Shield your eyes, Mr. President, things are about to get steamy. Directed by Andrew Dominik and based on Joyce Carol Oates's legendary novel of the same name,
Netflix's upcoming Marilyn Monroe film, Blonde, reportedly does not shy away from the most controversial pieces of Monroe's life and her status as the sex symbol of the 20th century.
Now, after many months of waiting, a first trailer for Blonde has landed. While it doesn't get into the sort of material that the rating promises, it does introduce Ana de Armas as Hollywood's most legendary leading lady. Ping-ponging between glamorous moments on the red carpet and scenes from a private dinner with Joe DiMaggio, with Monroe looking fragile, the actress says of her fame, "I know you're supposed to get used to it, but I just can't. I play Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe. I can't face doing another scene with Marilyn Monroe." Then, the trailer takes a tone shift—no longer at home in the spotlight, Monroe looks uncomfortable on stage, and we catch glimpses of her happy in her private life with her husbands. "Marilyn doesn't exist," she says in voice-over. "When I come out of my dressing room, I'm Norma Jean. I'm still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen." With the tagline "watched by all, seen by none," the film promises to unpack the tension between the actress' public and private personas.
As for that rating, Dominik has revealed that he was as unsuspecting as anyone, telling Vulture, "I was surprised. I thought we’d coloured inside the lines. But I think if you’ve got a bunch of men and women in a boardroom talking about sexual behaviour, maybe the men are going to be worried about what the women think. It’s just a weird time. It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality. It’s depictions of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behaviour."
The director added, “I think if I’m given the choice, I’d rather go and see the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story. Because we know that her life was on the edge, clearly, from the way it ended. Do you want to see the warts-and-all version or do you want to see that sanitised version?”
Blonde may, at first glance, appear to be a biopic, but Oates's 700 page tome is its source material, and the author has always been steadfast in her classification that the work is one of fiction. (Controversially, the novel gets into the idea that Monroe may have been assassinated, as well.) Speaking with Vanity Fair, Oates explained the allure of Monroe, describing her as Emma Bovary dropped in Hollywood. “Both are young women who have a very romantic and probably unrealistic vision of love," the author said. "Marilyn was so insecure, so demanding, that it was hard for anyone to love her or even help her. Many men, including her second husband, baseball player Joe DiMaggio, tried, though, before backing away, afraid.”
Speaking to Netflix Queue about how the film was developed, de Armas said, “We worked on this film for hours, every single day for almost a year. I read Joyce’s novel, studied hundreds of photographs, videos, audio recordings, films—anything I could get my hands on. Every scene is inspired by an existing photograph. We’d pore over every detail in the photo and debate what was happening in it. The first question was always, ‘What was Norma Jeane feeling here?’ We wanted to tell the human side of her story. Fame is what made Marilyn the most visible person in the world, but it also made Norma the most invisible.”
As Dominik describes it, "The idea behind Blonde is basically it details a childhood drama, and mistaken ideas that she carries into her adult life, and she sees the world through the lens of those ideas. And they necessitate a split into a public self which can be loved, and a private self which has no hope of achieving intimacy. She’s not seeing the world, really; she’s seeing herself... on a simplest level, it’s about an unwanted child who becomes the most wanted person in the world and can’t deal with all of that desire coming at them."
Joining de Armas as Monroe in the Netflix film is Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, and Julianne Nicholson. This is de Armas's second film of 2022 to wade into the mature content waters. Earlier in the year, Hulu released Deep Water—an erotic thriller starring her and ex, Ben Affleck. The film was largely panned, trading off plot for an extra dose of sauce. This one, according to Oates, seems to lean in the opposite direction.
After seeing an early version of the film, the prolific author wrote on Twitter, "I have seen the rough cut of Andrew Dominick’s [sic] adaptation and it is startling, brilliant, very disturbing, and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly ‘feminist’ interpretation." Similarly, early feedback from Vanity Fair writer Sylvie Bommel seems promising; Bommel wrote, "I swear on the heads of all the blondes in my family, including myself, that Blonde is a film that 'got me on board,' to use the words of the critics of the show Le Masque et la Plume. Another way to say it: I was not bored for a minute of the 166-minute film." Dominik, for his part, teases an adaptation that promises to upend everything we know about Monroe. "The idea was to take stuff that we’re familiar with, imagery that we’re familiar with, and change the meaning of it in accordance with her drama," he said. "So it’s like this uncomfortable déja vù thing where you’re seeing stuff you’ve already seen before, but the meaning of it is wrong."
Best of luck to this bombshell. Blonde hits Netflix on 28 September.
Adrienne Westenfeld is the Books and Fiction Editor at Esquire, where she oversees books coverage, edits fiction, and curates the Esquire Book Club.
Justin Kirkland is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers culture, food, and the South. Along with Esquire, his work has appeared in NYLON, Vulture, and USA Today.
