Blonde

The terror of being possessed by a force greater than oneself is what slots Blonde firmly into the horror genre. The film outwardly appears to catalogue the life of Norma Jean, from her desperately unstable childhood resulting from an absent father and a mentally unwell and abusive mother, to the abusive husbands, through to the exploited model and movie star who never received due credit for her work and died an alarmingly premature death aged only thirty six.

But the film is more than a biopic, and it is a mistake to regard it as such. It is a film about the grotesqueries of childhood traumas relived in adulthood, a film about rape and reproductive rights, and, ultimately, about the lethalness of celebrity. Ana de Armas plays Norma Jean who is demonically possessed by Marilyn Monroe. Monroe is the portal which Norma Jean must occupy to achieve fame, and de Armas magnificently and terrifyingly encapsulates the process of being haunted by an alter ego which has the sole function of pleasing the men in her life, be it her husbands, her film directors, or any number fo high profile figures who treat her as vacuous and disposable. The horror of this haunting is what makes Blonde a sickeningly necessary portrayal of the toxicity of fame.

This is a film which has parallels with other pictures released in 2022 about the pitfalls of fame, most noticeably Elvis. Blonde would also be an excellent counterpart to She Said, a film about the New York Times journalists who broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct in Hollywood. Both films portray the sexist injustices which permeate journalism and filmmaking, She Said, however, demonstrates the distance that women have come since Monroe’s era. It has been an agonising journey which has seen several women risk everything to find a voice and an outlet to speak of such monstrous maltreatment.

Norma Jean was the original ‘Me Too’ woman, and for that, she must be respected, and the horrors must continue to be documented.