Blonde on Blonde

I.

In September 2022, Netflix released Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s 167-minute adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 738-page novel about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. If the studio’s executives expected the film to be greeted with plaudits and awards, they were mistaken—most critics responded with scorching outrage to Dominik’s brutal and lugubrious take on the misfortunes of the screen icon and sex goddess who died following a self-administered overdose of Nembutal some sixty years before. Her death was officially ruled a suicide, but alternative theories still abound.