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Dead blonde celebrities12/27/2023 Stephanie Zacharek, looking back on Marilyn’s film performances for Time, praised “the pin-dot precision of her comic timing.” She was truly a star. She worked at her craft as an actress, singer, dancer, and comedian. She built her name and reputation and then used it as leverage for better contracts. When Fox failed to put her in films early on, using her instead for publicity, she ensured that every photo op generated a headline not only for the studio, but for her. Marilyn’s success was a direct result of her ambition, studiousness, cleverness, work ethic, and determination. Gloria Steinem, who identified Marilyn as an early feminist, wrote, “It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations.” Which is to say that her death at age 36 cut short the growing list of her accomplishments. I also wrote to understand why Marilyn, above all other actresses, has endured in the world’s imagination 60 years after her death. The Blonde Marilyn has no agency in the world she is victimized at every turn. Along the way, I grew to understand my subject and to respect the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. To give a voice to the woman who had become nothing more than a famous face. In writing Marilyn through poetry, I set an intention to get as close as possible to the bone of Marilyn and to write from there. In fact, during a conversation following a reading I gave in New York, when asked whether I was concerned about appropriation when writing in the persona of Marilyn, I responded with something about fiction and the public domain of dead celebrities-but then I finally answered that for me, it’s a matter of intention. And I, too, have used Marilyn Monroe for my own literary ambitions. Then along came Hollywood (read: Netflix) with Andrew Dominik’s film adaptation of Blonde to further distort the memory and biography of Marilyn.īut does that matter? It’s entertainment after all, storytelling. Her fictionalized Marilyn in no way resembled the Marilyn I had come to know through my research and writing-Oates had realized a version of Norma Jeane Baker, and of Marilyn Monroe, and eventually of a third identity, “the Blonde,” into her own created character. This time, I saw Oates’s characterization as playing into and with stereotype. One that-in my second, more-informed reading-I liked less. Her Blonde is much more than “a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction.” Oates took the rough contours of Marilyn’s life and fictionalized an entirely other character and story. So, this time reading Blonde, I saw how far Oates strayed from the biography of Marilyn Monroe. Concerned with celebrity culture in America, I’d chosen this enduring icon as the star of my thesis and what would become the collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe and then Marilyn: Essays & Poems. I was in the midst of my MFA thesis, a collection of poems in conversation with Marilyn Monroe. At the time, I worked for a large talent agency, a business that emerged to counter the studios’ control over talent. I knew nothing about her, and after reading Blonde, what remained with me was Oates’s description of the power dynamic between the old Hollywood studio system and their stars. I was living in LA, just one street over from where Marilyn had lived and died. I first read Blonde soon after it was published. In her Author’s Note, Oates writes, “ Blonde is a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” The same could be said of Oates’s Blonde. But any resemblance to the actual life of Marilyn Monroe is nonexistent in this adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s epic novel Blonde (2000). In particular, Ana de Armas is arresting in the lead role as she easily slips between the dueling personas of Marilyn and Norma Jeane Baker, just as Marilyn did in real life. To be fair, the reviews (rightfully) applaud the casting and performances. What went so very wrong in this depiction of Marilyn Monroe? It’s quickly become the top streaming film on Netflix, despite mixed reviews and headline-grabbing controversy that mostly centers on Dominik’s directing. It’s hard to avoid Blonde-the Andrew Dominik directed film that debuted last week on Netflix and in a limited theater release.
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