“I truly believe that was very close to us, she was with us,” de Armas tells Deadline. If you look closely at Marilyn Monroe, she’s the most visible woman in the world, but she’s completely unseen.”įor Blonde’s lead actress, de Armas of Knives Out fame, the role was an emotional and spiritual revelation. “I wanted to detail her childhood trauma and then show her adult life through the lens of that trauma. “I’m trying to relate to someone else’s life experiences in an authentic way,” Dominik tells Vanity Fair. (As literary critic Elaine Showalter wrote for the New Yorker in 2020, Oates-and, by extension, director-screenwriter Dominik’s script-“plays with, rearranges and invents the details of Monroe’s life in order to achieve a deeper poetic and spiritual truth.”)ĭespite the liberties taken by Blonde, Dominik sees his film as an attempt to portray what he deems the “real” Monroe.
Instead, like the fictionalized Oates novel it’s based on, Blonde seeks to be spiritually faithful to the image Monroe embodied. Though the 166-minute film has the sweeping scope of a biopic, covering Monroe’s life from childhood to her ascent to stardom to her death, it does not purport to be historically accurate. Here’s what you need to know about the true history behind Blonde-and the woman, actress and image that was Monroe-ahead of the film’s release on Netflix on September 28. One of the questions the stories about Marilyn’s life beg, therefore, is how much any of us is natural, whether any identity is not made.” Not easy.”Ĭultural historian Sarah Churchwell, meanwhile, contends in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe that “Monroe is not best understood as only an image, or as an ‘artificial creation of a woman.’ … Something that is not natural can still be real: It has been made. … When she acted a part, it was Norma Jeane, playing Marilyn Monroe, playing said role. At the heart of it all, Marilyn Monroe was still Norma Jeane. “She was a character and a persona to be played, both on and off the screen. “I don’t think there was a ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe,” says Vogel in an interview.
“Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.”įilm historian Michelle Vogel, author of Marilyn Monroe: Her Films, Her Life, echoes this view. I’m still her when the camera’s rolling,” she pleads, haunted and exhausted. “When I come out of my dressing room, I’m Norma Jeane. As the star explains in the film’s trailer, her stage persona isn’t real.
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Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel of the same name, the movie imagines a Monroe torn between two disparate selves. Was “Marilyn,” the personality and persona brought to life by the star’s younger self, Norma Jeane Mortenson, a real person? Or was she simply a manufactured image?Īndrew Dominik’s new film Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Monroe, adds another layer to this age-old question in a fictionalized narrative of the actress’ life that’s equal parts glamorous and disturbing. That same question-who was the real Monroe?-has sparked debate among cinema scholars, cultural critics, historians, novelists, filmmakers and the general public for decades. People you run into feel that, well, who is she-who is she, who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe?” “When you’re famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way,” she observed. Published in Life magazine on August 3, 1962-just a day before the actress died of a barbiturate overdose at age 36-it found Monroe reflecting on her celebrity status, alternatively thoughtful, frank and witty. Marilyn Monroe’s final interview is a heartbreaker.
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