This article contains spoilers for “Blonde.”

The film reviewed in this article depicts multiple scenes of sexual and physical abuse, some of which are discussed within the review. 

The semi-fictionalized biopic “Blonde” centers around the life of Marilyn Monroe, who came to represent the ideal of female sexuality in the United States in the 1950s. After its premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, the two-hour-and-47-minute film, adapted for the screen and directed by Andrew Dominik (“Chopper” and “Killing Them Softly”), was released on Netflix on Sept. 28, 2022. It depicts an imagined account of Monroe’s private life, which very few other people had access to in reality. Though it claims to offer a more comprehensive look at the woman behind Monroe’s captivating on-screen persona, “Blonde” manages to both objectify and victimize her, seemingly exposing her to satisfy some morbid fascination with her personal trauma and challenges rather than to understand her pain and honor her memory. For all its filmmaking strengths (beautiful, delicate cinematography and innovative blend of diegetic and non-diegetic sound), Dominik’s film misses the objective of revisiting the life of a figure like Monroe, whose image has been exploited and objectified as long as she’s been in the public eye.

Firstly, the role of Monroe—or Norma Jeane as her loved ones refer to her throughout the film—is horribly mishandled in the incompetent hands of Ana de Armas. Truth be told, I had very little confidence in the Cuban actress going into my viewing of “Blonde.” I’d only seen her in Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” (2019), in which her monotone acting falls particularly flat against the larger-than-life performance of its A-list cast. All the same, I was unsurprised that de Armas got the role of Monroe, given that there is quite a striking resemblance between the two.

Even with my low expectations, de Armas disappoints as Monroe. The first time we hear her, in a disembodied narration of Norma Jeane’s mother’s failed attempt to drown her as a child, is laughable. It isn’t so much the problem that her squeaky, infantile impression of Norma Jeane doesn’t sound like Monroe’s real voice—which it doesn’t. She also never settles on just one set of vocal qualities. Throughout the movie, de Armas’ cadence and tonality wildly varies yet never happens upon a combination that seems remotely true to the real thing.

In a movie that strives to separate the public persona of Marilyn from the private personality of Norma Jeane, de Armas’ performance never manages to communicate any real emotion or intention of Norma Jeane’s character. She often just looks confused, perhaps about the reasons she’s in the movie in the first place. Everything about the performance feels ingenuine. Twelve-year-old Lily Fisher manages to deliver a more authentic performance as Norma Jeane in the first 15 minutes than de Armas does for the rest of the film. 

The scenes where de Armas portrays Monroe in one of her on-screen roles expose her incompetency in the role. While undeniably beautiful, she lacks the fundamental charisma that continues to attract millions of viewers to Monroe’s movies. Furthermore, de Armas can’t capture the complexity required to depict an actor who is trying to act. She barely manages to communicate the standard range of emotion on screen.

It’s not just de Armas’ performance that robs Norma Jeane of a voice in this movie. The film itself assumes no niceties about her. Every male character immediately assumes she’s vain, stupid, fragile, and even talentless. 

“…pretty bad, wasn’t it? Like watching a mental patient,” one writer in the film comments after Monroe’s screen test for “Don’t Bother to Knock.”

“Look at the ass on that little girl,” his supervisor remarks later in the scene, as he watches Monroe exit the studio. 

This scene exemplifies the overall treatment of Norma Jeane by the other characters and by the film itself. The script doesn’t give her a chance to speak power back to her critics or those who try to box her in as a pretty face and nothing else. Every action she takes in the film, and almost every line she speaks, is a response to some (usually traumatic) thing that is entirely out of her control. The men in her life (and occasionally her mother) are constantly controlling her, from what roles she takes to the way she experiences sex. Adult Norma Jeane has barely been on screen for three minutes when she’s being sexually assaulted by a Hollywood studio executive behind closed doors.

Dominik’s telling of the life of Marilyn Monroe intentionally excludes any moment where she makes a personal decision for herself. This pattern limits her character from growth, consistently relegating her to the scared child in need of her father’s validation. It goes out of its way to emphasize Norma Jeane’s overwhelming desire to connect with the father she never knew, finding some clichéd way to tie almost every scene back to the fact that he was absent from her life.

Dominik’s script also doesn’t care that Norma Jeane’s character falls into several harmful stereotypes of women that have largely been diminished from popular media in recent years. In fact, it seems to play into them to some extent, and never in a subversive way that may ultimately empower her. At the beginning of the film, Norma Jeane is a naive actress who doesn’t realize that the violation of her body is the price she must pay for stardom. Throughout, she realizes that the only thing that will truly make her happy or fulfilled is the ability to bear children and start a family. By the end, she’s so prone to hysteria (brought on by the fact that she never had any children) that she can’t make it through filming a scene in one of her movies without throwing a tantrum and being sedated. 

I’m not alleging that it’s entirely bad to have a female character with any of these qualities or desires in a film. However, combining them in the way that Dominik does and limiting the reasons that she may think or act in a certain way to a single cause isn’t complex character writing. It’s exploitation of the real pain of a person who will never have the chance to tell the events from her own perspective.

The film’s distinct visual style only further violates Norma Jeane in the telling of her life story. It begins with mostly dream-like sequences that use soft and natural lighting and warm colors to depict the beginning of her career and her relationship with Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr. and Eddy Robinson Jr. These are interspersed with more expressionistic scenes in which she experiences (and, in multiple instances, later relives) traumatic events, that play with light and darkness and use close-ups from different angles to transport the audience to Norma Jeane’s state of mind during said events. 

“It was less about recreating factual events and more about ‘How do we distort it in a way that really harnesses how she must have felt in that moment?’” cinematographer Chayse Irvin said of his and Dominik’s intention for the film visually, in an interview with IndieWire.

I would be remiss to say they didn’t accomplish that. However, the film is saturated with scenes of Norma Jeane being physically or sexually abused, mistreated, and forced to act against her will. The visual style of “Blonde,” which switches between evoking nostalgia and visceral emotional pain, tells Dominik’s narrative of Norma Jeane’s life in a way that’s voyeuristic at best and exploitative and obsessive about her trauma at worst. No scene exemplifies this as remarkably as one in which Norma Jeane gives President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) a blow job.

“Come on, baby, don’t be shy,” he urges her, while the camera follows her face in a tight shot, cutting off right at her upper lip.

I felt so physically sick after the scene ended that I had to pause the movie for a few minutes to collect myself. I had never before seen the sexual assault of a woman (Norma Jeane is high on barbituates in the scene and can’t remember most of the experience) treated with such indignity and morbid fascination. It exposed the director’s conflation of depicting someone’s suffering with understanding the source of their pain. It solidified a resentment for him that had been building in me since the beginning of the film and suggested that not only does Dominik hate Marilyn Monroe, but that he might hate all women.

I also think it’s worth noting that there are many other scenes and elements of this movie that provoked outrage and disgust in me, and in other women whom I’ve spoken with who saw “Blonde.” From the scenes of Norma Jeane promising her unborn child that she “won’t kill it like the other one” that tinge the entire narrative with a strangely anti-abortion message, to the physical and emotional abuse she suffers at the hands of her husbands and lovers, “Blonde” is a pastiche of Norma Jeane’s suffering that feels six hours long, rather than three.

Now that “Blonde” and Netflix’s mini-series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” have been released to intense backlash about the depiction of victims of sexual violence, it is an important time for stakeholders across the media landscape to consider the way in which these stories are told, who is telling them, and who benefits from their re-telling. So far, it doesn’t seem to be the victims or their loved ones. Ironically, toward the end of the film, an imagined version of Norma Jeane’s father (voiced by Tygh Runyan) gives an explanation for never returning.

“I have not intended to be cruel, or to toy with your heart,” he writes to her.

“Cruel” seems the best word I could use to describe Dominik’s depiction of the life of Marilyn Monroe. He strips her of almost all agency and allows no space for pleasure that isn’t sexual. Dominik tells the story of a naive girl who ultimately is unable to cope with the demands of a world that values her only for her appearance. It’s a prime example of what happens when the story of a woman is told through the eyes of a man.

“Watched by all, seen by none,” the tagline on the poster for “Blonde” boldly claims. That won’t change if you see this movie.

Sulan Bailey can be reached at sabailey@wesleyan.edu.