12/23/2023 0 Comments The dark crystal tv tropes![]() Though certain chapters lead with quotes from influential acting teachers, and the heroine doth protest that she wants to be a serious actress, Oates is far more invested in Marilyn Monroe as the broken doll avatar for her very particular kind of white femininity, which is forever lurching toward its own destruction. The novel’s internal mythos is Jungian claptrap, with “the Blonde Actress” and “the Beggar Maid” driven mad by abandonment and enduring all manner of subjugation to win the favor of ever aloof “the Dark Prince” whose love will redeem her. In interviews, Oates describes writing about Monroe as her “white whale,” chasing after a mythic feminine and mythic masculine. Still, he is not alone in his morbid, preening contempt for “the American goddess of love.” His efforts bear cruel fruit because they sprang from a gnarled seed. Dominik, like Oates, seems interested only in Monroe as the patron saint of all beautiful, brutalized women, offering a breathtakingly vicious dismissal of her as “an Aphrodite of the 20th century … And she killed herself … Now to me, that’s the most important thing.” ![]() ![]() Though the movie has been rightfully criticized for its myopic brutality, reveling in graphic depictions of sexual assault and forced abortions, as well as its infamous “talking fetus” sequences, some critics seem to attribute its emphasis on Monroe-as-victim on filmmakers alone. Dominik’s movie follows Oates’s narrative ethos that there is inherent doom in the feminine, infusing an icy cynicism in almost every frame: In his work, the rape occurs not long after we’re treated to a rendition of Monroe’s song “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy” playing over montage of pinup photos of Norma Jeane (played by Ana de Armas). That’s the novel.ĭirector Andrew Dominik’s cinematic adaptation of Blonde for Netflix (there had been a miniseries based on Oates’s novel, in 2001, that starred Poppy Montgomery in the title role), which just dropped on September 28, is its own misogynist curiosity. And yet Oates traps Monroe in a glass case of her own, maneuvering her beautiful blonde corpse to be gawked at, sighed over, and projected upon. The author devotes some of her 700-plus pages to Marilyn Monroe’s internal monologue, but more often, those voluminous pages are given to a kaleidoscopic Greek choir of voices like classmates in acting workshops, her ex-lovers and husbands, cohorts of leering men, and inexplicably, a “Sharpshooter” who might be a shadowy, puritanical figure of American morality or an actual assassin sent to kill her by the U.S. In rendering Marilyn Monroe a passive bystander in her own creation-dazed over the assault, her humiliation compounded by the sudden arrival of her period-Oates not only misrepresents her subject’s actual life, she reduces the artist to a pretty, glass-eyed plaything. Her Marilyn doesn’t emerge from the thunderous sea she drowns on arrival. But Oates clearly correlates the naming of Marilyn Monroe-a moment that the pop-cultural zeitgeist often regards as a platinum Venus rising from the deep-with sexual torture and debasement. ” One could argue that Oates is conveying the savage realities of Hollywood, with its iron maidens of casting couches. This agonizing scene is followed by her Hollywood christening, when a studio representative and her agent give her the name that will usher her into stardom: “the start of my NEW LIFE … I am twenty-one years old & I am MARILYN MONROE. Z pushes her down on a white fox fur rug and rapes her. ” Her observation that to be female is to be perpetually annihilated is borne out mere pages later, as Mr. Clad in a white sharkskin suit that simultaneously amplifies her curves while giving her the ethereal pathos of a sacrificial virgin, she surveys a flight cage filled “not living birds, as I had expected, but … dead stuffed birds.” While she takes in these beautiful dead creatures in their glass case, she hears “a voice like Mother’s All dead birds are female, there is something female about being dead. In the early pages of Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates’s best-selling fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe that was published in 2000, our iconic protagonist-still Norma Jeane, though already sporting the titular hair color-walks into the aviary of powerful film producer, Mr.
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