the narration to (say) Marilyn’s manager, with
the ensuing split-level narration that allows … or JFK, or the succession of
husbands, or Norman Mailer … the sky’s the limit!
And besides, movies can do whatever the
hell they like with characters (including those ostensibly derived from real
life): three-dimensional or no-dimensional, or any hybrid of available options,
anything goes on that plane. Humanist compassion of the most conventional sort
is hardly a prerequisite – certainly not in the variously expressionistic and
black-comic forms to which Dominik aspires. There have been tremendous, steely
works about women who lack agency, not the least of them being Barbara Loden’s
immortal Wanda (1970). ‘Representation’ is not a book of
law, nor should it be subjected to a tribunal hearing (or mass lynching).
It could have been predicted from the
outset (from Oates’ novel, even) that, if you were expecting a comprehensive,
respectful and accurate biopic of Monroe’s life and career, this film is not
going to give it to you. No, what Blonde lacks (just as Chopper did) is an
intelligent perspective on its material. A ‘shocking ride down to Hell’, or a
parade of what Elena Gorfinkel has called “shallow forensic Pavlovian gotchas”,
just doesn’t amount to enough in this instance.
© Adrian Martin 2 October 2022 |
