The promotional posters for Blonde bear the subtitle: “Ana de Armas is Marilyn Monroe”. It’s a simple yet labyrinthine statement, containing the fascinating proposal that one can entirely become someone else – and fuse one’s identity to another’s in service of a performance. This, it becomes clear, is the key to Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, a film adaptation more than ten years in the making of Joyce Carol Oates’ bestselling, 700-page novel of the same name. Both works employ fiction as a means to arrive at some inaccessible truth, to shine a quavering torchlight on the dark ambiguity of an iconic life: attempting to grasp at the woman behind that eternally red-lipsticked smile, the one caught in the camera flash.
Spinning an epic from the chasm between superstardom and interiority, between Marilyn Monroe the image and Norma Jeane the flesh, Blonde is a tragic and searching Matroshkya doll of a film: a captivating meta-narrative on the idea of persona that tunnels deeper and deeper into the imagined psyche of one of the most famous women in human history.
In the almost 3-hour timeframe of Dominik’s pained, sprawling seance with the icon’s ghost, Marilyn Monroe becomes no more, and no less, than an invention. Universally recognised yet utterly unknowable, she’s summoned as an apparition of legendary fame and draped like a skinsuit over the actresses in her wake. Inside Lorelei Lee’s (from the iconic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) skin lies Marilyn Monroe; inside Marilyn Monroe’s skin lies Norma Jeane; and inside Norma Jeane’s skin lies Ana de Armas.
“Is the hair real?” Marilyn is asked. “No,” she replies, ducking her head gently with a self-aware smile. Ana isn’t a natural blonde either, and while some stunningly precise costuming, makeup, and camera framing renders the two uncannily identical at times, the actress does not sound like Marilyn at all. Blonde demands its star to simultaneously disappear within Marilyn’s body while constantly reminding us that ‘Marilyn’ is a performance, presenting de Armas with an endlessly fascinating multi-layered role where she excels with every breathy, not-quite-right whisper. “I’ll be anything you want me to be,” Marilyn (and Norma, and Ana) pleads at a screen test; her desperate willingness to be malleable is what finally catapults her to stardom, and also how she lets herself be stretched so translucent that she tears apart.
Blonde adopts a thrilling stylistic discontinuity that morphs according to Marilyn’s psychic landscape: the frame alternates between narrow and wide aspect ratios, between glossy black-and-white to warm technicolour, from meticulously formal portrait shots to unsteady bodycams or a distorted fish-eye lens. We attend the premieres of Marilyn’s iconic films with her, and Dominik’s camera positions us behind rows of seats at the movie theatre as we watch her act; our darkened cinema becomes an extension of the cinema on screen, creating a cacophonous tunnel of meta-performance that makes palpable the sheer psychic weight of how much Norma has to pretend.
Norma is wrangled into Marilyn’s corsets and thrown like an offering onto the red carpet, and every violent flash of a camera in her artificially delighted face smacks with a concussive blast. Everyone hungers for her, and the hunger relentlessly consumes Norma until only the imagery of Marilyn remains. “In the movies, they chop you all to bits,” she remarks quietly with a smile, yet this dismemberment doesn’t only occur on the silver screen but in her private life, too: a string of husbands, lovers, and ‘daddies’ attempt to subordinate her career, womanhood, and sexuality according to how they want her to accessorise their lives.
As Blonde traces Marilyn’s starlit, scandalous career back to her turbulent childhood, through her entanglements with these men, and up to her death, its narrative is visually anchored by several stunning recreations of iconic photographs of Marilyn, almost fetishistic in their detailed likeness. These self-conscious references pierce straight to our collective memory and imagination, underscoring Marilyn’s unimaginably vast place there, even sixty years after her death. They also breathe motion into stillness, and allow us to collectively visualise the psychic, flesh-and-blood interiority of the woman behind these two-dimensional images, elevated to the status of myth.
A cinematic force of grand and dissonant imagination, Blonde possesses a feral and animalistic sensitivity to the life of a person whose legendary image – blown up on billboards several stories tall, skirt in the breeze – has attained such dizzying height that it leaves her personhood down on the asphalt, so tiny it’s almost invisible.
This is guttural, instinctive, anguished filmmaking that bends space, time, and every cinematic tool at its disposal in service of attaining emotional truth. A ‘biopic’ that’s less interested in historical faithfulness and more in why we remain captivated by the same, unreachable stars, Blonde’s wildly symbolic storytelling befits the life of a woman who has become all but symbol – and bypasses the ‘real’ to get at the ‘true’.