In Blonde, director Andrew Dominic’s fictionalization of Marilyn Monroe’s life in a maniacal dream, Monroe (Ana de Armas) becomes pregnant in a celestial fantasy sequence. As she sips champagne on the beach with her two lovers, the two overhead stars align once again and the billowing sperm spreads. Cue Pregnancy Montage! Cell clusters appear. A pulsating embryonic bud resembling a jelly-like crimson shrimp. Soon, a beautiful photorealistic fetus floats in shimmering pink salt water.
Monroe is tempted to abort the pregnancy, but when she becomes pregnant a second time, the sentient fetus reappears. “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?” her unborn child asks Monroe. “You are not the same baby,” she whispers into her belly. The fetus replies: It’s always me ”
Marilyn Monroe’s chatty, regenerating fetus — she calls it “the baby” — has emerged as a scene-stealing sensation.stupid“Sneaky” When “Cruelty’” Some even point to it as inadvertently propaganda. Miscarriage prevention gimmickBut Monroe’s dialogue with pregnancy, which stems from the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates novel on which the film is based, is also a product of the star’s troubled self-concept and, in that context, the unborn child. The banal and sacred message is a kind of detection. Disturbing is the modern look of the fetus. It’s a stocky, seemingly computer-generated figure that evokes pop culture fantasy images invented long after Monroe’s death. It’s a very lazy rendering, and her stubborn curiosity about how Monroe actually went through her pregnancy, even though the film presents them as character-defining events. suggests.
Pregnancy can stimulate profound acts of projection. The fetus is an invisible body within a body, floating between non-existence and existence, defined by parental expectations and cultural imaginations. It is the personification of maternal desires and fears, sublimated insecurities and internalized judgments. And “blonde” Monroe has a lot of problems to throw at her future baby. It has become world-famous as a subject. Her ventriloquist fetus is voiced by a child actor (Lily Fisher) who plays as a girl when Monroe was still Norma Jean.When Monroe communicates with the fetus, she is both pitiful and disgusted. she is talking to herself.
What I don’t understand is why it looks like that. In exhibiting the fetus, Dominique made a tedious and literal attempt to portray Monroe’s inner life. Huh? Why does her pregnancy visualization resemble the smooth-skinned, supernaturally glowing fetus that appears in the pregnancy app on my iPhone 70 years later?
After all, a mother’s imagination is not a spontaneous soul connection. It is a historic building, based on the aesthetics, politics, and technology of the era in which the pregnancy took place.And the magic unborn in “Blonde” is an ahistorical imposition, an image that seems to have been pulled from the narrow imagination of contemporary male directors. At the time, the image of a fetus was a rudimentary fascination. Posted in Life Magazine The 1950s included black-and-white images of squid-like translucent embryos and skeletal fetal remains. It was presented as an independent entity that floated in the , but was not developed until after Monroe’s death. It has its roots in the 1965 Life magazine spread “The Drama of Life Before Life” by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.
For the magazine, Nilsson produced a series of photographs of sperm, embryos and fetuses representing the stages of human pregnancy. The subject on the front page is advertised as “her 18-week-old fetus alive in the amniotic sac,” but a note inside reads, “This embryo was surgically removed from the mother’s womb. It was taken right after.” “Didn’t survive.” Nilsson was known for capturing “live” fetuses in “natural habitats” (females), but mainly the lifeless products of surgical abortions and miscarriages. We filmed it, submerged it in an aquarium, and gorgeously lit it to make it appear to float. She shot in the starry sky and at a distance.
Nilsson’s photographic tricks erased any traces of the actual woman’s body. Images released during the height of the space race were framed as aliens, analogized to galactic exploration, and coded as men.one image of 13 weeks fetusAppearing inside a nebula is entitled “Spaceman”. Life magazine quotes “the leading Swedish gynecologist” who declared: “This is like seeing the far side of the moon for the first time.”
The Life feature was a major influence on the aesthetics of both anti-abortion activists and director Stanley Kubrick. star child model His 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey was partially based on Nilsson’s shots. Next, Kubrick’s gentle, fiberglass-smooth, all-powerful presence shifts from the wise, doll-eyed fetus of the 1989 romantic comedy Look Who’s Talking to the adrift, computer-generated fetus. Up to Image informs fetal decades of imaginary pop culture.through a pregnancy tracking app animation internet video I’m trying to explain “life”.
These images have the power to remove the fetus from the realm of the pregnant woman’s visceral experience and expose it as a public visual spectacle. And they open our minds to the pernicious ideas of our time. The idealized fetus exists independently of the female body. It hovers far above the earthbound woman herself in the cultural imagination.
Now this vision is pointlessly implanted into Marilyn Monroe’s mid-century brain. iconographic reproduction An extremely detailed account of Monroe’s life. “Blonde” flashes between full color and black and white, shuffling aspect ratios and swapping lenses to more faithfully reflect Monroe’s most famous photographs and scenes. Dominic twists it to inform Monroe’s perspective of being objectified.
and Decider interview, Dominic explained that he visualized the fetus in an attempt to access “Norma’s feelings” about her pregnancy. “The baby was real,” he said. “I wanted Baby to be real.” Still, Dominic’s brief glimpse into Monroe’s mind reveals nothing. All there is is her YouTube womb camera.
In her book Disembodying Women, medical historian Barbara Duden traces the public exposure of the fetus and its growing cultural primacy in the late 20th century. She calls this process “female skinning.” ‘Blonde’ is also a film in which women are skinned by an entire culture. First, her Hollywood contemporaries who made her a sex symbol. And now we’re only offering a recycled stock image of the magical fetus by Hollywood who claims to access her mind.