The Blonde Marilyn has no agency in the world she is victimized at every turn. Along the way, I grew to understand my subject and to respect the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. ![]() To give a voice to the woman who had become nothing more than a famous face. In writing Marilyn through poetry, I set an intention to get as close as possible to the bone of Marilyn and to write from there. In fact, during a conversation following a reading I gave in New York, when asked whether I was concerned about appropriation when writing in the persona of Marilyn, I responded with something about fiction and the public domain of dead celebrities-but then I finally answered that for me, it’s a matter of intention. And I, too, have used Marilyn Monroe for my own literary ambitions. Then along came Hollywood (read: Netflix) with Andrew Dominik’s film adaptation of Blonde to further distort the memory and biography of Marilyn.īut does that matter? It’s entertainment after all, storytelling. Her fictionalized Marilyn in no way resembled the Marilyn I had come to know through my research and writing-Oates had realized a version of Norma Jeane Baker, and of Marilyn Monroe, and eventually of a third identity, “the Blonde,” into her own created character. This time, I saw Oates’s characterization as playing into and with stereotype. One that-in my second, more-informed reading-I liked less. Her Blonde is much more than “a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction.” Oates took the rough contours of Marilyn’s life and fictionalized an entirely other character and story. So, this time reading Blonde, I saw how far Oates strayed from the biography of Marilyn Monroe. ![]() Concerned with celebrity culture in America, I’d chosen this enduring icon as the star of my thesis and what would become the collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe and then Marilyn: Essays & Poems. I was in the midst of my MFA thesis, a collection of poems in conversation with Marilyn Monroe. At the time, I worked for a large talent agency, a business that emerged to counter the studios’ control over talent. I knew nothing about her, and after reading Blonde, what remained with me was Oates’s description of the power dynamic between the old Hollywood studio system and their stars. I was living in LA, just one street over from where Marilyn had lived and died. I first read Blonde soon after it was published. In her Author’s Note, Oates writes, “ Blonde is a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” The same could be said of Oates’s Blonde. But any resemblance to the actual life of Marilyn Monroe is nonexistent in this adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s epic novel Blonde (2000). In particular, Ana de Armas is arresting in the lead role as she easily slips between the dueling personas of Marilyn and Norma Jeane Baker, just as Marilyn did in real life. To be fair, the reviews (rightfully) applaud the casting and performances. What went so very wrong in this depiction of Marilyn Monroe? ![]() It’s quickly become the top streaming film on Netflix, despite mixed reviews and headline-grabbing controversy that mostly centers on Dominik’s directing. “With the development of AI technology, I’ve been excited for a while, thinking that ‘anything imaginable can be shown in reality,’” he said.It’s hard to avoid Blonde-the Andrew Dominik directed film that debuted last week on Netflix and in a limited theater release. The time I spend with a single image varies, but I would say it takes ‘a while’”.Īs for his favourite celebrity to imagine, Yesiltas said it was probably Michael Jackson, because he started with the singer. Naturally the moment I like the most is when I think the image in front of me feels ‘real’. I’m starting to work on a state that I wish he/she would always stay that way. “Intentionally or unintentionally, I know a lot about the person I’m working with. The most important part is making the image I’m processing feel realistic to me,” he explained. “Some for obtaining realistic textures and light, others for photo editing (people around me were considering me as a good photo-editor for some time).
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