Suffering Blondes Preferred
On that Marilyn Monroe movie
Judging by the reviews, pretty much no one thinks Blonde, the new biopic of Marilyn Monroe currently streaming on Netflix, is a good movie. In fact, many outlets have rushed to confirm, it’s an actively bad movie, on multiple levels — sexist, exploitative, garish, and nihilistic.
I’ll readily confirm that every word of that is true. It’s nearly three hours of Marilyn looking like an unhappy rabbit, as she describes one of her would-be exploiters in All About Eve. We see her raped, beaten, emotionally abused, medically coerced, leered at and insulted. One repugnant scene has her physically dragged from an airplane to JFK’s bedroom and, after a frantic blowjob during which he carries on a phone call, dragged out again. The only course of salvation available to her is — what else? — pregnancy and motherhood (certainly not agency in her career, which can only be a source of humiliation and diminishment).
I suspect that the critical venom directed at this movie would not have been so vehement if the movie did not also demonstrate rather spectacular bad taste. The creepy deepfake transpositions of Ana de Armas’s face onto Monroe’s footage are one thing, but then there are the constellations that turn into wriggling sperm, the cringeworthy insistence on having Monroe call her husbands daddy, the camera perspectives from inside her womb, the sunlit talking fetus. It really is just as bad as they say, an abomination of a movie.
But there’s no way I wasn’t going to watch Blonde. And, judging from the amount of critical attention and thinkpieces it’s getting (and, apparently, robust viewership), many people felt the same. This suggests that it’s bad in an interesting way.
Blonde is an easy target for feminist criticism: it makes a fetish of her victimization and is dismissive — or outright hostile — towards the remarkable talent and charisma that made her one of the biggest stars of any generation. What she really needed, suggests the movie, was a father/husband figure to keep her away from the corrosive influence of the world and allow her to fulfill her true desire, which was to be a sexy baby-wife with babies of her own. The critics protest: what about her well-documented intelligence, media savvy, artistic ambitions, and lefty politics? These are all valid and true points, but I suspect that the impulse to rehabilitate Marilyn Monroe by girlbossing her is also flawed.
I doubt that anyone would have been happy with Norman Mailer’s version of Marilyn. He wrote a first-person fictional “memoir” from her perspective (the book’s title: Of Women and their Elegance) depicting her as a literary man’s dream girl: self-assured and widely read, exulting in catcalls and willing to have sex atop a speeding motorcycle. We know that wasn’t the “real” Marilyn, either.
Because what we know about her inner life is vague and contradictory and because she died so young, she’s a convenient stand-in for all kinds of narratives. During her lifetime, she was the dumb blonde; then, the tragic victimized waif too fragile for the world (Blonde fits into this category); the camp icon; and now, the proto-feminist artist and activist whom the world mistakenly failed to take seriously. Marilyn Monroe probably infuriated the proto-feminists of her day and for decades after; now feminist film critics rush to defend her legacy, and I’m almost certain that the viewership for her movies is mostly female. Why?
For all that Monroe’s “dumb blonde” character appears to be a creation of the patriarchy, it’s easy to forget that its ultimate expression, the archetypal heroine Lorelei Lee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was concocted by a woman: the writer Anita Loos, who wrote the 1920’s magazine stories on which the movie was based.
Anita gave Lorelei Lee an origin story:
…among us was a blonde who was being imported to Hollywood to be Doug’s leading lady in his forthcoming picture. Now this girl, although she towered above me (I weighed about ninety pounds) and was of rather a hearty type, was being waited on, catered to and cajoled by the entire male assemblage. If she happened to drop the novel she was reading, several men jumped to retrieve it; whereas I was allowed to lug heavy suitcases from their racks while men sat about and failed to note my efforts.
Obviously there was some radical difference between that girl and me. But what was it? We were both in the pristine years of early youth; we were about the same degree of comeliness; as to our mental acumen, there was nothing to discuss: I was the smarter. Then why did that girl so outdistance me in feminine allure? Could her strength possibly be rooted (like that of Samson) in her hair? She was a natural blonde and I was a brunette.
She goes on to explain that she was to have a more specific inspiration for Lorelei: the paramour of her mentor H. L. Mencken, with whom she implies she was lightly in love. Her motivation was something akin to a complaint — how could he choose her? — and something akin to revenge:
Menck was my idol and a good friend too. He often took me to Luchow’s for dinner; I was even included among his inner circle of beer lovers when they trekked over to Jersey City in those Prohibition days to drink a brew that was uncontaminated by ether. Menck liked me very much indeed; but in the matter of sentiment, he preferred a witless blonde.
The situation was palpably unjust. I thought it over as our train raced across the plains of the Midwest, until finally I was prompted to reach for one of the large yellow pads on which I composed Doug’s scenarios, and I began to write down my thoughts.
Lest we be tempted to frame her creation as a critique primarily of the men who slaver over Lorelei rather than the blonde herself, she puts that idea to rest: Lorelei was meant to be “a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation,” and she comes from Little Rock because Mencken saw that city as “the nadir of human stupidity.” Though the men of the book are satirized as well, Loos’s male readers (who signed up for Harper’s Bazaar in droves just to read the “Lorelei” pieces) seem to have felt very little sting — after all, she could tell the “dumb blonde” jokes that would have sounded crueler coming from them, and for some men, it’s a delight to see the woman they desire taken down a peg.
In fiction written by women, some version of Lorelei Lee is so common she is practically a stock character: the woman who gets ahead on her looks, stealing the things that the less flashy, more intelligent heroine deserves and desires. She’s usually vanquished in the end; sometimes she’s redeemed if she’s made to suffer. Otherwise, we are meant to see her as cheating — at best, the recipient of attention she doesn’t deserve, and at worst, a sellout to the patriarchy (I wrote about this a bit in this newsletter’s very first essay, about Anita Brookner).
Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote the novel on which the movie Blonde is based, blamed Marilyn in an interview for thinking she could be taken seriously, given her screen persona. “In a sense, she fell into the trap. She made herself into the blonde who looks dumb, who's very sexy. And at the same time, she seems to have wanted to be taken seriously as an intelligent person who reads Freud and who reads Thomas Mann and so forth. So she was complicit in her own fate, I'm afraid.”
None of the criticism of Blonde — although I agree with all of it — ever really grapples with the fact that our culture would be deeply, profoundly uncomfortable with any story of Marilyn Monroe that didn’t make her pay, somehow, for building a career by catering to the male gaze. She suffered and died, which makes it possible for women to forgive her. Now we can watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and feel like we’re on her side.
You might also enjoy these related pieces by me about women and/or Classic Hollywood: