Netflix’s Blonde is rated NC-17 for sex, violence, and viewer punishment

Prior to its release this week, the controversy surrounding Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe film BlondeIts NC-17 rating was the main focus of their debate. Reports claim that Netflix and Andrew Dominik fought for the movie’s final cut in an attempt to get rid of the NC-17 rating. There were rumors about extreme sexual content which might have been included.

However, the real mystery was how streamers could care. The NC-17 rating severely restricts theatrical distribution and marketing. It is a financial disaster for any traditional studio. Netflix is a popular streaming service that gives prestige movies like BlondeTo qualify for Awards, they will have a short theatrical run. Nor has Netflix shied away from hosting extreme, unrated content (like Gaspar Noé’s sex-forward drama In love(on its platform before.

Viewing the finished film, it’s unclear if Netflix won any concessions at all from the uncompromising Dominik, who told Screen Daily it had recruited editor Jennifer Lame in 2021 “to curb the excesses of the movie.” BlondeThe film, featuring an exceptional performance by Ana de Armas playing Monroe, is not excessive. It lasts almost three hours, features many shocking and degrading scenes and has an inexplicable bleak tone.

Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe smiles, reflected in two mirrors in black and white

Image by Netflix

MPA assigns Blonde’s NC-17 rating to “some sexual content.” There are a couple of scenes in particular that this might refer to. [Ed. note: Descriptions of these moments involve sexual assault and violence.]First, the first scene is early in the movie. It shows Monroe being raped in her office by an executive at the studio. It’s very unpleasant, but not particularly graphic. In a subsequent flashback, this scene is again seen. It is clearly visible and pushes. Blonde into NC-17 territory.

A second, well-respected scene shows Monroe intoxicated and drunk visiting President John F. Kennedy from a suite at his hotel. While he is having a conversation with his wife, he watches TV and sees images of rockets and artillery. Dominik watches this, at a very close, long-term, and continues it for an incomprehensible length of time.

You can find other times in Blonde that aren’t explicitly sexual, but still carry a hefty shock value, and might have figured into the MPA’s rating decision. There’s some violence, and some no-holds-barred depiction of miscarriage and abortion. Dominik takes what could only be called a vaginal view shot. It is both graphic and surreal.

But my gut instinct, on finishing Blonde, is that no particular shot or scene is responsible either for the NC-17 rating, or for Netflix’s evident unease about it. If there was an obvious edit to make, that long struggle over the film’s final cut could surely have been resolved more quickly — one way or the other.

An overhead shot, in color, of Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe emerging on the red carpet for a film premiere surrounded by photographers and onlookers

Image by Netflix

Dominik has been much appreciated by critics and his peers. He is an accomplished director, even though he creates his screenplays. However, his striking visual styling skills give his material a mythic dimension. Shopper, elegiac Western Robert Ford, a coward, assassinated Jesse JamesThe hitman thriller They are to be killed softly. Blonde is adapted from a novel — specifically, not a biography — about a half-imagined Monroe by Joyce Carol Oates. Although the sprawling book is controversial, it has an impressive literary legacy. Adapting it has been a passion project of Dominik’s for at least a decade.

The thought of Dominik returning to fiction features after a decade of frustration, and bringing his mythic sensibilities to Monroe’s story and iconography, was exciting. Here, too, was a single-minded director who might not shy away from the thornier parts of Oates’ vision. Evidently, he doesn’t. But it turns out that he is sorely lacking in other qualities — compassion, restraint, a fundamental interest in his lead character as a human being — that might have made BlondeIt is a grueling endurance test.

Like a film BlondeCan be provocative or explicit. Monroe’s carefree, ditzy, sexy image belied a troubled and complicated performer who led a tragically short life, and who was certainly exploited and abused by the Hollywood machine. It’s as important to highlight that now as ever. BlondeIt demonstrates this through focusing on Marilyn, Marilyn’s avatar of external desires that eventually consumes her, and Norma Jeane as the young, sensitive woman.

Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, wearing a flower dress on the beach and sobbing

Image by Netflix

The trouble is that Dominik’s mythologizing tendency, and his insatiable hunger for arresting imagery, undercut his own theme to disastrous effect. He doesn’t have enough interest in Norma Jeane to build a personality for her, or a sense of her achievements, outside of the ceaseless miseries heaped upon her by others. He has a superficial fascination with Marilyn’s iconography and uses every tool at his fingertips to recreate film scenes or photoshoots. You will see constant adjustments in the film stock, aspect ratio and lens, as well as extensive use of CGI to add a magical dimension or blend de Armas into your reenactment. Dominik’s dazzling technique not only fails to distract from the film’s wearying lack of tonal variation, but is in complete thrall to the dehumanizing image factory that the film is supposed to be critiquing.

De Armas delivers a phenomenal performance. Her Cuban accent can be easily detected when De Armas’ diction, tone, physical appearance channel Marilyn in such a uncanny fashion. But it’s an achingly personal performance, too; beneath the impersonation, she is raw, vulnerable and volatile. Dominik reacts to her honesty by giving her a thorough workout. It feels as though she is crying for the entire, bloated length of the movie — and all too frequently naked. It leaves him with a bad taste in his mouth. (Dominik hasn’t helped himself in a typically combative press tour; in one interview with Sight and Sound, he revealed a disdain for most of Monroe’s films, and called her classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “romanticized whoredom.”)

Even in film classification, which is notoriously rigid and inflexible, context matters. It’s in this context that Blonde’s most scandalously shocking images, and its NC-17 rating, need to be understood. BlondeIt isn’t trying to make a quick buck by including some boundary-pushing scenes. Nor is it challenging viewers to accept the ugly. This is the film’s entire theme. The film is the result of an artist who has become obsessed with his image making power and lined up beautiful, disturbing, or tasteless shots just to make it look good. You can’t cut its gross excesses because it has a limitless supply.

In his Screen Daily interview, Dominik praised Netflix for supporting the film in spite of its distaste for it: “It’s much easier to support stuff when you like it. It’s much harder when you don’t,” he said. Perhaps Netflix’s anxiety over the NC-17 rating was really anxiety over a film that, on a human level, it just didn’t like — and that no amount of reediting could redeem.

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