For my GCSE English Speaking and Listening assessment in 2007, the topic I landed upon was Marilyn Monroe. I vaguely remember how it began: ‘What do 20th Century Fox, red lipstick and *something else unremembered* have in common? Marilyn Monroe!’ I then proceeded to give what I’m sure was a very dull chronology of her life that I had lifted from ‘The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe’ by Donald H. Wolfe, which I had borrowed from a public library as part of my research. The choice to commit myself to this topic for an assessment was, with hindsight, a bemusing one: I had never seen a film of hers by that point and the first primitive reference to her I can recall was Geri Halliwell replicating the subway grating moment from The Seven Year Itch in the Spice Girls film ‘Spice World’ in 1997. Comically, during the Speaking and Listening, I even unknowingly mispronounced the name of Monroe’s film-noir Niagara, opting for ‘nia-garra’ over the generally agreed upon phonetic pronunciation ‘nahy-ag-ruh’. Very Alicia Silverston playing Cher Horowitz from Clueless, if I say so myself.
My interest in Marilyn Monroe didn’t end there: I had a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes poster on my bedroom wall; received books about her life and wardrobe for birthdays and Christmas; and I kept a black and white photograph of a still from Some Like It Hot on a wall in many lounges in various rented flats I’ve lived in over the years. A friend asked me once: ‘Why do you like her so much?’ I recall that my answer was somewhat vague: that she’d had a hard life and that ‘people’ had been unkind to her so remembering her was important. I still follow an account on Instagram called @perfectlymarilynmonroe that posts on a daily to weekly basis with lesser-known photographs and stories from Monroe’s life.
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to wrack my brains as to why I felt passionately enough about Monroe to give a speech about her life at great length in front of a class of my peers. My deep fascination with her has, indeed, waned over the past few years largely without my noticing: emblematic of this is that the said photograph from Some Like It Hot is currently lying in a bag of other old posters, artworks and fragments from my early twenties, gathering dust. What is becoming clearer for me is that Monroe was a representation, as perhaps she was for many people, of some kind of angelic aspirational figure. Whilst being blonde has something of a cultural reputation for being ‘dumb’, I can only recall almost learning to revere blondness, in particular white blondness, both in my peers and in cultural figures. This started both with my first Barbie and my first intrusive worry about my physical appearance when I noticed, aged five, that all of my school friends were blonde and were, I felt intuitively, valued in a slightly different way than I was by parents and teachers. When I decided, slightly questionably, to ‘go blonde’ after a break-up when I was nineteen, I was immediately asked whether people had started responding to me in a ‘different’ way: a slightly coded enquiry, that left me feeling that my physical and sexual currency had somehow been elevated now that my hair colour was no longer its natural tawny (and, yes, I think gorgeous) brown.
Monroe must be our culture’s ultimate archetype of this Aphroditic blonde. In the words of Anthony Burgess, she was an embodiment of ‘divine glamour’: physically unattainably beautiful, precious, witty and fun, whilst also seeming to transcend those humanly qualities into something celestial. Yet, her humanness meant that she never crossed into the realm of the purely and deathly symbolic: she seemed like an irreverent bodily, earthy being, vulnerable but also famously and gloriously comfortable in her own skin, like a cat. I am certain I projected a huge amount of my own adolescent gold onto her, seeing in her the goodness, radiance, beauty and joy that I couldn’t see consciously or couldn’t allow myself to accept in myself. As such, I began to uphold her as a role model I profoundly admired, believing I knew and understood her intimately, bittersweetly displacingknowing and understanding myself, and finding in my adoration a sense of meaning and belonging. I wonder if these feelings rooted for me are/were shared by others who upheld Monroe as a sacred role model. It is perhaps then no surprise or coincidence that my attachment to her has lessened, now, as a result of, amongst other things, therapy and by dedicating myself to practices that cultivate love, compassion and acceptance for myself. I don’t need to idolise someone externally when I have the qualities that I revere in abundance within myself.
As such, we arrive at why I have even been considering this at all. It is undeniable that Monroe has remerged in our public consciousness, famously through Kim Kardashian’s problematic wearing of the ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ dress at the 2022 Met Gala, the publicity preceding the film Blonde, and the subsequent furore surrounding its release. Towards the end of a term, a pupil at school said to me of Blonde: ‘I read that that film did her dirty’. Nothing screams cultural permeation and significance more than a thirteen-year-old remembering and recounting something they’ve discovered on one of their voyages across the internet. Yes: Monroe is back, and it feels more complicated than ever.
I decided to start reading ‘Blonde’ by Joyce Carol Oates a month or two before the film was released. Even before its Netflix release on 28th September 2022, the film had already drawn a lot of internet attention thanks to both the intriguing promotional stills that featured uncanny representations of Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, and clips of the 14-minute standing ovation the film received at the Venice Film Festival. Once the film was released, however, everyone from the New York Times to the Independent and social media netizens decried it for being exploitative ‘trauma porn’, that capitalised upon speculation and conjecture about Monroe’s life. I particularly respected Mark Kermode’s shrewd framing of the film as a ‘horror film’ and ‘gothic melodrama’, which, in my mind, served to complicate the fact that it was essentially marketed as a biopic, in spite of references to Oates’ novel in the trailers.[1] I noticed that many of the comments and reviews that read as supportive of the film when the backlash kicked off harked back to the novel, almost claiming that because the film was an adaptation from a book, people needed to calm down about how Monroe was represented; that being an adaptation lent the film some kind of legitimacy. This was problematic on a number of different levels that could be the subject of an essay in and of itself. However, what concerned me the most was that people were appealing to the book as a zenith of some kind of authority, when the whole premise of the book in the first place is startlingly thorny.
Aside from the legal abstract that opens the book with the prerequisite publishing and copyright details, and the declaration of this novel as a work of fiction, Oates provides us with a lengthy ‘Author’s Note’ that forms a singularly disorientating read. Here is where the novel begins, before the introduction of any characters, settings or narration. It interweaves a number of bibliographic references to Monroe’s poetry, Monroe biographies, and secondary material reproduced and referenced throughout the novel, which are held in the same breath as assertions of ‘invention’:
‘Blonde is a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation […] The historic Marilyn Monroe did keep a journal of sorts and she did write poems, or poem-fragments. Of these, only two lines are included in the final chapter (“Help help!”-); the other poems are invented. Certain of the remarks in the chapter “The Collected Works of Marilyn Monroe” are taken from interviews, other are fictitious […] Biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe should be sought not in Blonde, which is not as intended as a historic document, but in biographies of the subject […] Of the books on acting cited and alluded to, The Thinking Body by Mabel Todd, To the Actor by Michael Chekov, and An Actor Prepare and My Life in Art by Constantin Stanislavski are genuine books, while The Actor’s Handbook and the Actor’s Life and The Paradox of Acting are invented’.[2]
From the beginning, Oates immediately seems to perform the bewildering intertwining of fiction and reality: the ‘Author’s Note’ reads as a pre-emptive bombardment, constructing the overarching authorities of fact and fiction that are cast over the novel with the force and momentum of a high-speed train, throwing up questions and complications from the start: what exactly does ‘‘life’ in the form of fiction’ constitute? Is that not what fiction does and has done since its inception? Furthermore, the ‘nothing-to-see-here-officer’ intonation of Oates’ equivocation that the novel is ‘not intended as a historic document’ seems particularly slippery. Thanks to Roland Barthes and others, I have come to understand authorial intention as a concept that forms a contentious and, to put it bluntly, irrelevant focus of enquiry.[3] Whether done performatively or not, statements of intent, and their denial thereof, always raise my hackles: despite its seeming nonchalance, Oates here seems to be attempting to, or performing, the attempt to control the reception of her novel. This is doubly ironic as she follows this assertion with a complicated tangle of references that are both real and entirely made up, yet through the use of formal bibliographic conventions, such as italicisation, do not appear as such. Not to mention the ambiguity of the statement itself: ‘not intended as a historic document’. Not ‘not intended as an accurate history’ but ‘not intended as a historic document’. Which means that a claim is being made here that Blonde, in some way, exists outside of history. I would argue that any document published with an ISBN and with a catalogue record in the British Library constitutes an ‘historic document’: it is of a time and of a place. Whether Oates or Oates-performing-the-author believes it or not, her novel has entered discourse, it has entered consciousness with all of the contextual influences that informed its production and its reception, thus granting it a certain ‘historic’ position, regardless of whether its subject matter actually deals with history. Which the note tells us it does… and doesn’t.
I don’t mind that the novel starts with the ‘author’ running rings around us. I love being thrown into a conundrum which challenges my position as a reader, demanding interrogation and criticality over complacency. The is undeniably the air of the Trickster to the whole thing. However, it wouldn’t be a problem if the book wasn’t about someone who was real and is unable to do what she wants with the narrative: whether to disregard it, ignore it, challenge it or lean into it. And what a narrative it is: Blonde is one of a few books that I have found really excruciating to read: page after page, chapter after chapter of objectification, exploitation and violence. I actually didn’t mind the start of the novel and the mapping out of Norma Jeane’s relationship with her mother; I think it would make a great exercise to draw it into comparison with the start of David Copperfield, which I found equally compelling in the ways in which Dickens too leans into the psychological darkness and torment of an unhappy childhood. However, the rest becomes something of a relentless barrage of pure misery. Why did Marilyn Monroe have to be presented in this way? If this story had to be told, surely a fictional starlet could have been constructed upon which to map Monroe’s story, thereby removing the stickiness of projecting a load of cultural baggage onto someone, without their consent, who really existed.
Blonde’s iterations as a novel and a film are all a matter of projection. In choosing to render Monroe a total victim under the guise of critiquing the twin forces of patriarchy and capitalism, the book, in my view, ends up becoming an oppressor; it becomes the toxic water that oppresses, stunts, and drowns out the reality of a person who once existed, denying her control over her own narrative and story. This is all the more important, and all the more baffling, because we live in a post-#MeToo world where agency and the reclamation of power and truth are a core part of women pushing back against sexual harassment and violence, as argued by the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke: ‘There is inherent strength in agency. And #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency, it’s about claiming it’.[4]Blonde was first published in 2000, six years before Burke first used the phrase #MeToo on My Space and a further eleven years before it gained significant global traction after the New York Times broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of women in Hollywood. Therefore, the book clearly comes from an earlier time when ‘feminism’ was still a dirty word and stories of sexual violence and harassment were still marginalised. In 2000, perhaps society needed an Homeric story of trauma to act as a sledgehammer for us to wake up culturally and resist the violence of patriarchy, even though stories of sexual violence have long been shared and published. Yet, we are no longer in 2000; from a 2022 perspective, Blonde’s framing of Monroe’s torturous suffering in its obscenity and relentlessness verges on the gratuitously perverse. More than ever, we need testimony and we need story sharing: but a text claiming fictitiousness about a real person who is subjected to an indulgence of abuse and trauma is not the same thing. The biographical film She Said, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the New York Times journalists who broke the Harvey Weinstein revelations, was also released in 2022 and is something of a counterpoint to the release of Blonde. The film doesn’t shy from giving voice to traumatic experiences, including Ashley Judd’s who, notably, plays herself; however, instead of presenting horrific detailed scenes of abuse, the film centres women’s experiences, storytelling and solidarity in challenging gargantuan male power. I would argue that it is a much more important film for exploring the real lives and stories of real people who experienced sexual violence, rather than projecting conjecture and contributing to the oppression of someone who will never have the right to reply.
Am I surprised that Monroe and her story continues to be plagued and harassed by patriarchy (and, yes, I consider Blonde to be a patriarchal novel)? No. I see Blonde and its cinematic iteration in the same vein as the documentary Amy, released in 2015. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Amy Winehouse are allowed a say on their own story, let alone offered catharsis, redemption or transcendence. Two woman are placed onto a pedestal and then torturously and repeatedly torn down. They are brutalised within and by these texts in a way that I hope audiences find increasingly unacceptable, especially when compared with the adulation and adoration that men like Ayrton Senna in Senna and Kurt Cobain in Montage of Heck have received. It really is a tale as old as patriarchal time.
I am not ashamed to admit that when I finished reading Blonde I threw it to the ground, which has only happened one other time in my life (after reading Crime and Punishment, but that’s another story). I will not watch Blonde. Just as I don’t care if there really was a ‘real’ Shakespeare, I don’t care to speculate on ‘who’ the ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe is or was, especially when posited by a film that is problematic for all the reasons stated above and was applauded by the likes of Casey Affleck. Instead, I will re-watch Gentleman Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot for the thousandth times; I will recall how when Jane Russell tried to encourage Monroe to join a Bible group, she, fabulously, in turn decided to introduce Russell to Freud; I will enjoy the photographs of Monroe reading Leaves of Grass and Ulysses and leaning over a balcony in New York; I will enjoy the Warhol paintings depicting her; I will thrill at Lana Del Rey’s play with her image in the videos to National Anthem, Paradiso and Candy Necklaces; I will reminisce about the homage to Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend in Noughties teen staple ‘Gossip Girl’ where Monroe was played by Serena Van Der Woodsen AKA Blake Lively. What real joy this woman has brought and the bright, bright shadow she continues to cast. I dedicate the end of this essay to Marilyn, in her own words:
‘When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I’m already better than them’.
‘Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing’ – Lana Del Rey, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd (2023)
With huge love and gratitude to Nikki McKinney at The Bell Jar Flowers for her generous permission to use this photograph as the featured image for this poem. Nikki arranged, designed and provided flowers for my wedding and I never realised how much I cared about these beautiful creations until I met her. She is a true artist. Her work can be found at https://www.thebelljarflowers.co.uk/
Harping On 