So I Just Saw Blonde


Yeah... I don't want to linger on this subject for too long, since I just got finished talking about it with my friends on our radio show, but holy wow that movie was not fun to watch. 

It's one thing to see a film about a real person who really lived a really sad life, but this film isn't real at all. It's based on a book that depicted a fictionalized and dramatized version of Norma Jeane Baker's life and made no attempts to rectify these changes. It wouldn't even have been that bad if it was advertised as a historical fiction narrative, but it was not. Every article written about this film calls it a biopic, which implies that it's striving for accuracy which is blatantly not true.

The film is constantly berating you with atrocity after atrocity, it never gives you a second to breathe. Every moment of happiness or effort that Norma Jeane scrounges out of her soul is instantly either shut down by the people around her or edited in a way that makes the moment forgotten by the audience instantly in favor of more societal torture. 

It should also be noted that this film is very exploitative. While it is incredibly important to tell the stories of people who have gone through these things, we should be going about it in a way that is respectful and not in a way that embellishes those aspects for the sake of shock value or financial gain. This film does exactly that. It is refreshing to see how blatantly and outwardly some of these horrible things can be done because many like to downplay how common these occurrences are, but the way that the film is written and edited just makes it seem as though it was written that way for shock value which detracts from the film and makes it unenjoyable to watch.

Overall, the film diminishes Baker's personality, legacy, and agency in the narrative that is her life. It exploits the treatment of women in film and does not justify its ability to disgust and unnerve the audience in doing so. It's a well-made film but a bad experience and is not something that I would recommend people see.

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