'Blonde' Director Blames Backlash On Americans' Desire To "Reinvent Marilyn Monroe As An Empowered Woman"

There have been many attempts to tell the story of Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood, and the latest film was based on a novel about Marilyn's life, which was written by Joyce Carol Oates. Blonde attempted to tell a different side of Marilyn's life, the one that was full of pain, suffering, and abuse. It was a difficult film to watch due to multiple scenes of sexual assault, forced abortion, and drug use, but the director Andrew Dominik thinks it was a tough movie to enjoy because of Americans' need to pain Marilyn in a different light.

'Blonde' Director Blames Backlash on Americans' Desire to "Reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an Empowered Woman"

There were many scenes in Blonde that made most people want to turn off the TV and never lay eyes on the movie again. Ana de Armas looks very much like Marilyn (although many people couldn't get over her Cuban accent that remained) but audiences weren't too thrilled with the film overall. At the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, director Andrew Dominik shared his thoughts about why the film wasn't a success in the US.

There was much backlash against Blonde, including criticism of the constant abuse and emotional trauma, and Dominik is aware of this. "They hated the movie!" he said about American audiences. But he believes it was because Americans are desperate to see Marilyn as some sort of feminist icon.

“Now we’re living in a time where it’s important to present women as empowered, and they want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as an empowered woman. That’s what they want to see,” he said. “And if you’re not showing them that, it upsets them.”

He also touched on the fact that so many people thought the film was a way to exploit Marilyn, "which is kind of strange, because she's dead," Dominik said.

"The movie doesn’t make any difference in one way or another,” he continued. “What they really mean is that the film exploited their memory of her, their image of her, which is fair enough. But that’s the whole idea of the movie. It’s trying to take the iconography of her life and put it into service of something else, it’s trying to take things that you’re familiar with, and turning the meaning inside out. But that’s what they don’t want to see.”

He also added that American film is becoming "more conservative," like a comforting bedtime story that children already know every word of. "But I don't want to make bedtime stories," he said.

It's curious that Dominik believes that American film has become more conservative, when most everyday people have actually complained about the opposite—movies in the US have become insufferably progressive in their storylines, resulting in box office flops and general disinterest in the film industry in general. Perhaps people who work in the movie industry see things differently.

You can watch Blonde on Netflix.