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Blonde: a bit was needed, but something is always missing
30 September 2022
I saw Blonde without pre-reading any reviews. Because usually, everything I read about Marilyn Monroe disturbs me: even today, 60 years after her death, Marilyn is still narrated as an icon of femininity, beauty, elegance, and winking, as opposed to a kind of “modern inelegance” of all those women — both celebrities and not — who don’t wear belly choke dresses, stilettos, powdered faces, and kiss-proof lips, accompanying everything with suave vocals and sinuous movements, for the public’s pleasure. Either you’re Marylin or you’re sloppy, there’s no third way. And in any case, you are weak in both cases. Therefore, I am annoyed to read any news about Marilyn Monroe that does not take Norma Jeane into account. In the virtual square of social media, where anything is allowed, there is a proliferation of practical demonstrations of this thought that are, to say the least, embarrassing, and which I see being shared without any fear of appearing seriously ridiculous: the photo of an elegant Marilyn posing-not many others are seen of her in the natural pose, reading a book or doing something else, even though existing! – side by side with that of an ordinary girl wearing a pair of ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and maybe a tattoo and two piercings. And what could be the text accompanying these two images? But of course, “there are no more women of the old days!” Those who post usually feel the need to supplement this great piece of knowledge with their contribution ranging from “it’s true, real women don’t exist anymore” to “we have lost sight of real VALUES.”
Uh…values, right….let’s talk about them.
But which values did Marilyn Monroe so strongly represent, so much so that she should be a guideline for girls of all times? I don’t want to ask these people, because they would tell me “femininity and elegance,” and already the fact that they consider them “values” raises my imprecation of great occasions. So I use time and energy to be able to talk about Norma Jeane. I do it through those who made it possible for me to understand Norma Jeane’s story, and to find out why it is about me and the oppressive system in that I live in.
In 1986 Gloria Steinem published “Marilyn: Norma Jean,” a sensitive and provocative portrait of Marilyn Monroe, through which she reveals the woman behind the myth-the child Norma Jean-and the forces in America that shaped her into the fantasy and icon that never died. In an exclusive clip shot for the documentary series American Masters, Gloria said she has never walked out on watching a film in the middle, but made an exception when she first saw Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953. She felt embarrassed, because she saw in Marilyn everything she did not want to be as a teenager – vulnerable, seeking approval, a caricature. After her death by overdose, Gloria began to question why she appeared for all that she clearly was not in her real life. Certainly, she told herself, because when you’re paid to be a public character with a certain attributes, it’s hard not to be; she certainly would not have been paid if she had been herself. Gloria makes a reflection that strongly influenced my viewing of the film Blonde:
What the women’s movement has done is to allow women to become each other’s mothers and to support and model and hope and praise and love each other enough so that we can begin to repair the early damage.
So we wonder, all of us, if we could not have saved Marilyn’s life.
Norma Jeane Mortenson Baker was a slave, made invisible by a male dominated world and a public that conditioned her existence and abused her body, her mind, her childhood dreams, consumed to the death, and even ignored afterwards. Although she was one of the first movie stars to speak out about the sexual abuse she suffered in childhood, the reactions of the world around her and the public have been one of utter indifference, flanked by some criticism for having somehow “disturbed” that imagery of innocence and purity that hovered around her story.
A myth cannot be violated, it must not be humanized, otherwise which myth is it?
Norma Jeane did not exist, even though she cried out for help and screamed for pain, and she does not even exist now, now that her true story is accessible to the whole world. There is no grave with her name on it; there is Marilyn’s grave, which is still an object of fantasy and inspiration. I would like us all to start talking about Norma Jeane, who too soon lost her life to the same system that would like to take us back to those years when the scars of body and soul were covered by beautiful makeup and injections of drugs apparently revitalizing but actually deadly.
I would like us to take Norma Jeane to our forums, to our women’s circles, to our squares, so that we can tell her that she is not alone, but she is part of us. But actually that’ s what we do, taking back the public space where we talk about our bodies, our emotions, our fears, our self-determination, our abuse, our sexuality, our health. Each one of us is a daughter of Norma Jeane and loudly shouts her rebellion.
Blonde , a film based on the homonymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, throws Norma Jeane right in our faces, with all her constant pain, in a maelstrom of angst-producing images and sounds, for the film flows exactly like the thoughts of an anguished and overwhelmed mind. There is nothing romantic about her relationship with JFK, or fairy-tale-like in the way she became a star, in this film that constantly mixes fact and fiction through the restless use of sound, color, and image.
There is one remark I feel I have to make of this exploration of the idea of Marilyn Monroe: the choice not to have brought out the tenacious, politically literate, ironic, knowledge-loving woman, skilled in extraordinary performances, who also founded her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions. Here, I missed this, and perhaps even in this production they chose to exploit the image of a victimized woman unable to self-determine, at the mercy of events and circumstances, perpetually fluctuating. So, speaking of her, it seems we have to choose between two narratives: on the one hand, the superficial blonde who only aims to be a fragile and delicate sex symbol; on the other hand, the weak, desperate, misunderstood victim who cannot save her own life.
There would be a third way: there would be Norma who dresses as Marilyn in public, who also tries to deal with her traumas through her love for culture, with a brilliant mind and successful entrepreneur, aware of her own experience and the world in which she lived. Norma who, despite everything, is a victim of violence throughout her life. But this third way would be the brave one, which tells us that there are no women predestined to suffer violence because of culture, ethnicity, social position, strength of character-somebody explain strength of character to me once and for all-but that violence affects all women because they are women, at the hands of a society that tells men that we exist in their function and that we cannot deviate from this role
Anyway, only after seeing the film I read opinions talking about misogyny, pornography, disgust, sadness: the truth hurts, isn’t it? It’s always better to remain in the indifference, giving everything a glittering stroke, right? Which, after all, is like turning up the volume on the television while the neighbor beats his wife to cover up disturbing noises and be able to fake not having heard anything.
Goodbye Norma Jeane
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name
