🎬 Kat Sachs draws parallels between Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, a controversial adaptation of a JoyceCarolOates book about Marilyn Monroe. Blonde is now streaming on Netflix. 👇
“For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” —Herman Melville,Imagine my surprise when, as a preteen girl with a budding interest in film—for whom the galaxy of the Hollywood star system was an accessible inroad to the vast universe of cinema—I checked out Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel“There came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning sepia light,” begins Oates’s haunting prelude.
Rich colors certainly distinguish the meaning of Marilyn, from her bright red lipstick to the Technicolor glamor of films such as, as do ominous shadows. Just as death hurtles along at the beginning of Oates’s book, a montage of severe chiaroscuro shots depicting how the white light of Marilyn Monroe is illuminated against those shadows—set to the film’s correspondingly portentous score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis—begins this controversial adaptation.
Such criticism, however, is not about the film, but rather the ongoing mythology surrounding Marilyn the construct, which is inherently what Oates’s novel and Dominik’s film seek to epitomize. The former has said that Monroe is her “Moby Dick, the powerful galvanizing image about which an epic might be constructed, with myriad levels of meaning and significance.” Monroe is in turn the American public’s white whale, that which we seek to dominate and claim as our own.
Nevertheless getting the part as a result of the rape, Marilyn’s star is soon on the rise. Here begins the most hallucinatory part of the film, wherein she enters into a ménage à trois with Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. , boys about town with daddy issues and substance abuse problems.
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