Back when we were still waiting for Netflix to drop director Andrew Dominik’s fantastical and fucked up biopic of Marilyn Monroe — an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ loose reimagining of the star’s life — we were promised that Blonde would “offend everyone”. And well, when it was released last fall, the movie stayed true to its word, causing an endless stream of controversy and dividing critics and audiences alike. Now, unsurprisingly, the movie has been dubbed the worst of the year by the Golden Raspberry Awards, a.k.a the Razzies, a.k.a the infamous annual parody awards that celebrate (what they claim to be) the very worst of cinema each year.
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Leading the nominations at this year’s event with eight potential prizes up for grabs, Blonde ended up winning the Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay awards. For the former award, it was up against Disney’s new Pinocchio, Machine Gun Kelly’s stoner comedy Good Mourning, fantasy movie The King’s Daughter and Jared Leto’s MCU horror Morbius — for “‘explor[ing] the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe … by continuing to exploit her posthumously”.
Blonde’s star, Ana de Armas, avoided any nominations but the movie was also up for Worst Remake/Rip Off/Sequel and Worst Director. It then bagged two nominations for Worst Supporting actor too, for Xavier Samuel as Cass Chaplin, and Evan Williams who played actor Eddy G. Robinson Jr. Finally, the movie received two nominations for Worst On-screen Couple: one to “the real life characters in the fallacious White House bedroom scene” and the other to “Andrew Dominik and his issues with women”. Ouch!
Was the movie really the worst to come out of 2022? Both Andrew Dominik and Ana de Armas have stood by the movie despite critiques, one of which came from model and activist Emily Ratajkowski, who called out the “fetishisation of female pain”. Planned Parenthood also referred to the movie as “anti-abortion propaganda” due to a contentious scene where Marilyn is talking to a foetus.
In a previous interview with Collider, Andrew described the movie as “one for all the unloved children of the world… It’s like Citizen Kane and Raging Bull had a baby daughter.” But it is, first and foremost, a film about the manifestation of trauma. “The whole idea of Blonde was to detail a childhood drama and then show the way in which that drama splits the adults into a public and private self,” Andrew explained. “And how the adult sees the world through the lens of that childhood drama, and it’s sort of a story of a person whose rational picture of the world as being overwhelmed by her unconscious, and it uses the iconography of Marilyn Monroe.” He continued by calling the film both a “tragedy” and a “nightmare”, about a child no one wanted becoming the most desired woman in the world. “It’s about being in a car with no brakes. It’s just going faster and faster and faster.”
If you’re still yet to watch the highly controversial movie, here’s everything to know about Netflix’s Blonde and the drama surrounding it.
Where can I watch the trailer for Blonde?
Here! Netflix dropped the official, full length trailer for the film after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival was announced. Watch Ana as Marilyn as she poses in white dresses, confronts her adoring public, and crashes her car in a road rage — all to the dulcet tones of a slow “Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend” cover. Perfection. The second trailer, in which we see Ana’s depiction of the icon in a little more detail, can be found above.
What is the plot of Blonde?
Blonde is based on the 700-page book of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, which was released in 2000. Joyce has long been adamant that her book should not be considered a biography, but rather as a fictionalised historical novel. The New Yorker also called the story “the definitive study of American Celebrity”. Throughout, Joyce never actually uses the real names of the men in Marilyn’s life, instead using pseudonyms; but it does cover her marriages, affairs and toys with the theory that she was assassinated by a vindictive, powerful ex. Andrew has said that some of the “excesses” of Joyce’s novel have been removed though, including a rape scene.
The script for the film has done the rounds on the internet for a while, and a first cut was submitted to Netflix last year, who were rumoured to have asked for re-cuts due to it being, as Dlisted put it, “too weird”. That too was a first in the studio’s history, who famously allow directors to have free rein over their projects.
Who else is in the cast of Blonde?
Alongside Ana is Bobby Canavale (I, Tonya) and Adrien Brody (The French Dispatch) as Marilyn’s second and third husbands, the Yankee’s player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller respectively. Her mother, actress Gladys Pearl Baker, will be played by Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown) whilst John F. Kennedy, Marilyn’s rumoured lover, will be played by Caspar Phillipson. Of course, Caspar also played JFK in another biopic: Pablo Larraìn’s Jackie.
Who is behind the camera of Blonde?
The decade-long project has been the baby of writer and director Andrew Dominik — who is also known for the neo-noir movie Killing Them Softly (2012) — since the very beginning. He also brought the star of that movie, Brad Pitt, in as a producer on Blonde, alongside two-time Oscar winning producers of 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. Working on the movie’s music are Nick Cave and Warren Ellis of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – something of a favour, after Andrew produced an acclaimed documentary on the group.
What is the runtime of Blonde?
When first pressed by Collider to give us an idea of the runtime, Andrew gave a blunt answer: “Mate, that’s like asking a woman her age.” Blonde has been rumoured to be extremely long since it wrapped filming (the book after all, is over 700 pages thick). At one point, it was thought the movie would have a runtime in excess of three hours. It’s been chopped a little, but not too much: at the announcement of its Venice Film Festival premiere, it was finally confirmed the movie will run at 2 hours 45 minutes long.
What rating has Blonde been given?
The Motion Picture Association have given the film an NC-17 rating (the equivalent of an 18 in the UK), owing to its sexual violence, nudity and, just maybe, the talking foetuses present in Joyce Carol Oates book. “If the audience doesn’t like it, that’s the fucking audience’s problem. It’s not running for public office,” Andrew joked to Screen Daily. “It’s an NC-17 movie about Marilyn Monroe, it’s kind of what you want, right? I want to go and see the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story.”
In an interview with Ana around the time of the movie’s release she stated she didn’t understand why it had been given the harsh rating. “I didn’t understand why that happened,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I can tell you a number of shows or movies that are way more explicit with a lot more sexual content than Blonde.”
So why is Blonde dividing critics and audiences opinions?
Specific scenes in the movie — ones which likely earned Blonde it’s NC-17 rating including moments of sexual assault, an abortion and the movie’s Marilyn performing oral sex on John F. Kennedy — have been described as graphic and difficult to watch by many. Ana de Armas though, has spoken out and defended the movie’s explicitness. “It’s harder for people to watch [those scenes] than for me to make them, because I understood what I was doing and I felt very protected and safe,’ Ana told Entertainment Weekly. “I didn’t feel exploited because I was in control. I made that decision. I knew what the movie was doing. I trusted my director. I felt like I was in a safe environment… I knew exactly what the shot was going to be. I knew exactly what was going to be seen, what was not going to be seen, and it felt like it was the right thing to do.”
The film has also been accused of framing Marilyn as a helpless figure, stripping her off that aforementioned influence and power in her field. The New Yorker called it “ridiculously vulgar—the story of Monroe as if it were channelled through Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ”. But the Globe and Mail called it a “meta-contextual epic tracing the rise and fall of Marilyn Monroe”. Writing for i-D, Xuanlin Tham called it “a ‘biopic’ that’s less interested in historical faithfulness and more in why we remain captivated by the same, unreachable stars…”
“I’ve been hearing a lot about this Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde, which I haven’t seen yet, but I’m not surprised to hear that it is yet another movie fetishising female pain, even in death,” Emily said in a TikTok video. “We love to fetishise people in pain. Look at Amy Winehouse. Look at Britney Spears. Look at the way we obsess over Diana’s death. The way we obsess over dead girls and serial killers.” Emily went on to describe how she believes more people should be vocal and pointed about their disdain: “I think we all need to be a little more pissed off… 2022 is my Bitch era. I’m going to be pissed off when I see this movie. I already know it… I’m just going to get angry.”
Planned Parenthood, too, have also recently called out scenes within the movie where a baby-looking foetus says to Marilyn “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?” as ‘anti-abortion agenda’. “While abortion is safe, essential healthcare, anti-abortion zealots have long contributed to abortion stigma by using medically inaccurate descriptions of foetuses and pregnancy. Andrew Dominik’s new film, Blonde, bolsters their message with a CGI-talking foetus, depicted to look like a fully formed baby.”
Responding to a question in an interview with Deadline on Marilyn Monroe’s agency, and the role she played in her own fall from grace, director Andrew Dominik dropped another controversial clanger in the mix. Andrew rightly pointed out that Marilyn was a power figure in Hollywood, a trailblazer in fact. “I’m aware, for example, that in real life Marilyn Monroe was one of the people that broke the studio stranglehold over players under contract,” he said, speaking of the constricting deals stars were expected to sign back in the day. “She got in a war with 20th Century Fox and got a whole bunch of deal points renegotiated, which was unprecedented.”
It’s used as evidence that she was considered smart, he says. “… like anyone, she would make these stabs towards being in control of her life, but she clearly wasn’t in control of her life. Any person that’s killing themselves is not a figure of female empowerment. As much as we want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as the female du jour, I don’t think that that’s responsible.”
Also, when the trailer dropped earlier this summer, some viewers reportedly took issue with Ana’s native Cuban accent being slightly audible within her portrayal of Marilyn’s signature breathy tones. Ana has previously told The Times that she spent nine months working on the accent with dialect coaches: “It was a big torture, so exhausting. My brain was fried.” With the movie being about the artifice of celebrity and the performance of the figure of Marilyn, others have argued that the Cuban accent only adds to the overall message.
Andrew has also said though that he felt it was the right time for the movie to come out with our current culture and how it might have differed if it arrived in cinemas earlier. “If it had come out a few years ago, it would have come out right when #MeToo hit and it would have been an expression of all that stuff,” he said. “We’re in a time now, I think, where people are really uncertain about where any lines are… It’s a film that definitely has a morality about it,” he added. “But it swims in very ambiguous waters because I don’t think it will be as cut-and-dried as people want to see it. There’s something in it to offend everyone.”
How does the Marilyn Monroe Estate feel about the movie?
Though the Marilyn Monroe Estate did not authorise the movie, nor have they been involved, they did defend Ana’s casting, with its owner Marc Rosen stating: “Marilyn Monroe is a singular Hollywood and pop culture icon that transcends generations and history. Any actor that steps into that role knows they have big shoes to fill. Based on the trailer alone, it looks like Ana was a great casting choice as she captures Marilyn’s glamour, humanity and vulnerability. We can’t wait to see the film in its entirety!”
Does Blonde have a release date?
Blonde is currently streaming on Netflix.