Netflix’s newly released Blonde, which tells the story of Marilyn Monroe‘s traumatic childhood and tumultuous, exploitative Hollywood career, is stirring up heated backlash. In a scathing TikTok, Emily Ratajkowski had a few bones to pick with the film for its capitalization of female trauma and the movie industry’s continued fetishization of women suffering at the hand of the patriarchy.
Ratajkowski shared that while she hasn’t seen Blonde yet, she already has thoughts on the biopic based on the public commentary she’s been exposed to. “I’m not surprised to hear that it’s yet another movie fetishizing female pain even in death. We love to fetishize female pain.”
The model went on to explain, “Look at Amy Winehouse, look at Britney Spears, look at the way we obsess over [Princess] Diana‘s death, the way we obsess over dead girls and serial killers” — a timely example with Netflix’s Dahmer being the streaming service’s biggest debut since season 4 of Stranger Things.
So done with the fetishization of female pain and suffering. Bitch Era 2022
Ratajkowski went on to share, “I can say for myself for sure that I’ve learned how to fetishize my own pain and my own hurt in my life so that it feels like something that can be tended to, that’s kind of sexy, and like, you know, ‘I’m like this, oh, f—ed up girl, whatever,’ and I think we do that in many, many different ways… But I want that to change.”
EmRata then made a call for women to band together to protest the gross and violent fetishization of women like Marilyn Monroe, and women in general, saying, “You know what’s kind of hard to fetishize? Anger. Anger is hard to fetishize. So, I have a proposal. I think we all need to be a little more pissed off. I’m gonna be in my witch era; 2022, baby, is my b—h era. I think we should all be in our b—h era.”
She wrapped up her thoughts, saying, “I’m gonna be pissed off when I see the movie, I already know it, but it’s nothing new, and… Yeah. I’m just gonna get angry.” She captioned the TikTok, “So done with the fetishization of female pain and suffering. B—h Era 2022.”
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Ana de Armas, who stars in the biopic as Marilyn Monroe, alongside Adrian Brody, who plays Monroe’s third husband, Arthur Miller, have defended the uncomfortable portrayal of Monroe in Blonde, sharing their reasoning behind the unsavory depiction of the Hollywood icon’s short life in the new movie.
Brody spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the film, saying, “I think that since it’s told [from Monroe’s] first-person perspective, it works somehow for the film to be a traumatic experience, because you’re inside of her — her journey and her longings and her isolation — amidst all of this adulation.” He continued, “It’s brave, and it takes a while to digest. And I think it’s in conflict with what the public’s perception of her life is,” overall coining the project “fearless filmmaking.”
de Armas also shared her thoughts with Variety, explaining, “We’re telling her story, from her point of view. I’m making people feel what she felt. When we had to shoot these kinds of scenes… It was difficult for everybody. But at the same time, I knew I had to go there to find the truth.“
While Ratajkowski isn’t wrong about Hollywood continuing to capitalize on female pain and trauma through the making of Blonde, de Armas and Brody also have a valid point about Monroe’s life being fetishized into something it never was in the first place.
Blonde is a chaotic, surreal portrayal of how Norma Jean Baker’s alter ego, Marilyn Monroe, was created by her as a coping mechanism and means of escape from the trauma she experienced as a child — trauma that heartbreakingly bled into her life as an adult and led to her tragic, untimely death.
Yes, Blonde is a painful 3-hour retelling of every horrible thing that ever happen to Monroe, largely at the hands of other people, therefore making Ratajkowski’s thoughts about fetishizing female pain valid.
However, that was also Monroe’s reality, and those who were involved with Blonde told her story in such a nauseating fashion in order to bring justice to Hollywood’s favorite starlet of the 1950s — a beloved starlet who was horrifically taken advantage of and commodified by the industry that supposedly loved her so much in life and well after her death.
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