Blonde, the new Netflix film from Andrew Dominik, adds as much nuance to the idea of Marilyn Monroe as can be gleaned from a gynaecological exam. The bombshell movie star has long been established as a tragic figure, a woman who was abused by Hollywood studios, her husband Joe DiMaggio and, as a child, her unwell mother. Rather than challenge the conventional narrative, director Dominik’s nightmarish film, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalised 2000 novel, takes it somewhere even darker and even more invasive. If you want to understand Marilyn Monroe, it suggests, first you have to get inside her uterus.
This grim drama takes us into the previously unexplored depths of Marilyn Monroe’s vagina several times across its astonishing 2-hour-45-minute runtime. I won’t “spoil” them all, but in the film’s first hour, we watch Monroe, played with distressing frailty by Ana de Armas, excitedly clutch her belly as the camera cuts to her glowing womb – complete with a spectrally backlit foetus. A few scenes later, we follow Marilyn onto the operating table, where doctors perform an abortion she hasn’t consented to. “Please, won’t you listen? I’ve changed my mind,” she begs, as her doctor inserts the speculum – a procedure that’s gruesomely depicted head-on, from the point of view of Marilyn’s own cervix.
