Planned Parenthood blasts Blonde as “anti-abortion propaganda”
Among other things, Andrew Dominik's Marilyn Monroe biopic depicts CGI talking fetuses who say things like "You won't hurt me this time, will you?"
Aux News Abortion
Planned Parenthood has joined the chorus of voices with nothing much positive to say about Netflix’s new Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, giving an interview today that blasts the film as “anti-abortion propaganda.”
This is per THR, which reached out to the reproductive rights organization for comment on Andrew Dominik’s new film, which stars Ana De Armas as a version of the legendary Hollywood star, and which depicts two illegal abortions as part of the web of trauma that led to Monroe’s death. (Including CGI talking fetuses that say things like, “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?”)
In response, Caren Spruch, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s national director of arts and entertainment engagement, told THR that, “As film and TV shapes many people’s understanding of sexual and reproductive health, it’s critical these depictions accurately portray women’s real decisions and experiences. While abortion is safe, essential health care, anti-abortion zealots have long contributed to abortion stigma by using medically inaccurate descriptions of fetuses and pregnancy. Andrew Dominik’s new film, Blonde, bolsters their message with a CGI-talking fetus, depicted to look like a fully formed baby.”
Spruch added:
Planned Parenthood respects artistic license and freedom. However, false images only serve to reinforce misinformation and perpetuate stigma around sexual and reproductive health care. Every pregnancy outcome — especially abortion — should be portrayed sensitively, authentically and accurately in the media. We still have much work to do to ensure that everyone who has an abortion can see themselves onscreen. It is a shame that the creators of Blonde chose to contribute to anti-abortion propaganda and stigmatize people’s health care decisions instead.
Dominik has come under fire both for the content of the film itself—based on the book by Joyce Carol Oates—and for the press he’s given around it, in which he’s suggested a sort of baseline contempt for Monroe’s various films. Addressing the abortion issue in a recent interview with The Wrap, he suggested that the film is not anti-choice, and that unhappiness at its depiction of abortion was rooted in the Supreme Court’s recent overturn of Roe v. Wade. “No one would have given a shit about that if I’d made the movie in 2008, and probably no one’s going to care about it in four years’ time.”
62 Comments
It seems to me, as someone who has not seen this movie and only has this article and a write-up in the New York Times to go by, that this is a ridiculous overreaction to a film that is trying to be artsy or whatever in its unconventional choices. This is not a standard biopic. It sounds like a terrible movie, but people need to trust audiences a little more. No one is going to think this represents the “inner life” of a real fetus. It’s very clearly trying to portray some kind of inner conflict of the person carrying the fetus—someone who lived in a very different time from ours and maybe had different hangups. Again, terrible movie I’m sure, and definitely a groan-worthy artistic choice, but at the end of the day it’s a movie, not a PSA segment. I get that Americans are rightfully touchy about this subject right now, but this is not the way you win the war.
A ridiculous overreaction? By the click-hungry media press? I’m SHOCKED!
I sort of agree in spirit with the idea that people should trust audiences more, but I overwhelmingly fall back to Barnum’s dictum that nobody ever went broke betting on the ignorance of the American public. I assure you there are thousands of viewers who absolutely believe that whatever is being described here is an actual fetus.
H.L. Mencken said that, although the exact quote was: “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
Oh, whoops. Apparently it’s a common misconception. I tend to google stuff like this to verify, but when you google “Barnum money ignorance” you get an answer with some confirmation bias.
It frequently gets attributed to Mark Twain and various other cynical/clever American public figures as well.
I bet the makers of Battlefield Earth would disagree with Mencken.
This is also (seriously) why you should never Google “[insert mild symptom] cancer”.
I disregard Barnum’s claim constantly. Then I log on to facebook and, yes, I wonder if a lot of these people are even walking upright.Of late, my favorites are the neighborhood/town snitches: often less-employed or retired local men who listen to police scanners all day and then post the most inflammatory ‘reports’ then can create. Sometimes there are pictures of people not even arrested yet but 400 people will line up to cheer these shit-stirrers on, having decided that the suspect is certainly guilty. Most of it is racist AF too. Cop ass-licking at it’s best.
That’s depressing. On the other extreme, I know at least one person who refuses to see the movie on principal for its “anti-choice politics”. No one is forced to see the movie, and I don’t particularly want to, but it annoys me that it’s being given a certain amount of power and intent where it was probably just thoughtless and clumsy.
I’ve seen the movie, and I can confirm that Twitter severely overreacted. There are controversial moments in this, sure, but going from how they overexaggerated it, I thought it would be more provocative than it was.It’s an okay movie with good ideas that could have been executed better, and Andrew Dominik couldn’t decide whether to demonise the people who sexualise her or sexualise her himself.
I mean, he just did both in classic exploitation fashion
No one is going to think this represents the “inner life” of a real fetus.Bull fucking shit. You are either underestimating the work some people put into being as stupid as they possibly can, or just throwing out bad faith arguments.
You really think people out there think fetuses have complex thought and language ability? I guess it’s possible, and maybe I’m the naive one here assuming that if they’ve seen a fully developed newborn they have to know that a fetus is even LESS developed than that.
As others have stated, you greatly overestimate humanity. If you have never seen one of the pro-life movement’s shameless talking baby billboards, consider yourself lucky.
So what if they do? If we only catered to the tastes and cares of the willfully stupid, we’d still be in the dark ages.
If?
So we should base our entire society around that?
I think everyone’s overreacting to the depiction of white, male, middle-class rage in deliberately provocative satires like Fight Club. Sure, the theme of disaffected normies bonding over their shared alienation in a postindustrial capitalist society bereft of meaning may look dangerously suggestive, especially in light of the burgeoning death cult currently driving privileged young men to commit mass murders and support fascists. But we should trust audiences to interpret scenes of anti-establishment terrorism as they were intended: as an ironic and nuanced cautionary tale rather than a one-dimensional manifesto. Besides, the fight club’s decision to blow up the headquarters of financial firms should clue in any impressionable minds to the film’s left-wing and anarchist orientation, ensuring that they won’t be drawn to reactionary demagogues.
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” (Hans Hoffman)logorrhea much?
So your point is…what, that Fight Club should never have been made?
Rupert Murdoch did in fact seem to think Fight Club should never have been made, apparently he was furious after he saw it which is hilarious given he effectively paid for it to be made.
Rupert Murdoch did in fact seem to think Fight Club should never have been made, apparently he was furious after he saw it which is hilarious given he effectively paid for it to be made.
I think that the point is that what artists intend their work to communicate, and what the audience actually takes away, can not only be different but completely at odds with one another.
Or we could just dismiss the novel and the film as ridiculously juvenile.
I can’t tell whether you’re being sarcastic or not, but I unironically agree with all this. We need better media literacy being taught, not a neutering of books and film.
Came off like a pretend standard, trashy biopic. It’s hardly David Lynch
That is kind of funny. My impression was that it’s all over the place stylistically and tonally. So maybe wants to be David Lynch?
I’m seeing conflicting reports that claim the abortions were miscarriage. Either way, I learned from being in a therapy group with some other women that many women who have abortions may be satisfied, over-all, with the decision but may still feel like they “murdered” a child. This is a direct quote from someone I met. I started to reassure her but was told that this was how she felt and I should respect that. Maybe Marilyn felt that way (though I’m not seeing any claims to that effect) and the fetus/CGI thing is, as you wrote, the dramatization of an inner conflict.
Do you, like, read your own comments as you write them?I have no real knowledge of this thing but let me offer my opinion on it blah blah blah. Jesus.
Having watched the movie, I understand what he was going for (that Marilyn sees herself as perpetuating her mother’s abuse towards her by abandoning a potential child), but this is very clumsily telegraphed and the political climate is such that bad actors will absolutely interpret this as a pro-life message. Also, the CGI is just plain terrible and stylistically at odds with the rest of the movie. It doesn’t have the intended effect of making you sympathize with her because it’s ugly and so utterly devoid of subtlty. Now of all times, media should put at least a little more thought and care in depicting abortion since people are literally dying. If you don’t have any insight or point to make about it other than “look at what else this woman had to suffer through”, then why bother?
“This is not a standard biopic.”
In fact it’s not a biopic AT ALL. It is an adaptation of a work of fiction.
“No one would have given a shit about that if I’d made the
movie in 2008, and probably no one’s going to care about it in four
years’ time.”
He’s probably right about that. I was looking forward to this but after the sight & sound interview I couldn’t give a shit.
Nobody gave a shit about it when they already adapted that novel in 2002
Even though a young Jensen Ackles danced around in a Kimono??
Him calling her character on “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” a well-dressed whore is so perfectly illustrative of why he was the wrong person to direct this movie.
Have you read fucking NOTHING about this movie? Why is someone who thinks that a character who is a proud golddigger is, in fact, a well-dressed whore (which says LITERALLY NOTHING about Marilyn Monroe, unless you are so fucking developmentally challenged that you can’t separate an actor from her character) have anything WHATSOEVER to do with whether that person should direct the adaptation of a surreal, completely fictionalized NOVEL.
“I was looking forward to this but after the sight & sound interview I couldn’t give a shit.”
No you weren’t.
Judging by the various stories coming out of this movie, I’m not surprised it’s anti-abortion, because it sounds like someone should have killed this thing in the womb.
I got the sense she wanted to be a parent, but it suggested that the men controlling her and her life essentially made her get the abortions, and that’s why she viewed the abortion as a bad thing that she felt uncomfortable about. I really don’t think that’s the same thing as saying “abortions are bad things” full-stop. I didn’t see this film as trying to add to the abortion discourse. I think it was just using those scenes to show yet another way men controlled Norma Jean.
Good post; I like your name.
On the one hand I can’t think of anything dumber or crasser than the inclusion of a CGI ghost fetus in one’s movie, but on the other hand I think there’s a clear difference between symbolically depicting one person’s trauma over getting an abortion and “anti-abortion propaganda.”
I can only think of one other thing: Tommy Lee’s talking penis in “Pam and Tommy.” And that thing had quite a few lines.
It was good to know the penis from Boogie Nights was still getting work.
Yes, Tommy Lee had a lot of lines.
There’s no evidence Marylin Monroe ever had an abortion beyond one photographer’s gossipy wife. No diary entries, no friends revealing her secrets after death. Her autopsy looked for signs of previous abortions and found none. Marylin Monroe had endometriosis and suffered several miscarriages. The abortion scenes weren’t an attempt to depict the facts of a person’s life or understand their actual inner turmoil. That leaves us with questions like: Why did the author make that up? What was she trying to say? Why did the screenwriter include it? Why was it translated to screen in that way?Looking into the author, it seems she’s not anti-abortion. The director claims not to be either. But that still leaves us wondering what they were hoping to achieve, and why they went about it that way.
“That leaves us with questions like: Why did the author make that up? What was she trying to say? Why did the screenwriter include it? Why was it translated to screen in that way?”
So, essentially, the exact same questions that are asked every single time a movie is made?
WOW, what incredible insight! Thank you.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t speak to it directly, but it’s worth noting that the overwhelming majority of women (like 95 percent) feel relief directly after having an abortion and feel positively about their abortions when asked about them from when it happens to about five years later. (The study I read did not ask the question later than five years later, so that’s not to say that they then had a change of heart, it’s to say they weren’t asked.) The 5% was basically women living in extremely patriarchal, isolated communities and the researches suggested the women’s comments about it were largely a matter of community pressure/expectation rather than some intrinsic horror around the abortion itself. That said, it’s possible Blonde approaches this from the POV of the horrors of getting an _illegal_ abortion, but based on the imagery of the talking fetus, i’m guessing that’s not it.
The 5% was basically women living in extremely patriarchal, isolated communities and the researches suggested the women’s comments about it were largely a matter of community pressure/expectation rather than some intrinsic horror around the abortion itself.To be totally fair, that doesn’t sound like the worst description of 1940s-1950s Hollywood.
While the talking CG fetuses (feti?) are a little much, I would think the depiction of trauma inflicted by illegal abortions would be more of a pro-Roe statement, if anything.
there were 2 abo-bos in this thing, and its anti-abortion? How many do they need to satisfy their thirst for baby blood? 7? 8?
Maybe one actual baby?I also love the logic here. Based on that logic, Schindler’s List was pro-Holocaust because it showed the Holocaust.
“We still have much work to do to ensure that everyone who has an abortion can see themselves onscreen.”We’re not even pretending to have rational conversations at this point. The movie is far less incendiary than people are making it out to be. Dominik tried to make a movie hyper-focused on trauma and he didn’t pull it off. Some of its sequences are incredibly moving, but overall it didn’t work. I don’t know how you can, in good faith, call it anti-abortion. Even if it were, people can (and do) make anti-abortion movies, it is legal to do so, just like abortion should be.
Good to see Planned Parenthood getting into the “hysterical overreaction to a piece of entertainment” game.
This movie is so weird and dream like, that taking anything in it at face value is just plain silly. It’s like “Mulholland Drive” with a Marilyn Monroe like character in it.
It felt to me like this entire movie was aping that scene from Mulholland Drive where the Naomi Watts character reads lines for an audition. Like they treated every scene as the big monologue you submit to the academy for an Oscar nom. It was overkill
Remember when Marilyn Monroe wouldn’t leave a diner because she was sure there was a talking fetus behind the dumpster?
He’s probably right that this wouldn’t have been as big of a controversy without the context of Roe being struck down, but that isn’t an excuse. This still would have been a tasteless depiction 5 or 10 years ago, but people are understandably losing patience and expect more nuance now that their rights and health are in peril. Cultural context matters, and now is a really inappropriate time to be thoughtless and exploitative about this topic.
Part of being pro-choice is allowing women to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It is very clear in the film, and something that was prevalent in the film and for anyone even vaguely aware of history that many women were forced into abortions. Portraying a woman being conflicted about having been forced into an abortion is not anti-choice. Only displaying women as being ecstatic about having abortions is just propaganda itself. It isn’t very complicated.
“Andrew Dominik’s new film, Blonde, bolsters their message with a CGI-talking fetus, depicted to look like a fully formed baby.”
Oh my fucking god, just stop it.
This is awful hard to work just to try to get Ana de Armas and her breasts Oscar nominations.
I find it amusing that Ana de Armas lamented (or strategically offered, depending on your view) the sex scenes going viral, but the CGI fetus is just about the only thing I have heard about with regards to this movie.