The movie “Blonde” premiered on Netflix on September 28, directed by Andrew Dominik and starring the Cuban actress Ana de Armas.It is an adaptation of the book by Joyce Carol Oates that bears the same name. This book is not a biography of the life of Hollywood star Marylin Monroe, but is a romance and fiction written based on some true facts and highlights of the actress’ career and her personal life.
For almost 3 hours, the audience continuously observes the transition from colored to black and white lenses in the images and watches the great tragic plot of the image of Marylin Monroe or Norma Jeane, her birth name. The scenes portray a fragile, tame, dumb, and sexualized woman who was successful in Hollywood’s twentieth-century.
In a largely open-ended way, the storyline highlights Norma Jeane’s nudity, sexual violence, abortion processes and childhood traumas. The movie focuses on the romantic relationships, the great fame and reputation that Marylin Monroe had to deal with, but it doesn’t show the linear process that brought her to stardom.
Without warning that this is not a biography of Marylin Monroe, the film shows only the sorrowful face of a sexualized woman and can confuse the viewer by not knowing who she really was. In an interview for the British Film Institute, the movie’s director said “I don’t think that matters. Why would it matter?” when asked if there was a risk of the public taking the story of the film as true and if that mattered to him.
TRUE OR FALSE PLOT
Norma Jeane’s childhood was never easy. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, didn’t have the money to take care of her, so Norma had foster parents, but she always visited her daughter. In 1933, Gladys was able to buy a house, but a year or two later, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was hospitalized. In the film, Baker attempts to kill his daughter, although in reality it is not proven that this actually happened because there is no police record of this event. An account of this attempt was told by the actress’ third husband, Arthur Miller, and described in Keith Badman‘s book “Marilyn Monroe: The Final Years, one of Monroe’s husbands“.
In the movie it is shown that she had a relationship with Charles Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. at the same time. In reality there were only rumors that she had brief relationships with both of them, but separately.
Another romance portrayed in the film that is not concrete is her affair with President John F. Kennedy.
In the case of her ex-husbands, she was actually married to the baseball player Joe DiMaggio and to the playwright Arthur Miller. In 1954, she got married to Joe DiMaggio, and he felt uncomfortable and jealous with her famous scene in the movie ‘The Seven Year Itch’.The union only lasted nine months.
Two years later, Marylin got married to Arthur Miller in 1956. He really wrote about her and she had three spontaneous abortions trying to have children with him. They separated in 1961.
A highlight in the film is the separation between Norma and Marylin that the character does all the time. However this did not happen. She officially changed her name to Marylin Monroe in 1956. But one thing that happened in Marylin’s career is that she really caused discomfort on set due to mid-shoot departures, late arrivals, and dependence on medication for anxiety and depression.
The other side of marilyn
Many aspects of Marilyn’s career development were left out of the film to make room for a fragile side of the actress. But Monroe built her career with determination and withstand great pressure from the media and the industry.
Norma Jeana only married James Dougherty at age 16 to avoid having to go back to an orphanage or go through yet another foster family. Dougherty joined the Navy and was transferred to a base in the South Pacific. That’s when Norma started working in a munitions factory to earn extra income from her husband. One day the photographer David Conover went there to make a series of pictures of American women working in the factories during World War II. It was in this situation that he saw in Norma a potential model.
After doing several modeling jobs and becoming a well-known face, Norma becomes interested in the film industry. In 1946, she signed a contract with Twenty Century Fox. In the same year she separated from her husband, because James did not approve her career. For her screen debut, Norma adopts the name Marylin Monroe, an homage to Broadway actress Marilyn Miller and her mother’s maiden name – Monroe. She also created her new image with her makeup artist and friend, Allan Snyder – a platinum hair and unique makeup, that first appeared on the screen in the film “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim” (1947).
With contract terminations and recurrences to Twenty Century Fox, Marylin made almost 30 films before she died. Some of them are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Niagara (1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Misfits (1961). Playing small parts or leading roles, her image has become canonized in the collective imagination.
Marylin Monroe knew how to work her image in the media, although it has been very sexualized. She always showed her opinion and wanted to take charge of her career. A proof of that happened in 1955, when she announced her own film production company called Marilyn Monroe Productions, releasing two films Bus Stop (1956) and The Prince and The Showgirl (1957).
Norma Jeane or Marylin Monroe needs to be remembered respectfully and not just by romanticizing her pain. A woman with such a life and career history should have her memory and image reverberated fairly and not by putting her as a sexual object.
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The article above was edited by Mariana do Patrocínio.
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