We’re obsessed with Marilyn Monroe; ‘Blonde’ about Norma Jeane
For a moment this spring, she was inescapable.
In late April, Marilyn Monroe’s life and death were the subject of the Netflix documentary “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes,” which explored a handful of conspiracy theories regarding her relationships with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. Then Kim Kardashian made headlines when she arrived at the Met Gala wearing the very dress Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to Kennedy in 1962. The week after that, the famed Andy Warhol portrait of Monroe sold for a record-shattering $195 million at a Christie’s auction.
With the addition of “Blonde,” the new Andrew Dominik film (based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates) on Netflix, it would now be hard to refute: We’re in a Year of Marilyn, our fascination with her peaking once again.
Monroe “represents a lot of things to a lot of people,” says Lucy Bolton, who teaches language, literature and film at Queen Mary University of London and guest-edited the 2015 “#Marilyneveryday: The Persistence of Marilyn Monroe as a Cultural
Icon” issue of the journal Film, Fashion and Consumption. Her image has “come to stand for the very essence of glamour and beauty,” Bolton says, while her life story
“stands for the classic hard-luck, rags-to-riches” tale of making it big in Hollywood.
Indeed, the sale of Monroe’s portrait and the controversial use of her gown at the Met Gala celebrated the former aspect of Monroe’s fame – which suddenly feels in step once again, with the ultrafeminine aesthetic that’s lately become trendy among some younger Americans. But none of this year’s moments of Marilyn fixation have engaged quite as directly with the latter as “Blonde,” which focuses on Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe.
A few forces have converged this year to create a period of renewed fascination with Monroe – or perhaps more accurately, with Monroe iconography. For starters, 2022 marks the 60th anniversary of Monroe’s death at the age of 36. In August, a memorial service was held in her honor in Los Angeles, timed to the day of her death; tributes and remembrances cropped up all over the internet. Her death in its own right, Bolton notes – its apparently accidental nature coupled with its untimeliness – accounts for a lot of her enduring mystique.
“She’s got a victim narrative,” Bolton says, “which, like Judy Garland or Princess Diana, has its own aura of tragedy. And people are attracted to that.”
And while certain aspects of her iconic image have come and gone – her pointy bras and her Middy haircut among them – several routinely come back into style, and have once again this year.
“I have noticed once again that clothing is coming around to the ’60s,” says Donelle Dadigan, president and founder of the Hollywood Museum in California. Indeed, while many of today’s most fashionable looks are 1990s- and 2000s-inspired, late-’50s and early’60s Monroe-era staples such as winged eyeliner, midi skirts and colorful matching two-piece outfits are going strong.
Additionally, Bolton notes, Monroe today “stands for a sort of irresistible, undeniable femininity and beauty.” Social media content creators are cheekily reclaiming the idea that being overtly hot on purpose is fine – and doesn’t need further justification.
Which is not to say that was true of Marilyn Monroe; in fact, as Bolton and Dadigan both point out, Monroe herself was ambitious about her acting career and actively pursued non-“bombshell” roles. But the genre does seem to take cues from Monroe’s bubbly public persona – and her apparent enjoyment of being a beautiful, hyperfeminine woman.
“Blonde,” however clumsily, attempts to look closely at the mortal person behind the immortal image. It is also, to be clear, based on a work of fiction: Oates’s book, published in 2000, sits firmly in the genre of biographical fiction as it imagines the life of the woman formerly known as Norma Jeane.
Still, “Blonde” the movie covers many of the major known tragedies and trials of Monroe’s real life, such as her mother’s mental illness as well as her own, her failed marriages, her substanceabuse issues and her unrealized desire to become a parent. In its storytelling, it deftly separates Norma Jeane from Marilyn, the former repeatedly abused and antagonized, the latter celebrated and adored to an oppressive degree. (It skips over a few famous beats, too, such as Monroe’s early marriage in her teenage years to a policeman – as well as the fact that she had half-siblings, one of whom she reconnected with later in life. In 1994, her half-sister Berniece Baker Miracle wrote “My Sister Marilyn,” and it remains one of the few definitive behind-thescenes nonfiction books about the actress’s life.)
“Blonde,” you could say, applies the very
2020s practice of re-examining female fame in hindsight (see: “Framing Britney Spears,” “Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson,” “Slow Burn: The Clinton Impeachment” and “Gaslit”) to one of the most famous women of all time, full stop. And of course, it comes to the now-familiar conclusion that there was much more to the story than was apparent at the time.
Bolton, speaking in August, was hopeful that “Blonde” would “present an experience of Monroe’s life that is not too melodramatic or sensationalist for the sake of it – because it doesn’t need to be.” Certainly, some critics have cringed or recoiled from the close-up brutality of its depictions of sexual assault, physical violence and abortion.
But Dominik’s film certainly meets Bolton’s other expectation: “Respect and fidelity to the complexity of the person.”