Blonde

Blonde is a deeply uncomfortable, even unpleasant, film built around a mesmerising performance that a little bit of me hopes wins Ana de Armas best actress at the Oscars, although I’ll be happy if she loses to Michelle Yeoh.

Although Marilyn died three years before I was born, as I was growing up, certainly when I was a child, she was still the epitome of a sex symbol. Even into my teens that was the case, although by the end of them other women were starting to displace her. So, although I never really studied her life, most of the events loosely depicted here are part of my cultural baggage. I certainly didn’t understand it all the first time I heard some of the stories, but by the time I was 14 or so and I was hearing them for the fifth time I was old enough to understand what they meant, maybe not in the context of the the America of 30 years earlier, but at least to understand what an abortion was, what the drugs stories meant, what being a Playboy centrefold implied and so on.

The film itself seems very odd to me. For someone whose life is so well documented there’s a lot that even someone like me, with casual exposure to her life, was going “hang on, I’m sure that’s not right.” I checked later and I was about 75% correct with the ones I thought I spotted, but I also missed a lot of other times it was just wrong. Sometimes films can ignore the known facts to tell a sort of “mythic truth” - telling the story as a story rather than a history to make the point more clearly. Elvis did that and it worked whether, like me, you’re a filthy casual to his life or, oddly in the case of Elvis, more effectively if you’re deeply invested in his story. Watching Blonde I didn’t get that feeling of mythic truth. Perhaps because I know her story well enough, and feel it’s tragic enough it doesn’t need to be streamlined and enhanced for clarity? But the effect of doing exactly that is to make me feel like I was watching psychological torture porn. I know films like Saw coined the phrase for gruesome dismemberments and the like (I haven’t seen any so I can’t really go much further than that in what I say about them) and while we’re essentially spared that (it has its moments, but you’re not going to see people chopping their hands off to get out of handcuffs or anything) mostly we’ve got a film about mental illness and drug abuse, always a fun combination. When it’s piled up like this, it’s just too much.

And yet…

Despite everything that’s wrong, and how hard it is to watch Blonde (I ended up watching in four parts, maybe five) I did keep watching and coming back. Ana de Armas is incredible in this role. I knew it wasn’t Marilyn in some part of my brain but most of me believed it was her. Part of the reason it was so harrowing to watch was that I felt like she was going through these things and it was that Marilyn from my childhood who was suffering. I didn’t want her to, but watching her performance of Marilyn as an adult helped me understand her in a way that even the adolescent hearing the stories hadn’t, and sympathise with her in a way I hadn’t had the life experience to do back then. But the film would have been harrowing enough if it had been much closer to the truth, it didn’t need the extra, at least in my opinion.

If you can divorce content from performance then watch this for the performance. I really think it’s that good. If you can’t, and I can’t, I have no qualms about this film being nominated for a Rassie this year, so it’s probably best avoided.

Bechdel Test: Pass. Although conversations between named female characters are few and far between - Marilyn likes being around men, at least in this depiction - there are a few and some of them aren’t about men.

Ko Test: Fail. Honestly I’m not sure there are any WOC at all (scanning through IMDb suggests there might have been, but when the character is called “ex-athlete’s niece” you have a good clue she’s a huge part) so not enough dialogue to pass.

Russo Test: Pass. Although historically inaccurate, the film shows Marilyn as part of a stable thruple. In fact she’s shown as the unicorn in a relationship of two bi men. (History records she had relationships with both the men depicted here, but this doesn’t seem to be the equivalent of a case of two women living together all their adult lives who were clearly just friends, she had another relationship in between them.)