ldavis-2

It probably goes without saying but had Marilyn Monroe lived the long life as contemporaries Elizabeth Taylor, Joanne Woodward, Shirley MacLaine, and Sophia Loren, she wouldn't have become a multi-gazillion dollar industry. As some wag noted upon learning that the 42-year-old Elvis had swiveled his pelvis for the last time: "Good career move". Indeed, while she was fêted as a legend in her own lifetime, her probable suicide at age 36 made her immortal. And while fanboys and fangirls speculate on what might have been, can you seriously imagine a 50-or-60-or-70-something Marilyn peddling perfume or hawking her actor hubby's salad dressings or rebranding herself a New Age Guru or playing herself AND her mother in a TV mini-series? Me neither. But at least she wouldn't have been the subject of the countless garbage offerings humanity has been bludgeoned with since her death 60 years ago.

As I mulled over this latest garbage offering - garbage "auteur" Andrew Dominik's garbage take on garbage "wordsmith" Joyce Carol Oates's garbage novel "Blonde" - I came across his 2016 garbage draft of this garbage offering; it can be found under External Sites. As I noted in my take of garbage network CBS's 2001 garbage take of "Blonde": "There's nothing positive in this image of Monroe. It's disheartening that über-feminist Oates re-imagines her as The Dumbest Wh*re in Christendom". Oates published "Blonde" after Joe DiMaggio died, but while Arthur Miller and Marilyn's first husband James Dougherty were still alive. In Dominik's artsy-fartsy impersonation of von Trier impersonating Lynch, Dougherty is ignored (for which his family must be eternally grateful, I'm sure) as The Dumbest Wh*re in Christendom is violated over and over, figuratively and literally, by virtually every man she is unfortunate enough to cross paths with. Even when she is given agency by hooking up with "Cass" and "Eddy", the ne'er-do-well brats of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, respectively, she is put through the ringer. Why Dominik didn't just go all-out, and have Marilyn flogged and crucified in a vulgar send-up of "The Passion of the Christ" is beyond me.

Two things in this garbage offering have the "Me Too" and "Pro-Choice" mobs breaking out the pitchforks: Marilyn saying "Daddy" like a broken record; and having a conversation with her unborn child. This will cheese the Man Haters off to no end, but the "Daddy" is one of the few things this garbage offering actually got right: Miller recalled in his autobiography a then-overwhelmed Marilyn calling him "Papa" as she phoned him while making "Bus Stop"; a letter she wrote to DiMaggio in 1954 and sold by Hunt's Auctions in 2006 begins "My Dad", and in a note to him also sold by Hunt's, she refers to herself as "your baby". Speaking of, the "baby convo" is a hoot: "2001: A Space Odyssey" on crack. By the way, no woman gardens in a summer dress. And even the most amateur of Green Thumb Warriors know to wear gloves before doing battle with those pesky weeds. Upshot is, the real Marilyn was a Green Thumb Warrior who wouldn't have been caught dead doing battle with pesky weeds while wearing a summer dress and no gloves. And this Marilyn has an abortion (complete with "fetus-cam"!), so I honestly don't understand what the NARAL Nuts are whining about. But I digress.

This Marilyn isn't the only one put through the ringer. So is virtually everyone in her real-life orbit, beginning with Mother. In stark contrast to Patricia Richardson's Gladys in the 2001 "Blonde", Julianne Nicholson's Gladys is a wackadoodle with homicidal tendencies. Adrien Brody has been slouching his way toward Miller (pardon, "The Playwright") since "King Kong", and I had pegged Bobby Cannavale as DiMaggio (pardon, "The Ex-Athlete") since "The Station Agent". Here, Cannavale is King Kong and Brody is a standard-issue passive-aggressive snob. The toilet bowls Marilyn pukes her guts out into have more regard for her than "DiMaggio" and "Miller" do.

Which leads me to the most-infamous scene in this garbage offering. John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was almost 6 months old, so I've never had the reverence for him those who lived through "Camelot" have. And he always struck me as cartoonish: sunk-in beady eyes, plastic hair, square teeth, nasally voice which refused to enunciate words correctly (before you go there, I'm from Massachusetts). The torrid tales of "Camelot" which have dropped since JFK dropped confirm he was the worst sort of garbage human. And I'm surprised that no one else caught onto this, but this JFK is the stand-in for Dominik. How else to explain the perverted delight he takes in Marilyn being manhandled throughout his opus, yet never more so than when two Secret Service goons dump her strung-out self in the Presidential Suite to be manhandled by The Prez like an animated sex doll.

Ana de Armas's Marilyn talks like Zoolander with a Cuban accent while alternately mumbling like Brando and screaming like a banshee. Yet, as microbes on Mars know by now, in a "performance" which degrades both her subject and herself, she has scored a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, AND an Oscar nomination! "¡Felicidades!" to her management.

The End is near, my friends.