Blondes on Blondes

I read a pretty good novel and children's book. I watch two very good pictures.

Books first and get into movies below the fold. That latter section is gonna go on because I got shit to say, so skip or skim at your own discretion. Or if you’ve seen both films, go through my analyses with a fine-toothed comb and tell me what I missed or misunderstood. Our operators are standing by.

Anything or Anyone

The Enchanters is the most recent book by James Ellroy. His output has been wildly inconsistent in the years since he rounded out his masterful Underworld USA Trilogy with the great novel Blood’s a Rover. The Enchanters might be the best book he’s published since then.

The Enchanters takes the same protagonist/narrator as his previous book Widespread Panic. Freddy Otash was a real guy, a disgraced former LAPD officer and sleazoid private investigator who showed up in fictionalized form in a few previous Ellroy books as a minor character. Ellroy drops the grating scandal-rag pastiche style from Widespread Panic; The Enchanters Freddy, years older in 1962, addresses the reader in a mature, controlled and readable version of Ellroy’s hard-bitten but seriocomic noir prose. Just in terms of getting from sentence to sentence, this is some of Ellroy’s most relaxed and assured writing.

The story tells of what a fictional ex post facto observer calls a “unique merging of movie stars, major politicians, a corrupt Hollywood element, and a vicious criminal demimonde.” Marilyn Monroe features prominently from afar as what the book’s Dramatis Personae calls the “idée fixe of The Enchanters.” Ellroy’s Freddy is hired by Jimmy Hoffa to run a surveillance job on Monroe as a wedge against John and Robert Kennedy. After Monroe dies, Freddy surreptitiously prowls her pad and realizes that someone else was wiretapping her at the same time. He subsequently defects away from Hoffa to help the Kennedys limit their exposure vis-à-vis Monroe and to help LAPD Chief William H. Parker compile dirt on the Kennedys. In Ellroy’s fictionalization, the troubled and recently-deceased pinup girl and movie star also possessed a wide-ranging bent for degeneracy and criminality that leads into a number of intertwined and overlapping conspiracies touching a lot of very powerful people, not to mention some really scummy and dangerous ones.

The complexity of these machinations and the hard-to-sort cast of rogues and lowlifes who populate them is the only significant problem with what represents a generally quite impressive outing for Ellroy. As sometimes happens with his books, the middle portion of The Enchanters grows ponderously difficult to follow, slowing the reader’s interest enough to make me care way less about finding out what was going to happen. Sitting down and re-reading this book knowing what I know now would probably prove gratifying, but I have other literary fish to fry, so that will have to wait.

It’s a nifty pivot for Ellroy to structure one of his grandiose, sleazy, freewheeling, viscerally bloody stories of murder, corruption and institutional perfidy around Monroe as a close-but-out-of-reach figure of observation and obsession, a specter haunting numerous characters in The Enchanters who knew, loved, desired and/or pitied her. Ellroy portrays her as an impressionable, none-too-bright, morally-relaxed individual who was desperate to please and fit in, even if the people she meant to impress were devious false prophets and the somewhere she fit was a cockamamie criminal scheme that turned serious and started getting people killed, indirectly including Marilyn herself. What Ellroy writes of another character could be said of the book as a whole, that all of this “prophesies the simmering 60s.”

The Enchanters has a lot of great things going for it and finds Ellroy writing with a focus, control and intention that has not characterized most of his recent work, but it is just so hard to keep up with who’s who and what’s happening. Although there’s a lot I love about this book, I would finally only recommend it to people who already know and like Ellroy’s best work, such as my writer colleague Mills, or my old buddy Chris who was standing next to me the time we met Ellroy.

The same day I finished The Enchanters, I read Marilyn Monroe, written by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara and illustrated by Ana Albero, part of the “Little People, Big Dreams” series of which I’ve written before. Albero’s simplistic, cartoonish, childlike illustration style seems like a discordant fit for the material until the reader gets to the book’s end and finds that Vegara has elected to completely elide any mention of Marilyn’s self-destructive behaviors, premature death and status as a quintessential example of how getting what one wants can end up being the worst thing that can happen to someone. I guess any or all of that makes a less suitable moral for a children’s book than Vegara’s tastefully cheerful conclusion that “after giving her best in more than 20 movies, little Norma Jeane, the girl who never belonged to anything or anyone, found her home in the hearts of the people—the place where she will belong forever.”

Film Selections: What’s Real and What’s Just Yourself

Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik, 2022. I’ve seen and liked all of Dominik’s other films. He’s got patience, an interest in unconventional storytelling, a great compositional eye and an ability to deploy a lot of fancy movie technology without drawing attention to himself and away from his subjects. All of these traits are on display in Blonde, his lengthy, controversial biopic about Marilyn Monroe.

The premise seems be a portrait of Monroe as a real and empathetic person that freely imagines her private conversations and emotions. (The credits state that this film is based on a novel, as opposed to any works of nonfiction.) Perhaps Dominik and de Armas are suggesting to the viewer, This is definitely how Marilyn looked and spoke, and we all know what her public image represented, so we’re depicting those as accurately as we can and then showing what we think it was like to subjectively experience all of that from her point of view.

• They have constructed a plausible dramatic recreation of off-camera Marilyn as a real person. She is portrayed with incredible verisimilitude in terms of voice, appearance and gesture by the gifted actor de Armas, makeup designer Tina Roesler Kerwin and hairdressing by Jaime Leigh McIntosh. Biopics about entertainers usually annoy me, especially about ones as iconic and well known as the subject of Blonde, but Dominik succeeds in making it easy for viewers to forget we aren’t watching the real Marilyn.

• Of course, who and what the “real Marilyn” was seems to be one of the other essential preoccupations Blonde wants to toy with. Blonde is not breaking new ground by examining “Marilyn Monroe” as a media persona and Norma Jeane as the real person who got subsumed and destroyed by the public’s exploitative and abusive expectations, but it elevates the topic with a visceral painfulness and deep sense of fear and self-loathing that I experienced along with Norma Jeane. In this story Marilyn is the movie star who plays her ditzy characters, and Norma Jeane is the earnest and misunderstood thespian who plays Marilyn. Tension arises when Norma Jeane is crushed between the alternatives of hating the persona as it overtakes her own agency and individuality, and desperately hoping she can still conjure Marilyn because without her on-screen persona she has no future in the business. There is no place in between for her to be an authentic person.

• Biographically, Blonde has some straightforward suppositions to make about what drove and doomed this individual. Young Norma Jeane was an L.A. native with a mentally unwell mother and an absentee father. These three components are depicted as having combined to prime her perfectly for post-War film stardom with her one-in-a-million good looks as the spark that ignites her career. An early sequence and arresting image has Norma Jeane’s mother piling her into a car in the middle of the night to drive straight toward the hills decorated with the “Hollywood” sign, a massive fire blazing atop and across them: from the beginning of her conscious life, Norma Jeane is barreling straight into the all-consuming fire of fame. The film harvests narrative capital out of how the emotional instability Norma Jeane may have partially inherited from her mother gave her a unique flexibility as a performer; Blonde posits movie stars as beautiful and successful mental patients. But fatherlessness is depicted as the motivating force of her emotional life. The Marilyn of Blonde wants nothing more than a father who will love and care for her.

• So this is where things really turn horrible for this sad individual. Blonde is interested in this connection between the lack of a father-figure in Marilyn’s life and the horrible abuse and indignities she suffers at the hands of powerful, talented and/or charismatic men. Interestingly, where Vegara and Albero mention ONLY Marilyn’s first marriage to the relatively unexceptional man with whom she might have been happy if he hadn’t disapproved of her entertainment career, Blonde has no time to even acknowledge that part of her life.

  • First it takes a close look at a (imagined?) romantic troika she establishes with the libertine sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson. They are depicted as gorgeous, idle, entitled and sensitive oddballs and spiritual twins who sincerely love her. However their way of expressing it is complicated and indictable. They seem to be generous lovers who give her authentic sexual pleasure, but only if both of them are involved at the same time; anything that gives her something good in Blonde also risks commodifying and demeaning her. (They also tell her explicitly that they are doomed to always live in the shadow of their fathers, while she is fortunate to be fatherless because it gives her an opportunity to invent herself from whole cloth.)

  • Then Blonde skips along to episodic glances at both of her later marriages and her mythic involvement with President Kennedy. Possibly for legal reasons, and as if to underline that this is more fiction than biography, these characters are called “The Ex-Athlete,” “The Playwright” and “The President.” The Ex-Athlete, played by Bobby Cannavale, comes off as a rather clueless and physically abusive brute who wants to hoard Marilyn for himself. The Playwright, played by Adrien Brody, is attracted to Marilyn’s talent and charm but seems to overestimate his own power to bring out the Real Artist she longs to become; he means well but also thinks too highly of himself to see her as his equal. The President is depicted as a shallow, cruel, lustful jerk who sexually bullies and abuses her in one particularly harrowing and upsetting sequence, mirroring a scene from much earlier in the film where a studio executive inaugurates her into casting-couch culture. In one way or another, every straight man she gets close to tries to remake her as what they demand of her privately, sexually and commercially. It’s heartbreaking and challenging material that indicts the viewer as a member of the film-going public who are complicit in what the entertainment industry does to young women, though Dominik and de Armis depict Marilyn as often going along with her awful treatment and then hating herself for it later. To some extent she may be a victim of herself, but the film’s view of Norma Jeane as a child suggests she was born to be devoured by the business and never had a fighting chance.

• A narrative motif explores an imagined view of Marilyn’s desire to become a parent herself. In the fictionalized story of Blonde she goes through an abortion (which she may or may not fully authorize to happen and has conflicted feelings about later) and a miscarriage caused by accidental (or was it?) physical trauma. The film gets into some of its weirdest and most ambiguous territory in exploring what I can only imagine is indeed an extremely complicated set of experiences to go through as a woman. Especially as this particular character who is so deeply unhappy in her own doomed existence and finds herself with ample reason to question bringing new life into her environment, even as she so desperately and instinctively wants to do so.

• The musical score, composed and performed by Dominik’s regular collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is pretty good and stays subtly unobtrusive.

Blonde is lengthy and challenging. But it scores off the charts on one of my key metrics for how much I enjoy any given film: how often I want to freeze the frame and hang it on my wall. It’s a dazzling technical and aesthetic marvel at every moment, and Dominik, de Armas et al do a great job crafting a bleak, tragic, painful story about the short life of a unique and complex individual whose success doomed her. A tragicomic moral might be encoded in the first few minutes of Blonde when the mother character blithely and bitterly states that: “In California you can’t tell what’s real…and what’s just yourself.”

Later in the film, as fame is devouring her soul, Marilyn idly queries aloud, “I guess there isn’t any Norma Jeane, is there?” Blonde shows us many haunting, beautiful and thought-provoking images while confoundingly, poetically and elegiacally declining to provide a firm or easy answer. I’m sure it’s possible to be as repulsed and insulted by this movie as I was impressed with and captivated by it, but I recommend it nevertheless as a bold and skilled work of art and craft that demands consideration.

The Misfits, directed by John Huston, 1961. I will say, though, that after watching Marilyn’s last completed film right after Blonde and drinking in its all-around high level of quality, including in her really good final starring performance, I could argue that the lack of attention that The Misfits receives is a glaring and unfair oversight in Dominik’s film.

The Misfits was written by Arthur “The Playwright” Miller as an adaptation of his own short story; it gives his erstwhile wife Marilyn a serious, challenging role that she handles really well, especially having to hold her own against the equally-good and mostly well-cast trio of Clark Gable, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift (whom I once mentioned I would have cast in an adaptation of Ellroy’s novel The Big Nowhere, if the film had been made in the year in which the novel is set). Another key role is filled with a fine performance from Thelma Ritter.

It’s directed by the legendary and very talented filmmaker Huston; its uninflected black-and-white photography and blocking has the kind of old-Hollywood common sense and subtlety that characterizes most of Huston’s productions across the many genres and decades in which he worked. This one is a sprightly but serious drama about processing transition, trying to get unstuck in life, choosing to languish at a crossroads and living life on one’s own terms. It also has some insightful and rather gloomy thoughts on the irreconcilability of differences between women and men.

Marilyn’s performance is the lynchpin and centerpiece; she plays a young woman who has come to Reno to obtain a quick divorce from a man to whom she was married for two years and can’t stay with because he hasn’t been emotionally present, telling him on the courthouse steps that “If I’m gonna be alone, I wanna be by myself.” Ritter plays her sardonic and jaded boarding house landlord; they fall in with a mechanic and pilot widower played by Wallach, an aging cowboy played by Gable and a destitute but insouciant rodeo rider played by Clift.

So right from the beginning we’re starting with an ending, and a sense that Marilyn’s protagonist Roslyn has no idea where she goes from here, even as to whether or not she should hang around Reno. What at first appears to be a question of which of these men, each of whom loves her in his own way, will win her heart turns out to have much more to do with her frustration about what these guys value in life and how they go about pursuing it. The men aspire to freedom, wildness and self-determination: “Anything’s better than wages” remarks one, and “wages” gets repeated as a symbol of the constraints of society and responsibility that disgust them. This finally extends into a type of resentful misogyny on the part of Wallach’s character: “You struggle, you build, you try, you turn yourself inside out for ‘em. But it’s never enough.”

That line comes in response to Roslyn’s primal scream of catharsis, when she can no longer handle the fact that all of these men, each in his own male way, is driven to destructiveness and self-destructiveness by doing wild things just for the sake of doing them — Clift’s character risks death for laughs in the rodeo, Gable’s character wrangles doomed wild horses for not much money and Wallach’s character indulges in reckless driving and flying while ruminating on the many deaths he caused as a bombardier in the War. Perhaps at the film’s beginning Roslyn is still too naive to navigate life as a young divorcee with no direction home and finds her way to a new understanding of her circumstances by colliding with three interesting guys for whom she genuinely cares, but who challenge her desire to love and support any man by their remaining too stubbornly and uglily manly. In a more placid early scene, before things get out of hand, Roslyn muses that “Maybe you’re not supposed to believe what people say. Maybe it’s not even fair to them.”

It made me sad watching Marilyn’s last film, seeing how good it is and how good she is in it. Her much-commented-upon physical beauty has never been more striking to me than in The Misfits, perhaps because it is so enlivened by her having been properly cast in a really interesting role in a good drama, surrounded and empowered by fun and thoughtful writing and the professional guidance of a no-bullshit director. I’m guessing about a lot of that, since I don’t know what her working relationships were like with the cast and crew on this picture, but what shows up on the screen is a sublime curtain call for an interesting and unusual talent who was treated unfairly all of her life and died at a tragically young age. Maybe Vegara and Albero came closest to getting the point after all; Marilyn sacrificed too much to get a few indelible performances preserved on the screen, so the only consolation that makes this less sad for those of us who love watching good movies is that she left us a handful of great ones for us to go on enjoying.