With the release of Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation/sort-of biopic of Marilyn Monroe starring Ana de Armas, I was struck by two things—one of which I expected, and one which I didn’t. Given all the controversy surrounded Dominik’s film, and especially the inclusion of graphic rape and nude scenes, I expected critical response to fall along roughly gendered lines, with women and non-binary people falling to the negative side and cis men falling more to the positive. While we should always be careful about generalizations, this does indeed seem to be borne out—cis men seem more likely to have a positive response to Blonde, women and non-binary people to be more critical.
What I didn’t expect was the protectiveness. More and more women have taken to Twitter, to TikTok, to websites and print medium, not just to excoriate Blonde and its director, but to point out the depths of our love for and understanding of Monroe.
One of Dominik’s arguments in interviews is that Marilyn Monroe is now more an icon than an actress, and he has a point—her image has adorned everything from posters to coffee mugs to umbrellas, from imaginary renderings of her clinging to James Dean’s motorcycle, to an entire cult dedicated to her in Ken Russell’s Tommy. The image of Monroe is more powerful, in some ways, than her performances, even though they were what originally made her iconic. She has been transformed into a cipher, a symbol. In short, she’s not really a person.
Much of the transformation of Monroe’s image is a result of her onscreen persona and off-screen struggles, not least her failed relationships and tragic death. The image of the beautiful, suffering star, the sex object decaying right before our eyes, has been indelibly stamped on Monroe, a sort of strange death cult that indulges as much in her suffering as it does in her stardom. By all accounts, it is this that Blonde explores—or exploits—and it is this that many of Monroe’s male fans adore. She was beautiful. She was tragic. She suffered.
But at the base of this iconography is a deep-seated hatred for Marilyn Monroe, and for what she has been made to represent. In ignoring her humanity, these images—propagated by her estate and exploited by everyone from Andy Warhol on down—reflect a violent misogyny with her at the center, dehumanizing her while indulging in her imagined suffering, ignoring her work while exulting in the image of her with her skirt blowing up over a subway grate or nude photographs she never wanted published. The goal has been, and continues to be, to attempt to possess, violate, and exploit her via her image.
With the rise of the new feminist movement, many women, young and old, cis and trans, have come to re-examine what it means to be, well, a woman—outside of strict gender norms, outside of male control and definition. That Monroe, at least for the moment, has become a central concern now speaks, yes, to the power of her image, but also to the real person beneath that. Much of the feminist criticism of Dominik’s film has focused on the indulgence in suffering and the refusal to treat her as a full human being, who undoubtedly had joy in her life as well as sorrow. In other words, what many women see in Monroe is a woman made to suffer, over and over again, for the pleasure of men. And women are pushing back.
Many of Monroe’s roles were, in fact, deeply joyful. Her most subversive and arguably feminist role as Lorelei-Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes showcases her comedic timing, her humor and energy, and the savvy intelligence underlying her persona. Some Like It Hot might rely heavily on the inherent humor of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis pretending to be women, but it is Monroe who provides the human center—not just in her ability as a comedienne, but in the underlying sorrow of a beautiful woman who can’t stop falling for men who hurt her. She might be a fantasy woman in The Seven Year Itch, but her onscreen reality shows a happy, bubbly person enjoying her friendship with the man downstairs. Even when her character’s intelligence was the butt of the joke, her own intelligence shown through, with sharp comedic timing and dramatic pathos, delivered so often in that lilting, breathy voice.
The reason, I think, why women are so protective of Monroe is because we see in her the microcosm of our world’s misogyny and what it does even to the most beautiful, the most supposedly privileged of us. We see not a campy rendition of femininity, but a woman self-possessed and desperate to be in control, routinely exploited by an industry and a society that wants her to be beautiful, but perhaps not quite that beautiful. For all her almost unbelievable beauty, Monroe was more like other women than not—in her joy and her sorrow, her humor and her anger, her intelligence and her need to conceal it. Where too many men see an object and an image, many women see a person, a sister. It is not really that women want to be Marilyn Monroe or be with Marilyn Monroe or even admire Marilyn Monroe. At some level, we are Marilyn Monroe.
