False Impression

 Blonde casts Marilyn Monroe in a single role: victim.

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ARTHUR MILLER enters the Actors Studio, drawing its crowd into a reverent silence. Marilyn Monroe sits on a shadowy stage in front of him, about to perform, flanked by other actors in a half-circle. She's in a black dress, legs crossed and a coat slung over her shoulders, her face fixed in a terrified expression. The scene cuts between Miller at the back of the audience, presumably at the studio to cast his next play, and Monroe in the center of that stage, there to train. Her gaze darts between the script pages shaking in her hands and the reactions glinting across Miller's face. Tears dangle from her lash line like diamonds in suspended animation. When she's called to speak, they fall. "Not my Magda," Miller says, referring to his first, unconsummated love, on whom a character in his play is based. Monroe's mouth pops open, but she's stopped from speaking by a freeze-frame. We don't get to see her performance or regard the skill that ends up moving Miller to tears.

"Actress must have no mouth," Monroe once wrote about the industry in a diaristic poem collected in the book Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters. In Blonde, Andrew Dominik's faithful film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's hothouse gothic novel, which casts Adrien Brody as the presumptuous yet softly rendered Miller and Ana de Armas as the immobilized Monroe, the actress must have no voice either. It's not that she doesn't speak, as much as what she says matters less than what she endures.

Over the 60 years since Monroe's death, her history has become a vehicle for investigations into mid-century Americana, female sexuality and female madness, and the cruelty of the Hollywood dream factory.