When I first read that there would be a scene in Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde” that was from the perspective of a woman’s intimate lower half, I immediately thought of the brutal self-mutilation scene with a giant pair of kitchen shears from Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” where my good friend and fellow art critic, Brian Alessandro, a champion of avant-garde filmmaking himself, said of his trip to the theater for the latter, “All I saw were arms flying up in the air out of shock, awe, and disgust. I think everyone watched that scene through their fingers.”
Such was my expectation of Dominik’s “Blonde.”

It sounded too extreme and art-house to really convince me it would be anything but a rehash of the Marilyn Monroe story, and as a big fan of “Norma Jean & Marilyn,” could not believe anything could come close to the duality of the Ashley Judd/Mira Sorvino feminist flick. 
(But again, it’s probably debated now whether even that movie counted as a feminist telling of Monroe’s story, because apparently feminism, like all other ideologies championing for the marginalized, can’t involve the vulnerability, only sheer bravado, and an annoying meta-awareness of historical placing anymore.)

The first 10 to 15 minutes of “Blonde” did not engage me.

I even texted Brian that I was bored after a transition scene with flying magazine covers and an eye-roll-worthy zoom-in shot of a ringing phone, but he told me to watch it and I’m forever grateful that I did, because the next 90 minutes were even better than the Joyce Carol Oates novel (yes, novel, it’s not a factual account of Monroe’s life, yet another unnecessary criticism of Dominik’s vision) that inspired the movie.

What is so prophetic and inspiring about Dominik’s take of Monroe—and likely where all the hate towards the film comes from, with it being called “trauma porn”—is the full abandonment of reverence, glamour, or even beauty for the film goddess that leaves the audience unsettled because it tears apart our own obsession and genuflection for celebrity.

Ana de Armas has the face and the body to be Marilyn, but we see how despite all that power borne from her physical beauty, it counts for naught in her personal relationships with men, because, to emphasize recurring theme of the film, she is just “meat.”

Some critics of the film (annoyingly, a lot of whom didn’t even watch the damn thing) said it showed Marilyn as one-dimensional, a perennial victim, and “not all the things she actually was.”

But, if these critics had watched the whole movie, they would see that Dominik’s Marilyn throughout the film is well-read, gracious, and kind. She manages to become what each man she pines for needs: for Joe DiMaggio, a simple girl wanting a family; for Arthur Miller, someone who could explain why Magda didn’t love him back; for the unnamed President, a glamorous sojourn.

If the treatment of Marilyn is traumatic, then we must also look at the brutally abusive portrayals of the men in the film as well. Dominik, and indeed Oates’s, world does not spare us the ego and brutality of men that fuels the trauma of Marilyn, and what I imagine, are women who see themselves in that cruelty as well.

The multiple fetuses who talk to Marilyn directly are a bit much and a little ham-handed, but adds to the innocence and longing that is central to the character.

We want so much to make heroes that overcome their enemies, and ultimately our own, that we fail to see the heroics in someone, whether fictionalized or not, who isn’t perfectly strong at all moments.

But this Marilyn is.

It’s just not perhaps the strength our world today wants to see from women.

But, after all, this story of Marilyn was ultimately told by a woman, and what is more feminist than a woman creating art on her own terms?