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Marilyn from within | page 1, 2
Still, like "Citizen Kane," "Blonde" is a staggeringly effective piece of craftsmanship. The biographical aspect is fascinating and inescapable, but, as Oates warns us in an introductory note, "biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe are not to be sought in 'Blonde.'" People and events are manipulated, elided, exaggerated or radically foreshortened until they become the big screen images we vaguely remember from film clips or newspaper stories about Monroe's life. It's as though we're watching a series of movies, all with the same female lead: the Blond Actress and the Ex-Athlete; the Blond Actress and the Playwright. As Monroe painfully learned, once the studio had a winning formula, it wouldn't let it go; in "Blonde," Oates plays the studio's game to chilling, claustrophobic effect. Blonde By Joyce Carol Oates For example, she makes the Playwright -- the Arthur Miller character -- 48 years old when he begins his relationship with Monroe, instead of 38 or 39, as Miller really was (he was only nine years older than Monroe, and younger than Joe DiMaggio). I think she does so because the story plays more "Hollywood" that way: Contemporary magazine shots of Monroe gripping the arm of a New York intellectual with a receding hairline seem to tell the story of a young wife and a much older husband, so that's the story we get. The story the camera tells is always the primary story. "Blonde" shoots first and asks questions later, working from the outside in, faithful to the truth of appearances, both from Monroe's life and especially from her last movies. She did become a better and truer actress during the last years of her life. When asked what character she played in the wretched "Prince and the Showgirl," she answered, "A person." And it's true. Silly and simple as Elsie the Showgirl is, she's a mensch -- the only one of Monroe's characters whom I can imagine walking off the screen into real life, taking her rueful, down-to-earth, grown-up sexuality with her. I'm being sentimental here, dreaming in the way that the movie image charms us into dreaming, imagining her walking into the shadows like Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard at the end of "Modern Times." But Oates has built "Blonde" of tougher stuff, a substratum of imagery culled from the technology of the movies, the paradoxes of acting and the uniqueness of Monroe's screen image. Laced with poetry about light and vision, "Blonde" doesn't end with a soft, comforting fade to black, but in the brilliant, disquieting light that comes up when a movie ends. Oddly assorted snippets of poetry and philosophy expand upon fear, visibility, loneliness. Taken from Stanislavsky, Emily Dickinson and Pascal, among others, perhaps the citations are nods to Monroe's constant, passionate, haphazard reading. In any case, I found them strange and beautiful, merging pop and poetics, metaphysics and melodrama, in an attempt to account for her personality's absences, her image's uncanny presence. Was the power of her screen presence due to her audience's unconscious apprehension of her fear and loneliness? Maybe so; it is certainly so in "Blonde." But was her funny, intelligent and generous on-screen sexiness also the product of her personality's dissolution? Stupid as her lines were, her persona was smart enough to know her flesh's frailty, and self-conscious enough to find it amusing. Monroe may have been cast as selfish, thoughtless, a gold digger, but her audience felt her eagerness to share the physical pleasure she seemed to take in being herself. In his book "Marilyn," Norman Mailer muses that while sex might be dangerous with some people, with her one feels it will be "ice cream." One of my girlfriends' mothers, approaching 70, confides that she's still sexually active -- "and it makes me feel like Marilyn Monroe." My husband and I rented half a dozen videos of Monroe's films the week before I wrote this review -- and felt pretty good ourselves. "Blonde," of course, is anything but a feel-good book. It's eccentric, exhausting -- and remarkable. Part horror, part melodrama, part wildly adventurous meditation, it sees in the dark -- the way we all do at the movies -- holding the remembered and cherished image in our eyes while we wait for the shutter to open and the frame to advance.
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