I would ask that you forgive my crass language, but you needn't forgive Dominik's utterly and unintentionally crass film there is no hint here of the humour that makes John Waters's transgressions, for instance, so wickedly delightful.ĭominik told Deadline: “I had always wanted to do a story about childhood trauma and how that shapes an adult’s perception of the world.” ( Supplied: Netflix)īlonde hews closer to the provocations of the incorrigible Gaspar Noé, but Lynch is the most obvious touchstone. On top of that, there's the vaginal POV shot of an abortion, the toilet-POV shot of Marilyn vomiting, and the groin-POV shot of Marilyn sucking off JFK. While Marilyn, all voluptuousness in figure-hugging silks and satins, was something of an icon of indecency in her day, an NC-17 rating augurs a level of explicit imagery that would never have survived the censors in the buttoned-up 50s – titillating some, while making others wonder: what moments of intimacy, what awful indignities, would Dominik stage for public consumption in the deceased's name?īlonde's near 3-hour run time – from its star's childhood to her deathbed, punctuated by a barrage of flashbacks and -forwards – accommodates plenty of nudity, sex, and sexual violence. Oates was first inspired to write Blonde by a photograph of Norma Jeane winning a beauty contest when she was 15. Prior to its Venice Film Festival debut, Blonde made headlines for getting slapped with an NC-17 rating by the United States ratings board – the first film slated for streaming to be deemed unsuitable for viewers 17 or under. Two decades on from Lynch's film and Blonde's publication, Dominik's much-anticipated movie has finally materialised, courtesy of Netflix – though with the younger and more sultry Cuban starlet Ana de Armas ( No Time to Die Knives Out) having slipped into the juicy lead role. Watts's Mulholland Drive character puts a hit out on the more successful actress who spurned her love in Blonde, it's Norma Jeane who falls victim to Marilyn, her own prodigious creation. Watts had already, famously, played the role of dissociative blonde chewed up by the Hollywood machine in Mulholland Drive – the second of David Lynch's three möbius strip-shaped Hollywood chronicles (after Lost Highway, and before Inland Empire), released in 2001, not long after Oates's book. Monroe was found lying face down on her bed beside an empty bottle of prescription drugs she had been taking for anxiety, the LA Times reported in 1962. Her body was found in bed at her recently purchased Brentwood, Los Angeles home in the small hours of August 5, 1962, phone in hand and a riot of pill bottles crowding the night-stand. The growing chasm between these two selves – public-facing and private – could only resolve in tragedy whether by an intentional or accidental act of self-destruction, Monroe was dead at 36. Back in 2010, it was announced that Naomi Watts would star as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's sprawling, fictionalised biography of the same name, to be written and directed by Australian Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford This Much I Know to Be True).įolding in the icon's family history of mental illness and a childhood marred by neglect and abuse, Oates constructed her protagonist as a woman divided: the sunny, sexed-up persona Marilyn Monroe, screen goddess, versus Norma Jeane Mortensen (aka Norma Jeane Baker), the shy, stuttering girl next door, fatherless and all but abandoned by a mother who would spend most of her daughter's life in a psychiatric institution.
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