Blonde was released on Netflix just hours ago, but many film critics have already seemingly reached a consensus: If you have a strong moral compass, you probably won’t like it. The part-fact, part-fiction Marilyn Monroe biopic was written and directed by Andrew Dominik, best known for his work on thrillers like Chopper and Killing Them Softly. Ana de Armas stars as Monroe, and her performance has garnered well-deserved awards buzz. Dominik, on the other hand, has been at the center of thinkpiece after thinkpiece for the film’s graphic (and alarmingly frequent) depictions of abuse. A laundry list of bizarre shit goes down in Blonde, but we’re here to talk about its strangest character: a CGI fetus that appears out of nowhere, over and over again.
It’s widely known that Monroe wanted kids. One of her most famous quotes reads “Someday, I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.” Even so, Blonde shows her aborting an unplanned pregnancy against her will early in her career, though there is no real factual basis for the pregnancy or the abortion. Later, she becomes pregnant with then-husband Arthur Miller but suffers a miscarriage, which is confirmed to have happened in real life. In the film, both pregnancies are punctuated not by inner dialogue from Monroe, but with a glowing cartoon fetus.
It’s clearly computer-generated, but the fetus is nearly fully developed anatomically. It has distinguishable facial features, 10 fingers and toes, and sits floating in the womb, about ready to enter the world. It’s a weird image to include in any context, but it becomes weirder when you remember that in reality and in the movie, none of Monroe’s pregnancies likely reached this point of development. Most peoples’ stomachs begin to “show” during the second trimester of pregnancy, or at 12 to 16 weeks. There is no evidence of Monroe ever having a baby bump, despite her being one of the most photographed people in the world at the time. Her pregnancies likely ended long before the fetus would’ve developed any of the attributes in the CGI.
It gets worse. Shortly after Monroe reveals her pregnancy to Miller, the fetus speaks to her in the voice of her younger self as she picks flowers in their garden. Their conversation quickly escalates, with the fetus begging Monroe not to abort it. The scene lasts a few minutes at most, but it feels profoundly inappropriate. It’s valid to portray Monroe as regretting her abortion; that’s a real feeling many people deal with. But this moment showed her being gaslit by a weeks-old clump of cells, with Dominik assigning more confidence to the fetus than Monroe.
Dominik spent 14 years writing Blonde. Thus, he told The Sydney Morning Herald, he could not have predicted the post-Roe v. Wade world into which it premiered. “If people are looking at Blonde as having a position on abortion, it does have a position,” he said. “Its position is that, if you’re an unwanted child, pregnancy is going to be deeply ambivalent.” Still, he hasn’t addressed the root of the issue: Why imbue an unborn fetus with a sense of self at all?
