The problem with Netflix’s Blonde and Marilyn Monroe’s victim aesthetic
Netflix’s Blonde turns Marilyn Monroe’s life into a fever dream of sexual exploitation, abandonment, reproductive trauma, and public humiliation. Directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas, the 2022 film is adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, not presented as a conventional biography. That distinction matters, but it does not exempt the film from examining what its fictionalization does with Monroe’s image.
The movie announces its seriousness through stylized lighting, fractured chronology, and constant visual anguish. Yet its central idea is surprisingly familiar: Marilyn is valuable as a beautiful woman who suffers. Her pain becomes the organizing principle of the story, while her wit, professional skill, political awareness, and capacity for self-definition remain secondary.
This is the problem with Blonde: it appears to criticize the machinery that consumed Monroe while reproducing the same appetite for her vulnerability. The film’s feminist language is often undermined by its fixation on the spectacle of a woman being used.
A life reduced to an injury
Blonde separates Norma Jeane Mortenson from the public persona of Marilyn Monroe, presenting the former as an authentic self and the latter as a manufactured mask. This split could have opened space to explore performance, survival, and the pressures of celebrity. Instead, Norma Jeane is repeatedly positioned as a wounded child trapped inside an adult body.
The film returns to an abusive or absent father, a psychologically unstable mother, exploitative men, studio control, pregnancy loss, and institutional violence. These experiences are visually and emotionally amplified until they eclipse almost everything else. Monroe becomes legible primarily through what has been done to her, rather than through what she chose, made, resisted, or understood.
Trauma is part of Monroe’s history, but a trauma-centered portrait is not automatically a truthful or feminist one. When suffering becomes the main route to a woman’s significance, the story can turn victimhood into an aesthetic.
The camera joins the crowd
The film’s visual style is frequently beautiful, but beauty is part of its discomfort. The camera lingers on Monroe’s body, tears, nakedness, panic, and sexual coercion. These scenes are framed as condemnation, yet condemnation does not erase the voyeurism of the image itself.
A scene can depict exploitation while also asking an audience to consume it. Blonde repeatedly places viewers in the position of watching Monroe endure, with the film’s formal control making her pain polished, symmetrical, and marketable. The audience is invited to feel morally opposed to the industry while remaining visually close to the body that industry objectifies.
This tension reflects a broader pattern in popular culture: the “victim aesthetic,” in which women’s suffering is made cinematic through soft lighting, lush production design, and intimate access to their most private moments. The result can feel compassionate while still treating pain as a resource.
Fiction does not remove responsibility
Because Blonde is a fictionalized adaptation, it has permission to depart from the historical record. Fiction can reveal emotional truths, invent interiority, and challenge the authority of traditional celebrity biography. The issue is not that the film imagines. The issue is what it chooses to imagine, and why.
The movie invents or heavily reshapes episodes involving Monroe’s parents, pregnancies, relationships, abortion, and encounters with powerful men. Its speculative choices consistently push her toward helplessness. Imagination expands the possibilities of storytelling, but here it often narrows Monroe’s agency.
| Element | What the film emphasizes | What gets pushed aside |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | The split between Norma Jeane and Marilyn | Her strategic use of performance and public image |
| Sexuality | Coercion, exposure, and male access | Desire, negotiation, and personal complexity |
| Motherhood | Pregnancy, abortion, and reproductive loss | Her broader views on family, work, and autonomy |
| Fame | Studio abuse and public consumption | Her business decisions, ambitions, and professional intelligence |
| Legacy | A tragic icon destroyed by others | A working artist who shaped her own cultural power |
Treating Monroe’s image as an entirely imposed construction also risks denying the complicated ways she participated in creating it. Participation does not mean freedom. A performer can make strategic choices within oppressive systems, and acknowledging those choices does not blame her for exploitation.
Reproductive trauma becomes spectacle
The film’s treatment of abortion and pregnancy loss is among its most troubling choices. Reproductive experiences are presented through surreal imagery and direct emotional address, including a fetus-like voice that speaks to Monroe. The device turns private grief into a horror sequence and gives the fetus a strange narrative presence that competes with Monroe’s own.
Reproductive trauma deserves serious representation, especially in a culture that has often dismissed women’s pain. But the film does not consistently deepen Monroe’s subjectivity. Instead, it builds an emotional spectacle around her body and suggests that motherhood, or the loss of possible motherhood, is central to her moral identity.
That framing reinforces an old cultural expectation: women are most understandable through reproduction. Monroe’s career, relationships, and self-conception are repeatedly pulled back toward the question of whether she can become a mother. Her body is treated as a battleground, but her voice is rarely allowed to define what that battle means.
The performance cannot carry the politics
Ana de Armas gives a committed, technically demanding performance. Her physical transformation, vocal work, and emotional intensity demonstrate the craft required to inhabit an icon whose face has been reproduced endlessly. The performance is often the film’s most compelling feature.
Yet casting and performance also create a complicated politics. De Armas, a Cuban actor, plays a woman whose American accent and cultural identity are central to the mythology being recreated. The film’s attention to resemblance can make authenticity seem like a matter of surface accuracy, even though Monroe’s “realness” was always shaped by racialized, classed, and gendered expectations about American femininity.
The focus on recreating famous photographs and performances further privileges recognizability. We see the icon being reconstructed, but less of the labor behind her career: her preparation, comedic timing, negotiations, production company, reading, and decisions about the kinds of roles she wanted. The film admires the image while claiming to expose its violence.
What a feminist portrait could make visible
A more expansive account of Monroe would still address abuse, misogyny, mental illness, sexual exploitation, and institutional power. It would also show how she worked within and against those forces. Agency does not require a triumphant story. It can look like contradiction, compromise, refusal, ambition, humor, or a decision that does not produce liberation.
A feminist media analysis should resist both extremes: the fantasy that Monroe controlled everything and the fantasy that she controlled nothing. The second version may feel sympathetic, but it leaves the structures of power strangely intact. If she is only a passive victim, then the audience can mourn her without having to examine the systems that continue to reward the sexualization and destruction of women.
Critical viewers can keep the following questions in view:
- Who is allowed interiority, and whose pain is shown mainly through bodies and images?
- Does a film expose exploitation, or does it make exploitation pleasurable to watch?
- Which forms of agency are missing when a woman is defined by trauma?
- How do race, class, sexuality, disability, and celebrity shape the story’s idea of vulnerability?
- What would change if the subject were treated as an artist rather than an icon?
Blonde wants to rescue Marilyn Monroe from the gaze, but it cannot stop looking at her through it. Its tragedy is carefully composed, repeatedly consumed, and finally offered as proof of sensitivity. That makes the film worth discussing—not as a definitive account of Monroe, but as a revealing example of how popular culture can turn feminist concern into another form of possession.
Read Monroe’s work alongside the myths built around her, and examine the films, biographies, interviews, and criticism that return complexity to the woman behind the image. Subscribe to feminist media commentary that keeps asking who gets represented, who gets remembered, and who benefits from the way a story is told.