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Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s fictionalization of the life of Marilyn Monroe, is the latest in the expanding catalog of recent entertainment revisiting the tribulations of wronged, usually white women public figures with an empathy they weren’t afforded en masse at the peak of their notoriety. (Predecessors include 2017’s I, Tonya, 2019’s Lorena, and 2021’s Spencer.) The trend ostensibly comes from a good place, guided by a motivation to shore up fresh compassion previously deficient in the court of public opinion. But its guiding impulse usually is accompanied by a thorniness. Interest in its woman focal point’s humanity lies almost entirely in the context of trauma; there also seems to be an implicit, foolishly wishful assurance beneath the drama that in our supposedly progressive present we wouldn’t let something like that happen again. And for living subjects like Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears, renewed, presumably well-intentioned excavation can nonetheless feel not much different than the earlier violation now being repackaged and sold. Here, harming and helping can be inextricable from each other.

Adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ tome-sized novel from 2000, Blonde is by far the low point of this subgenre. Faulty as many of them are, you might watch the bulk of its defining works not sensing mean-spiritedness. Blonde, though, feels exclusively like an exercise in cruelty. For nearly three hours, it avidly ladles salt on gaping wounds; it adamantly refuses to imagine Monroe as anything besides a victim. That isn’t to say Monroe wasn’t. Her childhood, much of which was spent as a passed-around ward of the state, was marked by abuse from a mentally ill mother. And as an adult, she was subjected at various points to domestic abuse and sexual violence, and faced the ceaseless cruelty of a public who condescended to her and lustily commodified her on account of the blonde bombshell persona adopted in some of her movies. 

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