We’re hurtling through fire in 1933, the hyperspace of hell circling a forlorn automobile, winding its way to the Hollywood Hills in search of false salvation. Inside, a young Norma Jean watches wide eyed as her mother ignores the fleet of cars fleeing Armageddon. Delusion and hatred are the twin engines of her necessity, desperately seeking shelter with the movie mogul she believes discarded her with the daughter who will become Marilyn Monroe. Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage Mrs Worthington come two years too late.
The words of David Thomson, the greatest living writer on the movies, plague us, “There have been so many extensive post-mortems of Marilyn Monroe that we can do without one more.” Yet director Andrew Dominik is in back seat with Norma Jean and her abusive mother, forging straight ahead into the inferno, ignoring Thomson’s warning, ploughing ahead oblivious into the fiery omens raining down from Hollywood Land. His adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde was ten years in the making, his magnus opus, his astonishing act of hubris?
Norma Jean’s mother is a drunk, hands tattooed with liver spots that look capable of filicide. We should be terrified for the future star, “No one could love a child so accursed” she rants as she drowns the bath in boiling water. We’re edging into Mommie Dearest territory, biographical fiction meshed with misery porn, childhood trauma setting up more trauma to come. Absent fathers and homicidal mothers are a heady brew, every male Norma Jean is going to meet will be abusive, strange that the LA cop who turns them back from the fire is decent then, maybe Dominik never read any James Ellroy novels.
Thank God that cop wasn’t Dudley Smith.
Year later, Norma Jean journeys into another void, her own affective memory. She screams the screams of the dead, petrified looking into the abyss. Does she conjure Marilyn in that moment? Does she take possession of herself to survive the all-out assault by the patriarchy?
“Norma Jean, what were you thinking of?” she’s asked tenderly. “I was… remembering.”
It’s a Lynchian moment, straight out of Fire Walk with Me but like Laura Palmer, one of her future offspring, her defence will prove woefully inadequate against the torrent of abuse, surging from the loins of every man she has the misfortune to meet.
Marilyn’s a woman so she must be unhinged
Ana de Armas channels this ghost of Norma Jean / Marilyn Monroe with the ferocity of an exorcism. Her screen test for Don’t Bother to Knock looks beyond the studio executives into the void like she is communicating with the dead. What does she see between that ladder, what spirit does she unleash with her interpretation of The Method? The men are stunned. Have they witnessed that fine line between genius and madness? When they gain their senses, they revert to type. Marilyn’s a woman so she must be unhinged. The alpha male wheezing on his cigarette pulls them back from the brink, he’s just thinking about her ass.
There is little dispute that Norma Jean / Marilyn Monroe is debased thoroughly and comprehensively throughout Blonde, tortured in a cinematic purgatory where still photos are brought to life with cruel efficiency so her smiles, frowns, thoughtfulness are exposed as incessant sadness and torment, plunging her into ever greater depths of despair, never free from the bondage of the tragedy we associate with her short life.
What is one more indignity piled onto an icon who even had the beautiful song that was written for her to honour her death, taken away and hitched to the wagon of an even more tragic blonde who just happened to be a princess?
Goodbye Norma Jean indeed.
But when we think of Blonde we should remember the quote from Andrew Dominik’s last film, Killing Them Softly, maybe the greatest crime film of the last 15 years. Set during the economic crisis of 2008 and Obama’s run to become president, Brad Pitt – one of the last living iconic actors and producer of Blonde – stands in a bar watching Obama’s win on the television. He turns to the man who is trying to short him over a murder he’s committed and tells him, “America is not a country; it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”