In the Flesh: Blonde

A white dress flutters in the updraft of a subway vent. A white dress hangs still in the silence. A naked woman, expressionless, backlit by guttering flames, shuts her door against her child. The dress comes down. A hint of labia glimpsed pressed against white cotton. Lovers melt and swirl together into the ephemeral thing that is the beloved, bodies ebbing across the lens in striated waves of skin and keratin, teeth and tongue. This is the world as Norma Jean Baker (Ana de Armas) sees it, a world of nightmarish horrors and hazy half-truths forever oscillating between mutually exclusive poles. There is no interiority within the film but Norma Jean’s, upsetting and disorienting to the point of occasional incoherence. There is no mission statement here, no transformation of Marilyn Monroe, that fleeting, enigmatic conjuration, into a lesson or some other artifact of meaning. “You think I’m so stupid I don’t know the joke is on me?” screams Norma during rehearsal of a song and dance number for Some Like It Hot, and with a shriek she digs her nails into her cheek and claws it open. Sharp, dark lines of blood well onto her pale skin.

Blonde oscillates between luxuriant color and deep, dark black and white. In one scene a man stands smoking while his wife tries to drag a panicking young Norma Jean out of their car and into an orphanage, the trees abutting the parking lot seething in the breeze above them all like an ocean of whispering black feathers. It is a movie concerned almost solely with image as its own end and conceit, with the nested performance that is existence as a wounded and struggling human being. We see Norma come into the world as a confusing extension of her mother Gladys’s (Julianne Nicholson) already fractured life, an alternatingly beloved and detested reminder of a male rejection Gladys visits in turn on the child. How do you make sense of an absence in the form of a presence? How do you reconcile a shadow without a body to cast it? Norma Jean, even as an adult, must navigate this terror at a further remove, deprived of any concrete origin for the hole at the center of her life. She suffers an unwanted abortion and a tragic miscarriage, her existence blooming and rotting, blooming and rotting. The dress flutters in the air, and the dress is still.

Is the film exploiting Norma Jean? Does it do her justice as a human being? It seems unconcerned with answering such questions. It is interested in suffering, in abjection, in the processes of conscious delusion by which we attempt to remake ourselves. It is interested in the conflation of the unborn and the mother, of the infant and the self, and of the father and the world. “Norma Jean,” Gladys whispers to her daughter, pointing at a picture on the wall. “That man is your father. I dare not utter his name.” The script often feels almost Biblical, an affected but wholly unpretentious tone translated with aplomb from Joyce Carol Oates’ original novel, and its images of fame, agony, and their points of confluence have a distinct feeling of perdition to them. The naked mother and the burning door. JFK (Casar Phillipson) half-listening to an aide’s litany of sexual complaints against him as the television blares and his hand holds Norma Jean captive against the thick pink serpent of his penis. You can’t throw up, she tells herself,, so close to the camera she seems almost insectile with her huge pale eyes and sunken cheeks. Not here, not in this bed. You can’t even gag, and you have to swallow. You have to.

If there’s no sense to be made of the life of Norma Jean, if there’s nothing behind the endless crumbling facades and flickering images of damaged goods, we know at least that she still had to swallow it. She had to choke down that same bewildering slurry of misery and glamor and joy and grinning, dissociative delirium. She had to empty herself out so that something could come into her life and make it right, and whatever came in she had no choice in her own mind but to accept. Dominick stays so close to his subject she becomes that haze of skin he conjures when he shows her in the arms of Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel) and Edward Robinson (Evan Williams), willing herself to dissolve so that she can become a part of something in which joy is possible. If he reduces her to an image, that image is alive with blood and lightning. If he exploits her memory, her memory is fire that billows like a dress over the whitewashed ceilings of a lonely, cramped apartment. Blonde is disgusting and tender, intimate and wretched, and like nothing else you’ll see this year.