The concept of Marilyn Monroe, as a myth, is known to everyone. We are all interested because we have all, generation after generation, liked to project our expectations and shadows on the figure of the Hollywood actress par excellence, or in the worst case, on Shakira left on duty. Perhaps this event of breaking an ideal is what makes the new “biopic” of the golden blonde have such bad reviews from the public.
The new film made into a film by director Andrew Dominik, with the great performance of actress Ana de Armas as the protagonist, is based on Blonde, the extensive novel by the five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Joyce Carol Oates, published in the year 2000 in Spanish by the Alfaguara publishing house.
Oates's novel begins with a prologue dated August 3, 1962, the day before Marilyn Monroe's death, whetting her reading appetite as a bicycle messenger in Los Angeles speeds through traffic with a special delivery for the actress. He is the “Death in a hurry. Death pedaling furiously”, and is also the messenger death of in Emily Dickinson's poem: “Yes, I have seen Death. I dreamed about her last night and many nights before. She was not afraid ”; and closing the quote Oates continues: “There came Death, so determined. There came Death, leaning over the rusty handlebars of a dilapidated but unstoppable bicycle.” With this mind-bending introduction, the writer plunges us into a horror book about the fate of a female star in a world of Hollywood mirrors and shadows, a world where women's bodies are commodities traded for male arousal and profit. box office.
From Norma Jean to Marilyn Monroe, a broken construction
In both creations, book, and film, we delve into the life and body of Norma Jean, the real name of Marilyn Monroe, that girl abandoned by her father and mother, the latter emotionally and psychologically unstable, in 1934, according to official sources, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
In the fiction of the film, we see the childhood of Norma Jean, a brave but at times insecure girl who is left in an orphanage even if she yells at the camera that she is not an orphan, making visible from that moment that, who would be the blonde of Hollywood gold was not stupid at all, although it was unbalanced. But who wouldn't be if his life began like this, with such several abandonments, comings, and goings, and with what would later be his journey through fame guided by the veneration of his character and, above all?
Carol Oates reflects it in depth in the novel and Dominik moderately in the film: how a woman in the 40s, with that emotional baggage, was not going to seek affection in all the male figures that appeared in her life, how was she not going to having daddy issues and being harassed with the physical attractiveness she possessed, if in addition, she did not know how to apply limits to feelings of danger, because, above all, she was desperately looking for love.
In Blonde, the film, Norma Jean moves between her insecurity and tries to get into that character that they have created for her called Marilyn Monroe. Her first lovers, a trio with the children of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, seem to be of help to the young Norma, however, they do not see her, they only see Marilyn's innocence and attractiveness. Monroe. They were not men abandoned by their parents physically, but the shadow of their fame frustrated and overshadowed them.
In turn, Norma Jean becomes known to her future lovers and husbands through the character of Marilyn, and they, realizing the incision in her personality, discard her or simply do not understand her.
For example, baseball player Joe Di Maggio is enraged by the scene in The Seventh Year Itch, that mythical frame where Marilyn's white dress is lifted, exposing her underwear. A man in that age could not allow the character of Marilyn, his wife, to be desired, to have possession of her taken away from him by the looks of others. He also couldn't accept that Marilyn Monroe or Norma Jean sought that kind of attention, the simple pleasure of feeling desired.
Then came the playwright, Arthur Miller, the one who managed to see it in depth. He saw a reading and intelligent Norma Jean, but at the same time, her character made her body. That man saw in her a sensitive figure who could take care of her but in exchange for using her as a muse. Subsequently, her most famous ending, and the most criticized in the film, was delivered to the president, John F. Kennedy, the one who saw her as the most expensive whore in history, who everyone adored and who only he, the man who directed the country of the free world, could come to possess.
