‘Torture porn’ Marilyn Monroe film Blonde blasted by viewers ‘Sorry I watched it’ | Films | Entertainment
Netflix’s first-ever adults-only original film seeks to portray Marilyn’s inner emotional turmoil, from multiple miscarriages and abandonment by her father to the brutal way she was reduced to a sexual object, both by the men she loved and by the public at large. It graphically explores her spiritual and sexual torment at the hands of lovers and husbands including Bobby Cannavale’s Joe DiMaggio and Adrien Brody’s Arthur Miller. Attention has already centred on a humiliating scene when President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) forces Marilyn to perform oral sex on him while he is on a phone call. Viewers have reacted with disgust and disapproval.
The film is not a standard biopic, but rather a fantasy based on the 2000 biographical fiction novel by Joyce Carol Oates that reimagines the troubled star’s inner life, including a controversial scene where she talks to the foetus of a baby that will be aborted.
However, many viewers= simply see it as degrading and exploiting a woman who suffered too much of that while she was alive with one summing up the widespread view: “With the atrocity that is Blonde being released, let’s remember Marilyn Monroe’s wish during her last ever interview… ‘please don’t make me look like a joke.'”
Another said: “Tried to watch Blonde. Couldn’t stomach more than about 20 minutes of the nearly 3 hours length. That 20 minutes was nothing but cruel and heartbreaking.”
Among the distress over the graphic scenes of Monroe’s suffering, other viewers have been upset that the filmmakers shot scenes of her death in the real-life location where it happened – her Brentwood California home on August 5, 1962.
