Dead girls made great films: that’s the line. Blonde, an art (and snuff) movie about Marilyn Monroe, was up for an Academy Award for Best Actress (Ana de Armas) yesterday: fittingly, she lost to Michelle Yeoh. In 2019 Renée Zellweger won an Academy Award for playing Judy Garland in Judy. (Neither Monroe nor Garland were so honoured in life. They were beaten, in so many ways, by their myths). A new film about Amy Winehouse — named Back to Black, of course — starring Marisa Abela, is being shot in Camden Town, on the streets where she walked barefoot before she died at 27 of her addiction, the condition that killed them all. It’s the same awful story: if it bleeds, it leads.
I can’t speak to the quality of Back to Black, but I am not hopeful. Even the tabloids that stalked Winehouse packed up when she was, briefly, clean, and I doubt cinema will have a different emphasis. It will be two parts gift to three parts heroin at best. In Blonde and Judy the talent — Monroe and Garland were, respectively, the best comedienne and singer in films — is secondary to the condition: it is the condition that fascinates us. Not in any helpful way, you understand: our drugs policies are mad, and these films will keep them that way. They are, rather, cautionary tales for girls: an invitation to distrust themselves. A gift like this, you see, will kill you: watch and learn how.
Blonde is repulsive: there is no other word. Monroe was two things: a film actress of genius, and a sick woman. The first is the interesting part: the second should be a sorry postscript. She made it to 36 despite everything — she had nine years on Winehouse, as Garland had 11 years on her — and I call that a victory. Watch her in Some Like It Hot: she was luminous. Blonde, based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, who plainly despises Monroe — envy drips through the prose — breaks her more forensically, and cruelly, than she ever broke herself. She is not an artist, not here: she is only a victim. Her soon-to-be aborted fetus speaks to her, though we don’t even know if Monroe had an abortion, a caveat so tasteless I am reluctant to type it.
It is clear that the authorial eye revels in Monroe’s agony, but it can only do so much to traduce her: the real films remain. De Armas, usually a charming actor, is required to impersonate Monroe in scenes from Some Like It Hot. She can’t do it: she’s too small and ungifted. She looks dead.
Judy is no better: again, the gift is no more than landscape for the greater tale of a woman’s fall, as we watch Garland lose the things she has not yet lost. Horrifyingly, the producers decided not to even use Garland’s voice — Zellweger sings for her — so Judy presents as a film about a moderately talented middle-aged woman with a drink problem and an unwise dress sense. I doubt Black to Black will be better.
The thread linking these films is misogyny, no more. Women are so lucky, until they aren’t. Watch your back.
Thatcher’s curious absence from NPG mural
Margaret Thatcher has not made it into Work in Progress, the National Portrait Gallery’s mural of great British women, which will be unveiled later this summer.
Some 130 women will appear in Jann Haworth and Liberty Blake’s seven panels, inspired by the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Haworth co-designed in 1967. They include Boudicca and Elizabeth I but, despite the criteria being “trail-blazing” women, there is no space for our first female prime minister, though the gallery has multiple images of her elsewhere.
There is merely a silhouette. I wonder if this is unfair, considering not every powerful woman is an angel. I wonder, for instance, what Mary, Queen of Scots would think of the inclusion of her cousin Elizabeth I, who chopped off her head.
