Many of those images are indelible: Monroe standing above a subway grate, her white dress billowing around her, while filming The Seven Year Itch or singing Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend in a bright pink gown in an iconic scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.Įven images the public has never seen, but can easily conjure, are present in Dominik's film: the final scene of Blonde shows what Monroe was described as having looked like when she was found dead, lying nude in her bed with one hand clutching a telephone. In the film, Dominik said he aimed to stage scenes around iconic images of Monroe, including standing above a subway grate in a billowing white dress in The Seven Year Itch. Monroe's friendships with women, including her fellow actor and teacher Susan Strasburg, are not onscreen you would never know from this film that she founded her own production company in the 1950s in pursuit of stronger roles and she's depicted as being constantly tormented by her absentee father, so much that all of her romantic relationships become placeholders for him. We see abortions ordered by a film studio, domestic and sexual violence, substance abuse and professional humiliation - not to mention her father's absence and her mother's institutionalization. That's because it turns Monroe into an archetype of female victimhood, opting to recreate - and imagine - the worst parts of her life, rather than explore her interiority or her craft as an actor. Dominik has promised the film will 'offend everyone.' ( Juan Naharro Gimenez/Getty Images for Netflix) Latest in a trend of celeb-sploitation filmsĮven before it was released in select theatres last week, Blonde - which stars Ana de Armas - was making headlines for getting stamped with a NC-17 rating, after which director Andrew Dominik promised it would "offend everyone."ĭe Armas, left, and director Andrew Dominik attend the premiere of Blonde at the San Sebastian International Film Festival on Saturday. While some reviews have praised Blonde as a feminist reimagining of Marilyn Monroe's life - including Oates herself - others say it perpetuates the very same exploitative attitudes that it is supposedly critiquing, by depicting Monroe's life as a spectacle of unrelenting misery.Īs the film began streaming on Netflix Wednesday, CBC News spoke with film scholars and experts to understand where the myth of Marilyn Monroe begins and ends. It's been 60 years since Marilyn Monroe died at the age of 36, and Hollywood continues to immortalize the actor - for better or worse - as a symbol of celebrity tragedy and mythmaking.īlonde, a Netflix film about Monroe directed by Andrew Dominik and based on a 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, offers a fictionalized account of the indignities that punctuated Monroe's life before her death.
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