EPIC BOOKS AND VIDEOS MOVIE
EPIC BOOKS AND VIDEOS TV

Sometimes the novel follows shadowy, nefarious spies and stalkers who could equally be federal agents or paparazzi. Sometimes Oates uses a Greek-chorus-like “we”, in the same wistful, retrospective way as Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Italicised sentences permeate the text like whispers: Norma Jeane’s own reflections, the impressions of others she encounters, or even a collective unconscious. The book glides effortlessly from interiority to voyeurism. Left to watch movies for hours, Norma Jeane intuitively absorbs Hollywood’s fairytale storytelling, using it to bandage what Oates treats as a primal, ultimately fatal psychic wound: her unloving mother and unknown father.

EPIC BOOKS AND VIDEOS MOVIE

Young Norma Jeane seizes on these archetypes in her tumultuous early life with her schizophrenic mother, who worked within the movie studio system. Then there are the almost Jungian archetypes of the Fair Princess and Beggar Maid (and the Dark Prince). She is always viewed from outside, sometimes menacingly. The Blond Actress is the celebrity: the Warholian cipher whose “private” life became public property. “Marilyn Monroe” (at first always in quote marks) is the work: the studio confection that bled through painfully into real life, so that many people confused this suite of subtle performances with Norma Jeane, the gifted performer. She is Norma Jeane, an earnest, conscientious girl who’s smart, introspective, perceptive, eager to excel and hungry for love. Oates deliberately characterises separate aspects of her protagonist, to show overlapping views of her. Its protagonist insists heroically on her right to be seen and valued as herself yet her betrayal, her tragedy, is to be extinguished by the ideas others project onto her. Blonde summons, as only fiction can, the violence of being mythologised. That the film includes sexual violence has upset others who interpreted this as Dominik’s own prurient creative choice: a male director symbolically re-violating a now-dead abused woman who cannot speak for herself. Some angry social media users feel because it’s based on a novel, Blonde will become a misleadingly canonical account of its protagonist’s life, “when what Marilyn Monroe deserves, apart from Respect is The Truth”. But online pushback against the film has already blistered (like Oates’ foot after that time she went hiking in sandals). Instead they point to it and play with it, raising questions about the very evidence on which our knowledge of the past depends, creatively interacting with its traces.īlonde is just such a postmodern bio-novel, and Dominik’s film shows every promise of being such a postmodern biopic. In his 1995 book Visions of the Past, historian Robert Rosenstone describes a “historically reinventive” kind of biopic “that, refusing the pretense that the screen can be an unmediated window onto the past, foregrounds itself as a construction”.Īttempt to recreate the past realistically. Netflix’s Blonde, to be released on 23 September, is Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name. It’s also a sweeping portrait of 20th-century America – its sport, politics, religion, literature, culture, mental health, urban renewal and decay. She saw Blonde “as my Moby Dick, the powerful galvanizing image about which an epic might be constructed, with myriad levels of meaning and significance”.

Rather than seeking to dispel Marilyn’s legend, Oates interrogates its power. Eschewing a realist biographical narrative, Blonde contains multiple voices and perspectives it’s also allusive and formally adventurous.

Oates has always insisted Blonde is a work of imagination.

EPIC BOOKS AND VIDEOS TV

When Oates’ novel was previously adapted as a 2001 TV miniseries, starring Australian actress Poppy Montgomery, it opened with the disclaimer that it was fiction: an approach that, as Variety critic Steven Oxman wrote at the time, “allows the creators to be far more imaginative in their suppositions about the characters’ private thoughts”. It’s an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ bestselling novel of the same name: an epic doorstop of a book that was shortlisted for the 2000 National Book Award and 2001 Pulitzer Prize. And on September 28, Netflix will release Blonde, a film by Australian director Andrew Dominik, starring Cuban actress Ana de Armas as Monroe. Marilyn Monroe died 60 years ago, on August 4 1962.

Epic books and videos