Last year’s Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde broke up its parade of visceral suffering heaped upon the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson with an acknowledgement of one injustice not of the physically invasive persuasion.
We learn that while working on Howard Hawks’ superlative Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which turns 70 years old this weekend), she received a paltry rate of $500 a week, while her comparatively better-known co-45star Jane Russell raked in a sum-total fee in the amount of $200,000. On this point, director Andrew Dominik clearly conveys his thesis that the industry used and abused a woman ill-equipped to advocate for herself, and for once, he does it without joining in on that which he purports to critique by lavishing punishments upon star Ana de Armas. He pathologizes Monroe’s original narrative of tragic glamour in the direction of a savage, failed empathy, curdling into pity, making her out to be a victim of her own bimbofied image at the hands of the predatory men circling her, from the daddy that never loved her to abuser John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
